In alt.cellular.cingular Mij Adyaw <mijadyaw@nospam.net> wrote:

My neighbor said that a visitor with Verizon had wonderful signal in her
house, which offers minimal signal on Edge Wireless.  I have Cingular, and
spotty signal.

I filed that thought, since Verizon doesn't offer service here, and the
visiting neighbor must have been roaming to USCellular, the third service
in the area.  (Actually Cingular doesn't offer service here, but there is a
usable tower in a nearby town.)

This last weekend, There were three cellphones sitting on the same counter
in my house.  Verizon showed no bars, but did receive calls with spotty
coverage.  Cingular TDMA on Nokia showed one bar, and spotty coverage.
Cingular GSM on a Motorola v551 with a stubby replacement antenna showed
two bars, and offers stable coverage throughout almost all of the house.

The signal comparison has to be done carefully.  With roaming possible (my
phone was toggling between a poor home signal and roaming), and different
telephones, and the simple addition of an aftermarket antenna, lots of
variations are possible.

---
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA  38.8,-122.5

The difference is not worth spending multiple hundreds for
repeater/amplifier & antennae.  Especially if a $1.50 extendable antenna
will do the trick. :-)

Bill K

Bars mean nothing- there is no standard that allows them to be used as any
sort of measurement tool.

Bars are pretty much meaningless when comparing different phone models
without know the threshold for each bar. And even then it depends WHICH
bars.

To the best of my recollection, the Noika 51xx/61xx series had a 20 dB
delta on the lowest two bars, but only a 6 dB delta from first to second
bars. Therefore if the second from the last bar came on, it meant your
signal was 100 times stronger, and if the top bar came on, your signal
was only 6 times stronger.

Sheesh!  That's the bulkiest antenna I've ever seen, but then I deal
with professional antennas...not what the consumer runs across.

And it sure doesn't look long enough to be a quad-bay co-linear antenna,
necessary for a 6 dB gain. Opps...just looked at the specs. Its
LESS..LESS a 1/2 dB gain over a dipole!  TOTALLY WORTHLESS!!!

Lets do some math here.....

Two RF connectors: -.5 dB loss
Six ft. (estimated) of RG-58 coax: -1.6 dB loss
Gain of antenna: +.45

Net gain: -1.65.

If the antenna is not a wavelength harmonic, doesn't the power feed back
into the electronics, s.l.o.w.l.y frying it's little brain?

What you're actually getting is demonstrably better service from the
*combination* of Nokia *and* its programming than from the *combination* of
Motorola *and* its programming.  So if for example Nokia is Homed to "orange"
and Motorola was Homed to "blue" (or vice versa), then you really can't
compare the phones.

Valid comparisons between two products (independent of service factors) can
only be drawn when both are tested under the same conditions.  In the case of
Cingular handsets, that currently means that both must be Homed on the same
network.  Otherwise, one may give better results than the other simply because
it's Homed on the better network in that particular location, which may well
mean that it would get worse results in certain other locations.  Thus it's
best to test both handsets with the same SIM at the same place at the same
time, although even then the results can be different if one handset supports
ENS and the other doesn't.

I've run carefully controlled tests of handsets by several different
manufacturers, including both Motorola and Nokia, and the V551 is a very good
performer as compared to other handsets >> all other things being equal <<.
PC Magazine agrees, rating signal quality of the V551 as "excellent" when
awarding it an Editors' Choice.