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Groups > misc.phone.mobile.iphone > #90156

Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas

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In article <m9vspbp0hvep8nokt8u4n4s02d9mjpupc2@4ax.com>, Jeff
Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> wrote:

> >> Well, you're certainly entitled to an opinion. Personally, I prefer
> >> opinions based on repeatable tests, measurements, numerical results,
> >> and calculations.  However, I'll accept your assertion for what it's
> >> worth.  However, I did make one mistake.  The iphone wasn't 10 times
> >> worse, but more like 6 to 18 times.  Citing my web page:
> >> <http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/cellular/cell-test.htm>
> >>   "The worst phone I tested dropped the rx signal 16 times 
> >>   (-12dB). The iPhone 4 rx signal dropped 100 times (-20dB) 
> >>   to 288 times (-24.6dB). That's a 6 to 18 times worse signal 
> >>   drop for the iPhone 4... "
> >
> >if the iphone was 18x worse, it would not have sold anywhere near as
> >well as it did. people don't buy crappy phones.
> 
> Without the rubber cover, which is now epidemic, the iPhone 4 was 6 to
> 18 times worse in signal loss compared to various cell phones. 

nope

> With
> the rubber cover, it's about the same as most other smartphones.  At
> the time when I ran the test, rubber covers for the newly released
> iPhone 4 were not available. 

they were available.

> I can repeat the test if I can borrow an
> iPhone 4 from a friend.  So can you.  It's quite easy but there are a
> few tricks.  Bug me if you want details.

i don't need to borrow one since i still have mine. 

i had *no* problems whatsoever with reception and no tangible
difference between it and the 3gs it replaced.

> >there were fewer dropped calls with the iphone 4 than the previous
> >iphone 3gs.
> 
> True for AT&T because, as I previously indicated, AT&T would
> disconnect if the carrier was lost for only a few seconds.  That was
> later increased which hid any disconnects caused by carrier loss.  You
> can test how it works with any cell phone.  Make a call and then put
> the phone inside a shielded box (microwave oven will do) for varying
> amounts of time.  Last time I did this on VZW, I could disappear for a
> bit less than 2 minutes, and continue my call from where I left off.

bullshit. no cell carrier keeps a call connected that long without any
connection.

> I just tried it on VZW at home.  I called my house phone from my
> ancient LG VX8300 cell phone.  I then put it inside the microwave
> oven.  After 2 minutes, I was still connected.  However, I'm not sure
> if the signal went to zero.  I could see that the phone showed zero
> bars through the oven door, but the VX8300 will still work showing
> zero bars.  I'll see if I can find a weaker signal location and a
> better shielded box later in the week.  

put it on defrost cycle.

> It's easy enough for you to try the same thing.  Note that it doesn't
> matter what phone you use.  You're testing how the cell site responds
> to a loss of carrier.  Any phone will suffice.

i prefer real world tests in normal use.

my iphone 4 was not significantly different than any other phone i
have, whether it's other iphones, android and old school flippers, and
that's in both city and fringe areas. 

> >at the time, the iphone 4 was the best selling iphone to date and sold
> >quite well for the few years it was offered for sale.
> 
> Yep, and sales is of paramount importance.  Everything else, including
> quality, repairability, product life, and even price are of secondary
> importance.  If it sells, it must be good (for the company).

all of those are contributing factors to sales.

if the product was shit quality, unreliable, etc. it would't sell well.
people generally want quality stuff.

the reality is that the iphone 4 was very reliable, other than the home
button for early production runs, something that was easily fixed and
later modified at the factory to be more reliable.

> >once the whole antennagate bullshit blew over, nobody even thought
> >about it.
> 
> I thought about it.  I really hate to agree with you, but the
> antennagate thing had nothing to do with Apple.  Apple's only
> contribution was designing a phone that highlighted a bad setting by
> AT&T in their cell sites.  The problem disappeared when the rubber
> bumper made the iPhone 4 act more like other phones of the period, and
> when AT&T tweaked their settings.  As an added bonus, Apple also
> tweaked the relationship between receive signal level and the number
> of bars indicated.  Later, they graciously allowed users to see the
> actual numbers in dBm.  Prior to that, jailbreaking was required.  You
> can read about how it was necessary to get into the field test mode in
> order to see numbers at:
> <http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2>

jailbreaking was not required to put earlier iphones into field test
mode.

apple removed that in the iphone 4 and then put it *back*.

> >it was yet another manufactured problem which was concocted by gawker
> >media for the traffic, just like the iphone 6 bendgate and hairgate
> >nonsense.
> 
> Those problems were not concocted or in any way fabricated for the
> occasion.  They were quite real.  Whether they were significant or
> worth fixing is a very different story.  

the problem was concocted. 

'holding it wrong' is something that affects every single phone, but
gawker media, who had just had its ass handed to it for buying a stolen
iphone 4, decided to attack apple and get its revenge.

> These days, product lifetimes are sufficiently short that the next
> generation of product is already in the pipeline when the previous
> product is introduced.  In some product areas (i.e. disk storage and
> SSD's), there can be as many a 3 generations in the pipeline at the
> same time.  That means there's absolutely no incentive to fix the
> current product when the next generation will be released shortly.  If
> there are any real problems, current owners are simply told to wait
> for the next generation to be released, which will surely have those
> problems solved.  The reality is often quite different.

apple often makes changes *during* product lifecycles.

> >what comes around goes around, and now gawker media is bankrupt.
> 
> Hardly.  There are plenty of problems still left to solve.  For
> example, how about product life and servicability?
>
> <http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fix-out-product-repairs-get-tougher-new-a
> ge-obsolescence-n614916>
> Did you know that your Apple products are designed for a 5 year
> product life?

they aren't.

in fact, i have a 12 year old mac mini running 24/7 as a low end server
and just put an ssd in it because the hard drive was over 10 years old.


> <https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624>

that doesn't mean they're designed for 5 year life. 

it means apple stops supporting products after 5 years, or 7 years as
required in california, where you are.

every company cuts off support after a while, often *less* than that.

look at what android phone makers do, who drop support within a year or
two.

> Ever wonder what Apple does with cell phones that have been returned
> for repair?
> <http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shreds-old-iphones-to-prevent-real-parts-
> ending-up-in-fakes-2016-2>

don't believe everything you read.

apple recycles phones and even designed and built a robot named liam to
do it.

<http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot/>
  Liam is programmed to carefully disassemble the many pieces of
  returned iPhones, such as SIM card trays, screws, batteries and
  cameras, by removing components bit by bit so they¹ll all be easier
  to recycle. Traditional tech recycling methods involve a shredder
  with magnets that makes it hard to separate parts in a pure way
  (you¹ll often get scrap materials commingled with other pieces).

  Liam separates the insides of an iPhone with robotic precision so,
  for example, pieces of glass and plastic won¹t be mixed in with
  copper. Ultimately, these components can be sold to recycling vendors
  that focus on specific materials, such as nickel, aluminum, copper,
  cobalt and tungsten (a conflict mineral), and turn them into
  something else that can be reused, rather than dumped in a landfill.
  Some of these materials take decades to decompose and leak toxic
  materials into the ground along the way.

> >haters gotta hate.
> 
> That's only a problem when one hates something specific, like Apple.
> It's not considered a problem if one hates everything equally.  Don't
> worry.  I have plenty of bad things to say about Google and Android.

yet you don't.

> >no need to jailbreak to get dbm
> 
> At the time (2010), it was necessary to jailbreak an iphone in order
> to obtain signal strength numbers.  The field test mode was also
> initially disabled in the iphone 4.  Read the Anantech article
> mentioned above for a memory refresh.

they removed it in the iphone 4 and then put it back in the next
update, which was a couple of weeks later, if that (i'd have to check
the dates).

prior to the iphone 4 it was there.

> >you've admitted your anti-apple bias which makes what you say not
> >honest.
> 
> Excuse me?  Since when does hating something lead to dishonesty? 

it means what you say is heavily biased.

> I might hate a vendors products, possibly for good reason, and offer my
> opinion on the matter if asked, but I certainly would not poison my
> position by lying about what's wrong with their products.  I might
> also not like a vendor due to political, social, economic, or personal
> reasons that have nothing to do with their products.  From what I've
> disclosed, you would not be able to determine if it's one of those, or
> whether it's a quality, service, price, performance, design, or
> usability problem that I might have with Apple.  Assumption really is
> the mother of all such screwups.

except that you do lie about them, as you did above.

> Taking your statement at face value, are only people that offer
> favorable opinions of Apple allowed to comment because they're
> presumably the only ones that are honest?  Perhaps you might want to
> rephrase your statement.

i never said that at all.

every product has good and bad points. nothing is perfect. pick the
best tool for the job. 

anyone who repeatedly cites the bad things about one company and
ignores when other companies do the very same thing (or worse) is
dishonest.

> Drivel:  I found my old iPhone 3G and decided to see if it still
> works.  I charged up the battery, turned it on, and it complained that
> it could not make a secure connection.  Fine, that's Apple for set the
> date and time.  Once I did that, I was deluged with about 4 years of
> gmail stored on the Google server.  That was followed by about 200
> reminders and appointments, each of which had to be individually
> acknowledged.  When I checked for updates, it proclaimed that
> everything was up to date.  Not too bad for an old phone.

so much for designing for 5 years.

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Thread

WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-07-30 16:18 +0000
  Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-30 17:49 -0700
    Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-30 21:54 -0400
      Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2016-07-31 02:16 +0000
      Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-30 20:44 -0700
        Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-31 13:52 -0400
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2016-07-31 19:19 +0000
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-31 16:41 -0700
            Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-31 20:23 -0400
        Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-07-31 22:26 +0000
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-31 18:58 -0400
            Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-01 05:54 +0000
              Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 02:11 -0400
              Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 02:13 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-01 21:44 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 17:52 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-01 21:49 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 17:52 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-01 22:01 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 18:47 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-02 15:04 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-02 11:05 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-02 18:19 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-02 15:25 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-02 19:49 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-02 16:32 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-03 01:35 +0000
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-02 21:43 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-03 03:27 +0000
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2016-07-31 23:17 +0000
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-31 17:23 -0700
            Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-31 20:36 -0400
              Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-31 18:52 -0700
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-31 22:18 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-31 20:21 -0700
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-01 17:04 -0400
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-08-01 15:43 -0700
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2016-08-01 18:23 +1200
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-08-01 21:51 +0000
    Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Aardvarks <aardvarks@a.b.c.com> - 2016-07-31 02:59 +0000
      Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-07-30 21:42 -0700
      Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Michael Eyd <invalid@eyd.de> - 2016-08-01 13:03 +0200
        Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2016-08-02 08:59 +1200
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-08-01 16:19 -0700
            Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2016-08-02 13:18 +1200
              Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas BobbyK <bknight@Conramp.net> - 2016-08-01 21:51 -0500
                Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2016-08-02 18:22 +1200
        Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-08-01 16:02 -0700
          Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Michael Eyd <invalid@eyd.de> - 2016-08-02 09:03 +0200
            Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> - 2016-08-02 09:40 -0700
              Re: WiFi sensitivity question for Jeff Liebermann & anyone well versed in antennas Michael Eyd <invalid@eyd.de> - 2016-08-03 10:33 +0200

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