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Old 07-13-2009, 02:46 AM
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Re: [JUL 12] *11 Radios Available* Updated Touch Pro CDMA Radio Archive Thread

At risk of sounding like an elitist prick, which honestly, I don't intend to be, but I'm honestly not sure how to say this without sounding at least a little rude:
Please bear with me, and try to understand the message I am trying to convey, as no offense is intended.

If you really have little to no clue about how radio systems work, or how to test them, *please* do everyone a favor, and don't post your random imaginings as to how well a specific radio rom works. It is just misleading, and leads to *more* confusion for those who don't really understand any more than you do.

Now, I don't expect everyone to be an expert on IP radio systems or anything, but if you are judging signal, reliability, or really just about *anything* based solely on the signal strength bars displayed on your handset, then you really should not be making recommendations to anyone.

Even Sprint CS will tell you how nearly meaningless those bars can be, especially if you have no idea how they are actually generated. (They normally don't measure actual signal quality, or sadly even signal strength, but are instead based on an algorithm derived from the amount of amplification needed by the handset)

Likewise, online speed tests are really not a decent measure of even *wired* broadband, and are certainly not a measure of radio reliability. Even under the best circumstances they can only be a guideline, but in reality, there are so many outside factors involved, that they are fairly meaningless as far as determining how one radio performs compared to another without doing 1000s of tests with each radio over a period of time, averaging the results, and comparing them to each other, and even then, you really cant be sure that things such as seasonal usage drift, or network load due to a hot new device were not to blame for any differences, unless you do your tests on every radio you are testing every single day using multiple devices, or reflashing repeatedly.
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If you don't really understand the mechanics involved in radio performance testing, what you *can* do that *WILL* help quite a bit, is just use your device normally, in as many different places as possible, and report how well in general the radio you are using seems to perform compared to what you are used to. Reliability, heat generation, battery drain, and so on.

For those that would like to be educated in testing processes, I can try to write up a guide, when I get a chance, if Strra wants to put a link to it in the first post. However, the majority of my current wireless experience comes from when I helped manage and maintain the WiFi network sites of a local hotspot ISP so, it would probably be better if there is someone available that is an expert on *mobile* wireless networks, and EVDO data systems in particular to do it.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can find a post I saw somewhere that had some easy guidelines, and re post it here.
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