Telstra T100 pre paid phone & an external aerial

It can make a real difference

But it depends on your whole senario of using it.

E.G. If you have an external aerial mounted reasonably high on car and compare this to using phone from inside a car in a cradle below the level of dash - then big difference.

If you instead have that phone in a phone holder mounted high such that the phones internal aerial can see out of the cars windows - and you don't have heavy window tint film, then the difference is less.

If you then have your external aerial mounted low down with its tip below roof level then it may not perform much better than the phone itself.

You can also easily use the T100 as a modem for a laptop by using the Join-me software as supplied with the phone.

Hi D&G,

I cannot give you any advice re the T100 but I have a next G running on an external aerial on the cruiser.

If I use my phone in my hand in my back yard, rural area, I get very poor to no reception. Back yard is on the tower side of the house so signal is strongest there.

When I connect the phone to the external aerial I get full reception inside the garage which is all metal. This makes the shed a Faraday Shield which means it is difficult to get signals through, but the external aerial does such a good job that it surprised me in these circumstances.

Bought my broomstick off ebay for around $45, and a patch cord for my ZTE 165 another $20.

If you buy the phone try and get them to throw in a free patch cord (round $25 I think)

Can recommend external aerial.

The higher up you mount them the better as Robbin Miller said but mine works well enough on the bull bar.

Cheers, Bruce.

Hi D& G

Have used the Telstra T90 and newer Telstra touch 2 both with external antennas and it makes a big difference. On a recent outback trip i was the only one who had any service. You just need the broom stick mounted high on the bull bar and run the coax to the inside of the dash and connect patch lead to the back of the phone. Then you can either use speakerphone or if your car has bluetooth set that up by pairing the phone to the car. Works well in my last isuzu ute and now in my 200.

I bought a T100 for my recent drive from Perth to Sydney. I didn't have an external antenna, but it seemed to get reasonable reception. However, I didn't use it while driving - I mostly used it after I had parked and gotten out of the RV - so I don't know what its reception is like inside a vehicle. It does have an external antenna socket under a small sliding cover on the back.

As has been noted, I found I could use it as a modem. When you connect the supplied mini-USB cable between the T100 and your computer, your computer thinks it has an old-school dialup modem attached, and you tell the computer to dial a "phone number" (which is in the small printed manual that comes with the phone) to initiate a PPP connection. If you know how to set this up you probably don't need the software that comes with the phone, but the software that comes with the phone probably makes it easier. (I was using Linux so I had to use my native ability and cunning.)

It's faster than a real dial-up modem but not as good as a fast ADSL line. I would often run with images turned off in Firefox, both for better speed and to save on the data quota. I think I had 150 MB data with what I topped up. (Some websites become impossible to navigate with images turned off, though - the quick fix is to turn on images and a longer-term one is to pester the site admins about it.)

This phone also has a limited amount of web browsing built in. Some of the basics (news stories, sports scores, weather) are unmetered but others cost extra. As far as I can tell it doesn't have a "real" browser in it - you can't visit arbitrary sites. It does have "canned" access to some email providers like Gmail and Hotmail but I don't think you can add more.

It comes with a 240 V AC charger and a USB cable; it will charge from either source. There is no 12 V charger included.

It is not possible for anyone, including the people at Telstra who created them, to understand PAYG pricing plans, or to determine which is the best deal. (This is deliberate.) The phone had $10 credit included in the purchase price, and I topped up another $20 when I bought it. It took about two and a half weeks for my balance to go from $30 to about $25, and three or four days for it to go from $25 to near $0, with no change in the usage pattern.

Standard disclaimer: I don't work for or otherwise get money from Telstra.

I hope this helps!

MattR

At the moment for new prepaid customers Telstra is giving 1gb a month data downoads for the first 3 months.

As we are travelling through WA from beginning of June I plan to get one then and it will cover our trip.

Emails and such dont actually use that much so it willl leave something for other things as well.