amateur radio Archives

The iPhone is an “amateur radio”

5 July, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Comeon‘ Apple — we all know “my phone has five bars and yet it drops calls all the time.” I call customer support on average once a month about this. They have even given me credits on my bill (not often). They have told me to download and use their app AT&T Mark the Spot to report poor-reception areas. Which I do routinely.

Now that Apple has announced that the reception measurement on the iPhone is incorrect (reading too high by about 2 bars in some cases), I no longer have an excuse. AT&T claims to have 10 towers within a 2-mile radius of my home office, but most of the time 2 or 3 of them are ”down” and besides, in San Francisco, over half of them are “behind a hill” from me so they do me no good. There are probably only 2 or 3 towers that actually give me any coverage in the office here.

But, Apple knew about the +2 bars problem a long time ago. It was reported in 2009. We were all seeing 2 or 3 bars, and then our software was upgraded and we were seeing 5 bars routinely (except when there were none). We customers knew that the iPhone was giving us more bars than it should have. So why did Apple not know this, or not see the change when this happened in the first place?

And Apple was surprised about this?

Any mobile phone is a mobile radio. And amateur radio operators, which we all are these days, know that if you touch (and thus “ground”) the antenna, you cause a change in signal strength.

We’re all Amateur Radio Operators now

13 October, 2008 by sky 2 Comments

I was fiddling around trying to find a good position (on a desk) for my iPhone yesterday in order to get good reception for a phone call, and it reminded me of the “old days” when I was first an amateur radio (“ham”) operator.

Can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent fiddling around with antenna positions in order to get good reception. In those days they were mostly long wires strung from buildings or trees, but the principle is the same for a mobile phone antenna. It all depends on the direction the antenna’s pointing, the distance from “ground” (actual earth or metal objects below the radio’s antenna) and other factors that are just too hard to predict. And so we “fiddle” until we get it right.

In the case of a mobile phone, which is also a radio transmitter and receiver, the variables are pretty much the same. They include whether you’re holding the phone in your hand or not, whether it’s near metal objects, whether you’re inside a steel or concrete/brick building, and your orientation with respect to the cell you are currently connected to. So when you hear “can you hear me now?” what’s going on is that you and your callee are each adjusting or moving your radio and antenna to get better reception. We have all become amateur radio operators!

The smoking gun (er, actually, the smoking power brick)

28 July, 2008 by sky 2 Comments

Apple Computer had already announced that there are problems with power bricks for the old PowerBook and iBook computers (now officially discontinued) – the small cord coming out of the brick (carrying low voltage) is under a lot of stress and strain, and can short out right where it comes out of the brick’s case. So I was kinda ready for this intellectually. My brick is carried in my backpack almost every day, with the cord wound around the brick, and I can attest that the stress at the point where the cord comes out of the body of the brick hasta be a factor in weakening the cord, even though I’m always careful. Over the course of four years, being coiled and uncoiled every day, that’s thousands of flexions we’re talking about.

So on Saturday, I was sitting on the floor using my computer, with an external LCD monitor attached to it (also sitting on the carpet), and noticed a plume of smoke rising from the top of the monitor. I thought a little bug had probably crawled into the monitor and been tazered to death by a high-voltage supply. But I noted the acrid electrical/plastic smell of the smoke…which didn’t really smell like delicious fried bug.

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