"Isaiah Beard" wrote in message
...
Doug Kanter wrote:

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?

Resoundly True. Cell sites use directional antennae... in fact in an
area where buildout is mature, they sort of have to. Cell sites, even
those that operate on CDMA as Sprint does, are sectorized to reduce
interference with neighboring cells on different pilot signals.


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?

Actually, very likely. The 7867 is a 5 year old design at least, and
the network has changed quite a bit since then. The carriers have
worked to squeeze more capacity out of the network, and in CDMA that
means a generally higher signal to noise ratio (in CDMA, all other
conversations happening on the same channel are "noise" to your
particular handset), and thus greater tolerance requirements for a
higher noise floor. This has forced chipmakers (mainly Qualcomm) to
come up with better, more sensitive RF stages for newer handsets.

The result is your old phone will still work with the present network,
but not as well as it did four years ago even in the best of
circumstances. If you put a current-model Sanyo side by side with your
StarTAC, the Sanyo will probably receive a better signal nearly all of
the time.

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.

Yeah, a casualty of the need to squeeze capacity is sound quality.
Vocoder ("VOice enCODER") bitrates have gone down, and that means your
StarTAC which uses a 13kbps vocoder will sound better than the
8kpbs/variable-rate vocoder on today's phones. However, some phone
manufacturers are still better than others. A lot of people (including
myself) swear by the Sanyo models. Samsungs aren't all that great, and
the jury is still out on LG.

Of course nothing, not even a StarTAC, beats the sound quality on the
original Qualcom QCP-2700s that Sprint first started out with back in
1996. I had one and could swear that phone sounded as good, and
sometimes even better, than a landline. It was small and light, and it
was solidly built... if you smashed the 2700 against a brick, my bet
would be that the phone would win and the brick would lose.

Sadly, none of that is true with current phones from any wireless
carrier these days.

Before jumping ship, I would give the Sanyo 4920 a try. It's the
descendant of the 4900, which Sprint users have been raving about for a
while as being the best phone (of current models, anyway) for call
quality and for holding a signal.

--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.


Thanks, Isaiah, for the specific phone model tips. The guy at the Sprint
store pointed out a Sanyo. Years ago, I was in the car audio business,
selling AND installing what I sold. Sanyos were hideous. Absolutely
atrocious. We used to warn customers 10 times to keep the knobs & faceplate
very clean for the first week because they'd be back to exchange the units
for something real. 9 out of 10 people came back.

So, my stomach turned when he mentioned Sanyo, but my experience goes back
15 years. I'll take another look.