My current cell phone is unsatisfactory. For 80% of my commute, reception is unreliable to non-existant. While my cell phone company admits that my phone is crappy for my needs, their only suggestion is to buy an antenna for it.
I once had a decent cell phone which worked for over 90% of my commute, but it was issued by my employer (the State) and they now don’t allow us to use it for non-emergency personal calls (prior to this ruling, they just had us pay an extra 6 cents a minute for non-business calls). That phone has a retractable antenna, which pulled out about 6 inches from the phone. Of course that style of phone is now obsolete.
I need a basic phone! No web surfing, no camera, no game programs. Storing a few hundred numbers might be a nice feature, along with speed dialing, but that’s about it. The phone is only turned on when I’m making a call.
I’d like it fto be airly compact, but it doesn’t have to be ultra-small. I just want it to get reception most of the time!
You’re toward the southern end of the Milwaukee-Green Bay corridor, correct? Weird, I’d think the coverage would be pretty good along there.
I live in what used to be a rural dead zone for us with US Cellular. We ditched that and got Tracfones (pay as you go), and so far we’ve been pretty happy with the coverage. Sometimes we have to go outside, but we can almost always get a signal at home, and we’re really out in the sticks. Better sound quality too. The first time Mr. S called me on his new phone, it sounded just like a landline instead of crackle crackle crackle.
I’m in the kettles and moraines a lot. And I need my phone to be active while I’m mobile. I do not commute along any major corridors, in fact I take the back back roads, where my chief traffic worry is deer, turkey, pheasant, sandhill cranes, and manure spreaders. I swerve for turtles. If I can just get a no-frills phone with a retractable antenna that works as well as my old one did, I’d be happy.
Try going into a phone store somewhere along or near your route and see what they suggest. I’ll bet there are tons of 'em out there (there’ve GOT to be other Kettlers and at least a few Morainers…they’re just hiding in the trees).
A phone store along my route??? I pass 1 gas station, two bars (an incredibly low number for Wisconsin), a farm implement dealer, a dairy, and two apple orchards on my 56 mile commute. And that’s it, as for commercial establishments! Oh, one taxidermist too.
Perhaps I will have to examine this Tracfone of which is posted.
I’m not sure your problem is with your phone, but rather your provider. A lot of providers have maps that indicate their current (and often proposed future) zone coverage. It might be useful to you to start searching their websites to see if the area around those 2 apple orchards and the farm implement dealer is covered or not. About 5 years ago, I chose one particular provider simply because at the time, they were the only one that had reception in the area between the city I lived in, and the city I went to school in. Everyone else had a bit of a dead zone in between, but since that was my commute, it wasn’t very useful to me.
I’m with another provider now but that’s for other reasons.
mnemosyne, my provider tells me that there’s coverage if I have a better phone. Which they didn’t have in stock. Or remember precisely the make and model number. But I could order it on the internet.
I was thinking of someone who actually sells to the folks who live in that area. A more populated area that they would come to for their own cell phones. Is there a decent sized town nearby?