Author Topic: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.  (Read 9584 times)

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Offline Bloch

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #25 on: August 08, 2012, 04:59:48 pm »
My phone spent the morning on my desk at the course on silent with mobile internet enabled and a tall base station tower on site just a few hundred metres away.


Do you mean WIFI ?


Or at least have WIFI enabled ? Then turn it off and i ques you will double or triple battery life....
 

Offline SimonTopic starter

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #26 on: August 08, 2012, 05:03:38 pm »
no I meant 3G internet, yes wifi is on but I'd hope that has low power ? I mean all it has to do is check now and then if it is receiving an SSD broadcast, it does not go find wifi spots itself, I know this because when I turned SSD broadcast off on my router my phone failed to connect as it don't know it is there, more power efficient than having to keep trying to log into a non existent wifi network by transmitting.

I'll try the same tomorrow with wifi off, see what happens.
 

Offline Bloch

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #27 on: August 08, 2012, 05:17:40 pm »
I'll try the same tomorrow with wifi off, see what happens.


My phone is a Motorola Defy and it is only from that i have my expediences from.


It can also be an "bad" program that push/pull RSS feeds  / podcast / and so on.
 

Offline SimonTopic starter

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #28 on: August 08, 2012, 07:03:42 pm »
I generally class wireless devices in two categories. There are so called wireless devices aka things that used to be wired but is more flexible to have close range wireless links instead (WiFi, bluetooth, wireless periferals etc) so that we can dispense with cables, then there are true wireless devices that can only communicate over the ether like radios, TV and other stuff.

Mobile phones used to fall midway but are ever more towards short range "wireless" devices. Short range devices can afford to sacrifice efficiency for prettiness as the range so short it's no matter, but long range devices should have the primary function of transcieving as far as possible on as little power as possible or it will just become a modern wireless device: an accessory that can be replaced with a "wired" device !
 

Offline saturation

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #29 on: August 08, 2012, 07:56:05 pm »
A compromise is a signal booster, you can get them for homes or autos.  Here's a sample:

http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Extenders-YX545-Dual-Band-Coverage/dp/B003VOW5WI/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1344455113&sr=1-1&keywords=antennas

http://www.amazon.com/Wilson-Electronics-Signal-Booster-Antenna/dp/B003FGWGPS/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1344455113&sr=1-2&keywords=antennas

If you need a booster, one benefit is it works for anyone in the household, and you can continue to use the booster if you change phones or vendors.  It also provides more power to send that a phone may not be capable off regardless of its small external antenna.

I often spend time in the open ocean on a boat or day trips to wilderness; I've not had problems with reception with modern antenna-less phones in flat open spaces with voice, data suffers fairly quickly, so a booster hasn't been necessary.  I do get many dead spots in buildings that I wish installed such boosters.  We keep track of when the phones go dead because in case of emergency, we'd need to estimate how long to reach there to make a call.





Best Wishes,

 Saturation
 

Offline tom66

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #30 on: August 08, 2012, 08:13:11 pm »
For 200 bucks, I could afford to have a ten spare "dumb" phones, each on a different network. Surely one would get a signal...
 

Offline SimonTopic starter

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #31 on: August 08, 2012, 08:14:39 pm »
hm, I'm not well up on the number of bands used in cell phones but I think those boosters only do GSM (not even 3G) but like I say I'm no expert. I think that as we want more channels and higher data rates the frequencies go up, we need more base stations so they have stopped worrying about putting them too high as due to traffic density and shorter distances anyhow. Until you in a hilly and low population area where a few higher base stations are all you get and they are lost as soon as you go into a good old stone put or b&b.
 

Offline SimonTopic starter

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #32 on: August 08, 2012, 08:18:55 pm »
For 200 bucks, I could afford to have a ten spare "dumb" phones, each on a different network. Surely one would get a signal...

I am infact in two minds as to whether to resell my old phone, reception is not great but battery is great even with two sims. I like the repeater idea, but somehow it's not like it is as easy as it sounds and of course getting a mobile phone repeater is basically admitting defeat and downgrading your phone from a mobile (long range) device to a modern wireless device (replaceable with a wired device or just a localized wireless terminal for a wired system)
 

Offline SimonTopic starter

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Re: bring back external aerials on mobile phones.
« Reply #33 on: August 09, 2012, 06:38:24 am »
Following a pm from someone I have delved into my settings to see if they can be refined. Not really. It is either on or off, no middle ground. I think the drain was caused by background data enabled and my mail set to update once a minute. So after toying with the idea of disabling background data I decided not to as it does not control all apps which are still free to do as they please. So I have changed the mail settings to once every 15 minutes. I'd prefer it to swap to every minute while phone in use but that was too hard for the monkeys that wrote the crap software to anticipate. Now I have to hope that other apps I have no control over behave like slope and facebook.......
 


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