OK, I'm trying not to bash Sprint here, but I'm curious if others have experienced this...
I'm inside a McDonald's and my signal level goes from 0 bars to 5 (4?) bars and back again every 10 seconds. I make a call home and talk to my wife for about 5 seconds, then hear this beeping and my call is disconnected. The phone says "Signal faded".
Is this a Sprint-specific problem? I never experienced this type of behavior before on my Cingular (TDMA) phone. Didn't have my Verizon phone long enough to know if it would happen on that one. It just seems weird to me. I mean, either I've got a signal or I don't. How can I have 5 bars one second, no bars the next, and 5 bars again a few seconds after that?
Sounds to me like you phone is concerned for your health. Perhaps if you were in a whole foods market, this wouldn't happen?
Seriously, I don't think that the meter reading is necessarily accurate. Perhaps some of the equipment in McDonalds interferes with the signal? This is a weird one....
Same thing happens to me, though I haven't seen it go from 0-5-0 every 10 seconds. At home I can go from from 3 bars to 0 and back. The antenna seems to pick up an extra bar, but I still can't make calls from home with any reliability. Metal office buildings are also a problem with signal strength all over the dial.
this happens to me also. Goes from three to four bars to none, and when theres none, i cant make a call (or it is dropped). I've owned a lot of phones from the sprint network, all diff manufacturers. By far, the Motorolas are the best with reception, this never happened on my startac timeport. I have had other samsung phones in the past, and the same phenomenon has occured with ONLY those samsung phones. Its a samsung thing mostly, not sprint. However, I must say, compared to other phones (even previous samsungs), the I300 gets very good reception (this is my experience after three weeks of ownership).
I too have been on Sprint for a while (2 years), and have owned a Startac Timeport, TP3000, Kyo 6035, and now the i300. This is the only phone that I have had on Sprint that behaves this way, so I do not think it is a Sprint thing. My house is also in a Sprint hole, even though I am in the middle of a major metro area. Mot of my other Sprint phones worked sparatically at my house, could not move around, but w/the i300 I can use my phone with a fair amount of reliability. Sure I can't go in my underground basement, but this is by far the best reception that I have had. I also get a fluctuating signal on my phone, mostly vasilates between 2-5 bars. No other phone ever got more than one here. At first I thought maybe Sprint built a new tower closer, but my wife still has my trusty old Timeport and it still only gets one bar. Does anyone know from a techincal standpoint exactly what the sig strength meter is reading?
Scott mentioned that this never happened w/his TDMA phone. My experience with TDMA (ATT) was terrible. It seemed often I would "have a signal", but would be unable to use it. Could not make a call, and it it ever did connect, I would hear about every 5th word or so. Got the "underwater" effect. At least with Sprint and CDMA, if I get a signal, I can make a call.
cdma is at a much higher freq than tdma. cdma "spreads" the signal out over multiple frequencies and being at a higher bandwidth causes it to be more susceptibile to mulitpath and pilot noise.
its possibile that when the phone is showing a lot of bars one second then shows one or two the next could mean that your phone is "seeing" more than one tower. if this is the case, the phone is figuring out which tower is stronger at the time and then adjusts (this is what true diversity tuners in radios and cordless mic systems do)... this is not good for the end user obviously... this is the reason the airlines dont want you to use the cell phones in the sky as the phone can see more than one tower when in the sky and cause problems for the folks on the ground. IMO, the i300 is a very good phone that can get great reception than some other cell phones on the market, and this can be good and bad...
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