For those of you reading this in rec.radio.shortwave who are thinking the
question doesn't belong he Take it as a compliment, OK? Some of you might
be the type whose idea of great bathroom reading is a 17 pound book about
antenna theory.

I use SprintPCS with a 4 year old Motorola StarTac ST7867. Just moved to a
new house and I can barely get a signal unless I stand in the middle of the
yard. That's problematic in winter. After grilling a couple of customer
service reps on the phone, I stopped into the Sprint store today and came
away with some questions I need answered before I terminate my service and
try another provider

1) The salesman was the first Sprint employee I've found who was actually
able to show me the actual location of antennas. There's one a mile from my
home, and 2 others within 5 miles, with no obstructions of any kind. No
hills, no tall buildings, just trees and homes. He says this explains
nothing because he signal is highly directional. True or false?

2) His next suggestion was (of course) to try a newer phone because mine
uses "older technology" which might not be able to pick up such a great
signal. Likely or not?

3) Here's the tricky part: I'm not totally adverse to a newer phone, even
though I have absolutely NO need for color, email, songs, games, digital
pictures, or any other crap. I just need a friggin' phone. But, I've made an
observation over the past few years while listening to the sound quality
when people call me from THEIR phones. It seems that some manufacturers have
gone WAY off the deep end when designing their noise cancelling
arrangements. In many instances, background noise causes the phone to also
kill or scramble the voice of the user. This, of course, makes the phone
useless. I make quite a few calls from my boat in high winds, and people
tell me that as long as I'm manually dealing with the wind somehow (turning
away, etc), the phone sounds like a normal phone as opposed to some sort of
special effects in a B-movie.

Cell phone salesmen (and 98% of customers) seem to take crummy audio quality
for granted, or know nothing about it. So, before I consider upgrading
equipment, I'm hoping for the unlikely: Some specific input from anyone who
has been through this and can recommend brands/models which aren't toys. If
I ever have to call the Coast Guard on my cell phone, it would be really
novel if they could understand me.