Tower Mounted Amplifiers

Many wireless base stations installed today are experiencing unbalanced uplink and downlink paths. This essentially means that the base station downlink (transmit side) has a much better coverage area than the uplink (receive side). The reason for this is that the typical uplink transmitter is a handheld device with about 1 watt of transmit power while  the downlink can transmit with typically 20 watts or higher. Taking into consideration the difference in sensitivity there is an unbalance in the downlink vs uplink coverage area.