Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living ruarl cell-smart phone

I am spending more time since I retired out at our camp/farm it is down in a river valley in SW Arkansas and cell coverage is weak, I am about 3 miles from the two nearest towers with 800-900' ridges in between, my place is about 500' elevation. I need something with better/stronger reception capabilities, than my 8yo Samsung Rugby II. Anybody know of a phone that is known to be better than the rest for reception.The locals use variety of phones and Verizon as carrier. They all have issues with receptions but nothing like I do with the RugbyII and ATT as carrier.

Get more power.

Cell Phone Booster

I have the same problem,everyone tells me I need to throw my 3g out and step up the 4g at least.Certainly look at the phone booster. A buddy and I were up elk hunting.He could sit in his camper and get cell service with his newer phone, I couldn't get even one bar.We both have Tracfone

This is the second time I have heard the 4g phones have better range.

A 4g phone will only work if there is a 4g tower in the area. If not your fancy phone is worthless.

A 3g phone will however work on a 4g tower.

I was told this by a guy who works for a local cell company.

One of my buddies recently bought a new 4g phone and it will not work out in the country. My 10 year old phone gets a signal and he is standing 5' away with no service. He now has two phones. A 3g and the new 4g.

Ironbender, what I saw looks great for use at the house but, I am out and about around the place.

Sam what phone and carrier do you have/use?

First, Verizon is the only cell system that works in rural areas. AT&T, T-Mobile, and any other GSM based 3G/4G system concentrate on the cities and interstates.

Wilson makes the very best "amplifiers" or repeaters on the market. You can get them for vehicles, not just for buildings.

No cellphone can have more than 300mW (just under 1/3Watt) output by federal law, so it's all about antennas. Android phones by major manufacturers seem to have better internal antennas than the iPhones.

I don't know how big of a place you have, but if you're using a utility vehicle or tractor, then a Wilson rig will work, but you have to be close to the rig when you talk.

Text messages will get out in places that voice will not due to the frequencies they operate at and the fact that they are a "burst" of info rather than a stream.

Oh, and those little "bars" that show cell signal strength? They only pertain to the voice side of the device and even then they are routinely manipulated by the carriers to indicate a larger service area than is actually there.

Ed

Arky, I have a Casio G'zone Boulder. It has been an awesome phone. Verizon.

Not true.Tracfone willl use any tower that they can reach as they lease them some how. Me and my hunting partner have only used Tracfone for 5+ years. .I had little flip phone back in 2009 .I was hunting in extreme NW CO and I could pick up a tower 60 miles away and call home. No w he has better luck than me getting cell service with his LG phone, where as I have a Samsung, but also has Tracfone service.Tracfone is $20/90 days, 60 minutes,but most newer phones give you double or triple minutes.If you buy a years worth, you get 3000+ or more minutes. Not for some one who has to have a cell phone stuck to their head 50% of the time though.

I only worry about the voice side of the signal strength,but at times text will go thru when voice won't as so stated. As mentioned previously my buddies 4G would work out in the rural areas, 30+ miles from the nearest tower in Craig, CO. Mine wouldn't. I was out in eastern CO this past Friday.Again my phone would l notwork,but another guy that was driving had no problem.We were 40 miles from the nearest tower. It might very well be caused by all the apps running on these using power.I don't know about that though.

Verizon has a 4g flip phone, if that is of any interest. I can't say how well it works.

Sam. Are you both on the same network? Makes a difference here.

Arky
They make something similar for a vehicle. Oil companies use them here. Have to be within 10’ or so of the booster.

Thanks to all, looks like Verizon is the key in getting better service. Will look into that and explore the Tracphone route also.

Thanks for the input. I am headed out to the place in the am for Muzzle Loader season will check back next week.

Thanks again.

Well, good luck!

I miss those old bag phones. 3 watts and vehicle mounted antenna...

You could get some distance with those!

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.


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

Hey thanks for bearing with me and giving me a better understanding of this stuff. I appreciate you taking the time to do so.

So in an area where both AT&T and Verizon smartphones have difficulty finding even enough signal to send a text message, a Tracfone might be able to text? I used to could talk on my cellphones 5-7 years ago, all over my hunting property. Now, I have only a handful of spots that will even text. Phones often just say "no signal". Same for my hunting buddies. It is rather frustrating and seems to get worse every year in that area. I do like to at least be able to check in with people regarding where I'm hunting and if I was successful.

You are quite welcome! I'd rather take the time to try to explain why we all get so frustrated with technology than call people names or let a different point of view go unexplained.

The more we know, the better we can make decisions!



No, because Tracfones use either AT&T or Verizon type towers and frequencies to send voice, data, and texts.

I guess I need to be more clear about how these things work;

Voice goes over one set of frequencies, data over the same, or another frequency (depending on available frequency bandwidth) and texts (typically) go out on another completely different frequency band.

Also voice and data use a lot more bandwidth than a text. You can figure on 1MB/minute of digital info for a highest call quality call, although your phone's algorithms will compress that and filter a bunch of it out.

Data requirements, being run over different frequencies where available, will also be subject to filtering and compression.

Ever wonder why pics and internet surfing take so damned long? Probably because you'e actually downloading it through a 3G audio frequency!

Ever take a picture and try to text it and the phone says that it's formatting it into a MMS format? There's a buttload (Warning, technical terms being used! ) of info in that picture being filtered out and/or really compressed.

A text, purely text, no emojis, no pictures, no video, will be in the KB range, not the MB range of audio or data such as a picture or even a short video.
Because a text is such a small file, sent in a burst over a different freq, it can get through because it doesn't have to compete with processor time and bandwidth.
Also, if you have ever had a flashlight battery going down and you just need that last little bit, so you turn the flashlight off and turn it back on and the light is suddenly brighter, then dims? Well, that text is like that first instant that you turn the flashlight back on.

So... it's not that Tracfones get better results than an AT&T or Verizon phone, it's the physics of how a text works, regardless of the carrier.

As I mentioned earlier, some phones have better antennas, and this business is all about antennas! Remember the iPhone debacle a few years ago about dropped calls in the brand new iPhones? That was because some "Engineering Manager" signed off on an antenna design without the team doing their proper research and testing. So, Apple got a black eye, had to recall a buttload of iPhones and then had to pay another buttload of R&D money to get it right. Buttloads of "Engineering Managers" being bullied by buttloads of bean counting buttheads and not crossing the "t's" and dotting the "i's" due to R&D funding having very limited, line item funding and no mercy.

As my Dad used to say; "Do it right the first time". Or, as Pat Parelli says; :" If you take the time it takes, it takes less time."

I have talked with innumerable cellphone reps at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile stores and none of them knew what the hell I was talking about. They are sales people with a tiny bit of tech support training, mainly based on the devices they sell, and know almost nothing about how the system actually works. It falls into the "It's not your job, don't worry about that" category of training that they receive.

I'm not a cellphone engineer, I just have over twenty years of hands-on experience having to use the technology for electronic surveillance and counter-surveillance.

Ed

P.S., almost forgot...Saddlesore, the other reason your old phone could reach is that the old broadband frequencies used back then were considerably lower in the frequency spectrum than are used now. Most are now in the microwave range where the old ones were in the high VHF range. The lower the frequency, the farther it will travel given the same power output and antenna gain.

Seems like a good saying.

My old boss when I was doing asbestos abatement used to say:
There are no shortcuts. The long way is the fastest.

You're a pretty fart smeller, Ed!

I mean smart feller!

Back in the early days of cell phones, I was flying quite a bit. One thing I learned from other pilots was that you could use you cell phone up there in the air and hit multiple towers and it sent errors to whoever got errors, and the call billing would be cancelled out.

Back then, cell service charged by the minute, and it weren't cheap!

I called everyone I knew...