When I first moved in after building I had to sit outside to make cell phone calls. The house is wrapped completely with foil faced poly iso insulation(at least above ground).
 Last spring Verizon put in a new tower about a mile away. I am marginal now for signal inside,but radio reception sucks though. I use a cheap inside dipole antenna nowand get about 4 stations clearly. My car radio gets 20-30 stations parked in the driveway. If I wanted a simple solution to increase fm reception and get stronger cell service how would I go about doing it? I have been thinking about a simple dipole antenna on the roof running to the stereo, but I know very little about this. How about increasing cell coverage? Practically what would I do to increase signal in the house? Can I couple a outdoor antenna to an indoor one? I am guessing I only need it to get a little better as cell service marginal now, and a very strong signal outside.

Thanks,
Eric

A FM antenna on the roof wired to the stereo will work. Some phones have a jack to connect an external outside antenna, but most need a repeater from someone like Wilson Electronics - get one now, they are talking about banning them.

Coupling an outdoor antenna to an indoor antenna works, but it need not be anything complicated. A length of wire extending a meter or so inside and outside a window on each side of the house would be sufficient to re-broadcast 100MHz-2GHz signaling picked up outdoors to the inside of the building. The attenuation of a full foil shield is over 100dB, but drops to less than 10dB with a simple feed-through wire that's at least 1/4-wavelength at the frequency of interest on each side of the foil.

Un-powered cell-phone feedthroughs can be made with a cheap coax stub antennae and a piece of coax w/connectors on cable-TV type wall-plates on both the interior & exterior of the wall. It doesn't much matter how long the antenna is for cell-phones- something stubby that won't be easily compromised by wind would be fine.

For FM-band you need something longer, since it's much lower in frequency (~100MHz)/ longer-wavelength. Assuming you don't have foil under the roofing, a 1-2meter monopole antenna to coax in the attic works just fine for FM in many areas. If you need more power on the interior side re-broadcast, $10-15 VHF TV antenna amplifiers driving a 1m stub of wire will work fine (for FM, not for phone.) But of course, hooking the attic antenna directly to the receiver would work better, if it's easy to do.

Guys
Thanks for the advice.

Eric