On 2008-06-23, Cinder Lane <Cinderlane@webtv.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008, 1:55pm (EDT+4)
> noone@home.com (Larry) wrote:
>
>>We've turned down the phone's power so far and
>>eliminated all the external antenna connections,
>>making the antennas more and more inefficient
>>to make the glitzy girls happy until, even in flat country,
>>the phones won't radiate a signal bigger than the
>>noise from the sun more than a mile or two. In the
>>mountains, you're lucky if it works 2 miles from the
>>tower, ESPECIALLY on 1900 Mhz....
>
> Wouldn't the shortness of an internal antenna better match the
> wavelength of the *1900* MHz band, giving it *better* reception than the
> 800?

This is true, though this is balanced by the fact that there's
no space constraint at the tower so the tower's antennas will
be better at 800 MHz even if the phone's antenna is better at 1900.
And 800 MHz signals go around things better than 1900 MHz, while
1900 MHz signals generally reflect more, so at 1900 MHz the phone's
performance will depend a lot more on being able to make constructive
use of reflected signals, something which CDMA is supposed to be good
at but which is a bit expensive in terms of processing and may be
less than perfect.

The end result may be that teeny tiny handsets with teeny tiny antennas
end up being equally bad at either frequency. If you try to fix this,
however, say by installing a car kit, 800 MHz will get better in a bigger
hurry than 1900 MHz.

Dennis Ferguson