[quote=APDDSN0864]
Not true.Tracfone willl use any tower that they can reach as they lease them some how.
The reason your 2009 phone worked was because it was a pure GSM (Gen1/Gen2) phone that was wide-band. AT&T was the primary owner of GSM phone towers across the country and there was much less traffic in the bandwidth than there is now, allowing towers to lock onto weaker signals.
Narrow-band devices started with Gen2, both GSM and CDMA and continued through the current Gen4 and Gen4+ devices. With more phones, the tower will lock onto the stronger signal, meaning us folks out in the country have a harder time connentcing.
Tracfone can use either the GSM based LTE (AT&T) or CDMA based LTE (Verizon et al), depending on the model of the phone, thus appearing it can use any tower.
Your buddy's phone is probably CDMA based LTE or LTE+.
The apps running won't affect your signal strength unless your battery level gets too low and you don't have your cellphone's preferences set to prioritize call first, data second.
BTW, 3G is slated to be turned off by Jan 2020 and 4G gone by mid-late 2021; Both are being replaced by 5G which is a whole 'nother critter, meaning new hardware for everyone. Just like you can't run 4G on an old 2G device now, the carriers have disabled that support across most of the country, with all of it expected to be shut down by Dec of this year.
I miss those old bag phones. 3 watts and vehicle mounted antenna...
Barry,
the Wilson amplifiers act just like that old bag phone as their output is 3 watts and they use an external antenna. Use a 3/8 Wave, 3dB gain, vertical antenna with a good ground plane and make it act like a 6Watt phone! Win-win!
However...if you use that amplifier in "civilization", it will grab a cell tower and not let go (remember the part about weaker signals mentioned above?) This will drive the telephone engineers crazy as they start getting error messages about towers not "handing off" conversations.
Ed
