Yagi Directional <span class="highlight">Antenna</span>

Just a quick note regarding point 1) of your things to check list.

NOT all Blue Tick phones are the same.........

I have a particular Blue tick phone and we recenlty got a different Blue tick phone for my wife. It's absolutely useless.

If I have five bars and even without any bars sometimes, I can still get 3G albeit slow.

The one we got for my wife, even if it has 3 bars showing, still tells us it can't get Telstra, and can be used for emergency calls only.

I'll give you one guess where that phone is going.....



Tony

Thanks for the helpful info. Will be very helpful.

Hi Tony

The powers that be make it deliberately hard to directly measure phone reception - so can you tell which is the good and not so good one , as side by side comparisons are a helpful guide.

Robin, if you have an iphone or Android, there are many free apps that you can get that bypass all the nice user interfaces of the phones and tell you the RSSI or signal strength in dbM ( the less negative the better), some even plot graphs.

This one is free for Android and shows the RSSI ( signal strength)

Android signal strength app

Thanks Boobook - now if only we could find somewhere that lists there RF performance - side by side

Robin,

The model phones I'm referring to are both supplied to me by Telstra

The one that gets good/reasonable (we all wish for better still) reception is a Sony Ericsson CEDAR

The ....CRAP.... one we bought for my wife expecting it to get reception as well, being a Blue Tick phone is an Telstra T95

As a side note, when we were in Tassie earliy on this year, I was also looking into an antenna system to try to get some reception from a Telstra Mobile broadband stick that I had borrowed for my trip. This was getting about the same reception as the Telstra T 95. When I was talking to the very helpful (?) young bloke in Launceston, and explained was getting a reasonable reception from the SE Cedar, he suggested that I just place the sim card from the broadband stick into that phone.

This was a bit awkward, swapping sims as and when needed, so looked around every time we got neara phone shop and luckily managed to pick up another SE, which they were clearing out, as I think they were a runnout model.

Best part of this was the price, as they only wanted $29.00 for it.

Way cheaper than the antenna I was looking at and the a phone cradle to be able to connect.

We have Yagi antenna model DB 800-16-14-C frequency 824-896 MHZ Gain dBi. Our son bought it for us for $170. We hope it is going to prove worthwhile.