Timeline for Amateur radio antennas cause static on a cell phone call
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 24 at 2:33 | comment | added | really not Constantine A. B. | So, I'd blame the asker's own handset, or maybe a shift in perception (I noticed that with my father very strongly. For years he absolutely had to complain about the worse speech quality in modern telephone calls compared to earlier. Wouldn't realize that multiple people telling him that they can understand him just fine and that his family using his phone when visiting had no issues either might mean there's changes in quality of hearing, but also in quality of emotional response) | |
| Jan 24 at 2:30 | comment | added | really not Constantine A. B. | As said, multipath is only a real problem in situations where you're forced to a narrow enough bandwidth so that you are likely to end up in a situation where your signal self-cancels due to path length differences. With ofdm based systems that is extremely unlikely to happen to begin with; you don't even need to antenna diversity; that just further improves the situation. But as you very correctly point out: problems in digital transmission, and all cellular systems since circa 1993 are digita, so not result in audible static, but other effects. | |
| Jan 24 at 2:26 | comment | added | user10489 | Agree on both points, Cell probably has enough antenna diversity to ignore fresnel/multipath. I wasn't implying you could choose a tower, I was implying that moving far enough is likely to trigger a tower change automatically. | |
| Jan 24 at 2:24 | comment | added | really not Constantine A. B. | And I'd be surprised if you can instruct a modern smart phone with unmodified firmware and without vendor tooling to switch tower explicitly. These things are petty good at choosing the best connection partners (cells) automatically, and do that, if necessary many times a second | |
| Jan 24 at 2:22 | comment | added | really not Constantine A. B. | Modern cell phones are not very susceptible to multipath problems - cdma2000/umts already had equalizers, and 4G onwards is interently designed to deal with multipath. This works basically because the bandwidth of a single cellular channel is large enough so that there's not just one wavelength that could get completely cancelled. Also, mimo. | |
| Jan 24 at 1:11 | comment | added | user10489 | Dead zones are likely caused by elevation dips, in the hole you can't see out. But it can also be caused by multipath propagation (aka fresnel zones), but those are usually small in size, on the order of 1/2 wavelength, so moving around a small bit would recover the bars. (I suppose dead zones could also be just bad tower coverage.) | |
| Jan 24 at 1:06 | comment | added | David Hoelzer♦ | There's also just the dreaded deadzone... There's a 1/2 mile section of highway not far from me where you have 5 bars before it, 5 bars after it, but in that area, all calls drop. | |
| Jan 24 at 0:24 | history | answered | user10489 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |