Sprint Vogue PRL Question

[ETPhHm]

My wife and I live out in the rural country but we have had a pair of old Sanyo MM-8300 phones for ever and they do nothing except make calls. We have them set to "roaming mode only" because we are out of the Sprint network at our home. But to the credit of these old phones, they get better phone reception than any CDMA or GSM phone on the market old or new (I have tested plenty of phones with alltel, sprint, verizon, and at&t). Anyway, the PRL (preferred roaming list) is periodically updated by Sprint. We've been told that the PRL tells the phone which cell towers to use (according to agreements with other carriers, traffic on the tower, and other conditions).

Well, we just recently bought two new phones, Sprint Vogues for 19.95 each (yes older than the some of the newer stuff out there, but the price was hard to say no to). However, when I am sitting in my basement office, the new HTC Vogues get 0 to 1 bars in signal strength, while the Sanyos boast 4 to 5 bars almost always. Using the *2 feature, i noticed the provider service that the Sanyos are locking onto is the US Cellular tower about 3 miles south of me (the PRL in the Sanyos has not been updated for about 2 years). The new Vogues (and other newer phones I have tried in my home) are locking onto an Alltel tower about 8 miles northwest of me.

My question is this: Is there any way for me to customize my own PRL for the Vogues so that I can get them to pick up on the closer US Cellular tower? I tried the possibility of taking the Vogue to a Sprint store and having them back date the PRL to the oldest one they had on file but that did not help so I had them put a later one back into the phone.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer to point me in the right direction.