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Booster Antennas just "boost" or amplifier your signal. The cellular amplifiers are also repeaters that intelligently capture, amplifier and "repeat" or re-broadcast the signal. For this reason they have to be FCC approved since they operate in the licensed cellular bands.
However, too much antenna gain is not necessarily good especially for CDMA carriers such as Alltel, Sprint, Verizon etc. I.e Might not necessarilly be a smart decision to use these Yagi antennas attached directly to your cellphone and aircard http://www.rfwel.com/shop/?target=pr...8&cat=7&page=1. They have 13dBi of gain! They are designed with use with an in-building cellular amplifier such as http://www.rfwel.com/shop/?target=pr...&cat=60&page=1 which does smart power control using control packets from cellular tower. One of the big problems with CDMA technology that Sprint, Verizon, Alltel uses, is the near-far problem which basically arises since the cellular mobile devices (phones or aircards) are operating in the same frequency band (but differentiated by pseudo-random codes). So a strong transmitter will thus kill weak transmitters which in the worst will be frowned upon by the carriers/FCC (perhaps worse than frown) and in the least will affect the operation of any cellular devices in the vicinity.
However, too much antenna gain is not necessarily good especially for CDMA carriers such as Alltel, Sprint, Verizon etc. I.e Might not necessarilly be a smart decision to use these Yagi antennas attached directly to your cellphone and aircard http://www.rfwel.com/shop/?target=pr...8&cat=7&page=1. They have 13dBi of gain! They are designed with use with an in-building cellular amplifier such as http://www.rfwel.com/shop/?target=pr...&cat=60&page=1 which does smart power control using control packets from cellular tower. One of the big problems with CDMA technology that Sprint, Verizon, Alltel uses, is the near-far problem which basically arises since the cellular mobile devices (phones or aircards) are operating in the same frequency band (but differentiated by pseudo-random codes). So a strong transmitter will thus kill weak transmitters which in the worst will be frowned upon by the carriers/FCC (perhaps worse than frown) and in the least will affect the operation of any cellular devices in the vicinity.