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Post by 9idrr on Jun 29, 2020 16:16:24 GMT -6
I guess this might be as good a place as any for this subject, so here goes.
Bein' stuck with dial up most of the time means that I spend a good part of my time online waitin' for stuff to load. When I go to town and take a laptop I can avail myself of the free wifi at the County Library, but that don't help when I'm jonesin' for the good stuff on this board in the evenings. Satellite is out of the question as I see no point in cuttin' down a couple of acres of trees to get a halfway decent shot at a bird. Bein' down on the side of a hill means there ain't much of a signal that can reach me from other services. Yahoo mobile is offerin' "unlimited data, talk and text" for about forty bucks a month at five Mbps with a limit for one device tethered at a time. My AT&T flip phone only gets a bar or two, at most, anywhere on the thirteen acres, but Verizon (on whose network the plan runs) tells me coverage should be good. Here's a link to the plan www.yahoomobile.com/plan and I'd appreciate any advice our all--knowin' IT experts here might feel like imparting concerning what's good and bad that you can see. Thanks. |
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Post by papaof2 on Jun 29, 2020 16:43:30 GMT -6
Best guess from this distance:
Use their coverage map to see if your area does have good coverage - most cell phone companies have those maps online at least by zip code and some down to a street address. I do NOT trust "should be" when it comes to cell coverage.
There's an app for Android phones that can map the cell towers within range (apparently without regard to whose network they support) and provide you the signal levels from each tower at your location.
Climb up on the roof and use this app to see what kind of signal level you get and where it's from.
Buy a cell phone booster system (used, about $150 on Ebay) and point the outside antenns (up on the roof) at that tower and then you'll have useful signal level from the "other" antenna that mounts inside the house.
Then you might get their 5MBs speed.
Ignore any spelling errors - I just replaced the control board in a dehumidifier and removing and replacing 30-odd screws have left these old hands less than fully functional (well, I replaced all but one screw and I would have needed an ambidextrous five year old to have fingers small enough to put that screw in place without further disassembly - just a minor difference in parts placement on the old and new controller boards but enough to be a problem). The dehumidifier is now running and the humidity in the kitchen is dropping. If it fills the bucket overnight I'm $$$ ahead in not buying a new dehumidifier. If it doesn't fill the bucket, I have some parts for my junk box.
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Post by 9idrr on Jun 29, 2020 21:35:12 GMT -6
Thanks, sir. Not havin' a smart-type phone, it's kinda hard to download any apps. Have tried a few times to check coverage maps but my connection is too slow on the 'puter. Guess I may just go ahead and try their phone to see how reception is here at the house. Not sure I wanna invest too much 'til I see if the connection can come close to allowin' the "advertised" speed.
Hope your humidity problem is solved.
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Post by papaof2 on Jun 29, 2020 22:04:12 GMT -6
We've had a measurable decrease in humidity on this level, so the dehumidifier is working. It's not new. This dehumidifier died with a "compressor runs whenever it's plugged in" failure, which indicated to me it had burned contacts on the relay that turns the compressor on and off - those contacts can be welded shut and permanently on. The thing was under warranty so I contacted customer service and they sent me a prepaid card for the original purchase price. I found a new one on Ebay for $20 less (with shipping) and we've gotten about two years out of it (that's about the average life for an always-plugged-in dehumidifier). I found a control board for the original one on Ebay for $35 so that's what I changed out today. Might get a year or so out of it. When it finally dies, the replacement will be a HiSense model because the HiSense in the basement will have been working for 5 years in November.
You need someone with a smartphone that you can bribe with food or beer to get them out and have them check the things I mentioned ;-)
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Post by 9idrr on Jun 29, 2020 22:14:27 GMT -6
Yeah, I guess the bribes might work. Just ain't too fond of visitors. Social distancing has long been one of our specialties.
How much difference would the model of the phone make?
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Post by papaof2 on Jun 29, 2020 22:36:58 GMT -6
The phone has to be compatible with the carrier's system. There's still some CDMA but most are GSM, even TracFone. If the carrier provides the phone, you know it will work but it only takes a couple of minutes to find out which system the carrier of interest uses.
Newer/better (more $$) phones have more memory and more "nice" features such as selective ring - the brother-in-law you don't want to talk to gets the "funeral dirge" ring or whatever is appropriate - or huge zoom on the camera or whatever. I have a relatively new (couple of years old) but not "high end" phone that doesn't have selective ring or a lot of memory so I don't have all the "goodies" I'd like to add but most of those are "wanna", not "gotta". It does all I need but would fall short if I started a Youtube channel and tried to create videos on the phone (not likely). What can you expect from a $100 phone?
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Post by bunyip on Aug 11, 2020 0:59:22 GMT -6
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 11, 2020 6:45:50 GMT -6
There are satellite internet providers but they tend to have premium prices for non-premium speeds (the last time I checked). 9 says he's on the down side of a hill and has many trees so he might not be able to get the bird. We priced Dish versus the wired cable TV services and the Dish installation would have required taking out a tree that was directly in the path to the bird. Us paying for taking out a tree would have made the Dish installation prohibitively expensive so we went with a wired provider. If a cell provider has coverage maps to the level of street addresses (some do) then you can quickly determine whether it's even possible for you to have useful data coverage at your location. The cell phone repeater is a good option for certain locations but you need to do some checking - thus the need for a phone that can run the tower location and signal strength apps. Our wired internet is bottom tier (7mbs down/1.5mbs up - but occasionally someone slips up at configuration HQ and we get 14mbs or 21mbs down for a few hours or maybe even a day - such as when a near neighbor got fiber internet ;-) I figure that sort of makes up for the 30 hours they were out the last time we had a 12 hour power outage. The fiber terminal that provides DSL and better (50MBS fiber internet is available, for a price) speeds is up the road a ways and fed by a different 7400 volt line from the same substation that serves us. That time they went down about 20 minutes before our power went out but stayed out almost a day longer. I would say they have zero backup power. Not a big deal for internet and TV service but if your landline phone is part of a "package" then you have no landline phone - and no 911 access - when their power is off, which is not something they mention with all the other perks of their bundle deals. If we had someone doing classes online or if I was uploading video to Youtube, we'd need at least the next tier up in internet speed. The biggest uploads I do now are the story files that go to always-backed-up online storage, just in case the laptop I use for writing dies, which is why the better half's "Supper's ready" is usually met with "Just a minute" while I save and upload whatever I'm working on. |
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Post by 9idrr on Aug 11, 2020 21:48:35 GMT -6
Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I picked up an old iPhone but it doesn't seem to work much better than the flip phone. Just gonna have to keep tryin'.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 11, 2020 22:18:08 GMT -6
The iPhone isn't any better at using a weak signal than the others and some iPhones were worse than the cheapest TracFone - the iPhone Apple told people they were "holding wrong" when the problem was the antenna was along the edge of the case and people would touch it if they held that phone as they typically held previous phones. Apple never wanted to admit they had poor/stupid engineering but they did finally offer a free case to keep fingers away from the antenna - something free from Apple??? My better half has an iPod that one of the kids gave her but that's the ONLY Apple product in the house.
That iPhone should have the ability to run things such as the signal strength and tower locator apps to tell you how good/bad the signal is up on your roof and whether you could use a cell booster to have decent data speed at your location, although I'm partial to Android phones because Apple has always wanted to be entirely in control of your device (and they robbed schools back in the days of the Apple II - there are some dark green rea$on$ why Apple's founders are millionaires).
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