Oddly the droid does not show signal strength for voice calls by default.
When you glance at your phone and it shows full bars for signal strength, that is for 3G data only.
In many many places I get great 3g signal and web browsing etc is great, but as soon as you place a call in many cases you loose all bars and the calls sound terrible, I keep saying "What" when talking to people, the calls usually don't drop, but just sound like complete garbage.
is anyone else seeing poor signal strength when you make a voice call?
Is this the Droid and a bad antenna for the 2g voice signal? Or is the Verizon network just not what they say it is?
I took it iinto the store and of course I get full bars for voice because they have a signal repeater installed in the stores and they look at me like I am nuts.
Hi I think Ive been having similar issues. Are you saying that the "bars" icon is not for voice strength but instead just for the 3G? So there is no way to tell when you have good voice strength? It seems to me that I don't have full bars ever and that I have 1 bar or no bars most of the time..yet I can get my calls pretty well...
I wonder how many dBm's you are getting (decibels per milliwatt), go to your settings->about phone->status menu and it will tell you.
I've noticed that VZ's coverage maps are not very comprehensive, it tells me that I should get great coverage at my house. I have direct line-of-sight to the tower but I'm too close to it, so the transmitters don't angle down far enough to give me great coverage. I move 200' south though and suddenly my dBm goes from -100 to -60 (marked improvement and a great signal).
I think the bars are a bad way to gauge your signal quality. They're very subjective and inaccurate (ie a trick by the telco's/phone makers to look like better coverage).
at my house I when I have 3 to 4 bars the dbm is -96, and when I make a call it goes to -104.
I can have 4 bars of 3g, make a call and have 0 and the call qualithy is bad.
It seems the droid has a real issue with holding the 1x basic voice and data signal.
I tested this in other areas as well, will have full 3g bars, place a call and it goes to 1 bar and bad call qaulity and it takes much longer to connect and ring.
I don't know for sure, but it seems the droid is dropping to 800mzh for voice and in my area the infrastructure for 800mzh is nil.
From what I have been reading Verizon uses 1900mzh in my area for 3g and 1x, but it sure does not seem like the droid is staying on 1900mzh when making a call.
I can't even begin to describe how much worse Verizon is in my area than AT&T, I really want to stay with Verizon, but not if it means I get poor voice quality for two years. If I cannot get this resolved, it will be by by Verzion and back to AT&T
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