cingular air card

[david diehl]

for anyone who uses Cingular wireless for the laptop,

Is anyone having trouble getting a connection that lasts for more than 45 minutes.
It has screwed my Swift WX up several times, and when I start to look over forcast data, it freezes up again.
Anyone having this trouble

 

[Laura Hedien]

Nope.. been using the laptop Sierra Wireless 775 card and Cingular with no problems with the card or the connection.
Now it will c r e e p when the signal is weak. Almost seems like it freezes but just takes awhile to download. And sometimes I mean a w h i l e.
Laura

 

[david diehl]

I am sitting here at home, I have full signal, the card is a serria wireless 860G

 

[Laura Hedien]

If your dBZs are good... then.....??

Wait until Tyler pokes his head in here. he might have an idea.
Sorry to hear. Never fun when there's issues- especially when there's storms.
Laura

 

[Tyler Allison]

actually I just purchased my cingular aircard today online so I won't have it for a week or so probably.

If you are getting full bars and being disconnected you may want to call cingular. It could be that you locked onto a conjested tower or something is wrong with the tower. Of course, that wont help you if that's the case since you live there and they probably wont fix it just for you!

Try driving a couple miles and seeing if it fixes itself. That would tell you if it's a tower issue.

 

[Eric Whitehill]

for anyone who uses Cingular wireless for the laptop,

Is anyone having trouble getting a connection that lasts for more than 45 minutes.
It has screwed my Swift WX up several times, and when I start to look over forcast data, it freezes up again.
Anyone having this trouble

There were some undisclosed issues today regarding some cellular service in certain parts of the country. Unfortunetly, because people are not under NDA, I can not discuss this further.

-Eric

 

[Gene Moore]

This is a bit off subject.....but can anyone tell me the difference in tethering a laptop to a phone and using a card, aircard or any card for that matter? I've been using a PC card for a long time, but talked to Cingular about USB tethering a few years ago. They told me there was no difference other than going the card route cost more money, both for equipment and subscription. I think the USB setup made the difference, as opposed to the old way of tethering. Does anyone here have a different opinion, perhaps someone that switched from one to the other? Yesterday I chased in the Temple TX area and pretty much stayed online for hours from San Antonio to Temple. If I did disconnect the new upgrade Cingular software reconnects automatically (so did the old version but this is much better.)

As for the signal dropping after 45 minutes, it wasn't that long ago it was almost impossible to hold a signal for more than 5-10 minutes in a moving vehicle. At least after mobile phones switched from the old 3 watt setups to the newer low power analog (CDMA or TDMA). Now, digital holds a signal great, about all you can do to improve it is add a good roof top antenna....and hope nearby lightning doesn't overload/ruin your phone (old thread).....chasers must carry phone insurance.

gene moore

 

[david diehl]

TETHERING WILL TIE YOUR CELL PHONE UP,
drain your battery, and if someone calls you it will drop the data conection.
Hence is why I went with the air card, but about to drop cingular and go with verizon

 

[Paul Stofer]

Does anyone know of a good site to get a good comparison on price and coverage between the different providers? I have T-Mobile, but the signal drops when I venture off of the highway out of the cities.

 

[Gene Moore]

TETHERING WILL TIE YOUR CELL PHONE UP,
drain your battery, and if someone calls you it will drop the data conection.
Hence is why I went with the air card, but about to drop cingular and go with verizon

I disagree....for what ever that's worth

I can get inbound calls while on a laptop with Cingular .....did it yesterday with my Motorola V557. Bill Tabor called me quite a few times and we discussed the radar, my wife called too while I was online.

As for the battery drian, not much. I can charge while on line. Verizon was the first to have a cable (through Motorola) where both the tether cable and charger can plug into the same connector, now Cingular has it.

Good luck with Verizon.....I've used both and both have drawbacks.

gm

 

[David Drummond]

Mine on Sprint used to disconnect when someone called me. That was frustrating on more than one occasion. One of the nicest thing about the aircard I like is that you can just leave it plugged in and for the most part it connects when it can and stays connected as long as it can. 95% of the time you don't have to do anything (at least with the sprint one, I don't know about the others). With the phone tether there was always more steps I had to take to get it to connect, AND it used up plan minutes.

 

[Gene Moore]

Mine on Sprint used to disconnect when someone called me. That was frustrating on more than one occasion. One of the nicest thing about the aircard I like is that you can just leave it plugged in and for the most part it connects when it can and stays connected as long as it can. 95% of the time you don't have to do anything (at least with the sprint one, I don't know about the others). With the phone tether there was always more steps I had to take to get it to connect, AND it used up plan minutes.

One of my chase partners, Mike Watts, (who was an OU student with me) and I go out pretty much every season. We've been doing so for longer than I'm willing to admit. He's on Verizon and I have Cingular. We've fought to stay in the edge of new equipment that works. The idea here is if I can't connect he will.....but, it hasn't panned out as we had hoped. There are times neither system will find a connection, for example much of Iowa and Nebraska off the Interstates are bad. He does better in western KS than I do, but still not great. I do great just about anywere south of the KS-OK border, most of SD and so on.

I keep hearing good things about Sprint and T-mobile (especially T-mobile in western KS). Sprint in the past was not good for the northern plains. Regardless of the carrier it's still phone, software and laptop dependent. After all, if chasers would have been able to resolve this cellular issue Threatnet wouldn't have made much if any money.

As for Aircard, it's good to hear people are having good luck with them. David appears sold that it's a step up in dependability. One thing I would love to get rid of is all those #^&* wires hanging off my phone and the wireless cards accomplish this. Finally, I've noticed a trend in newer laptop builds to leave out the PC card slot. I had to order one for my HP laptop. The new Dell's have an all in one slot and it appears it will accomodate the old PCMCIA or PC II slot standard.

gene

 

[David Drummond]

I had problems in the past further north, especially in western KS (which now appears to be covered by Sprint) and anywhere north of Interstate in NE was spotty at best. WIFI came in handy then.

I upgraded last year to one of the newer Sprint cards that has an external antenna plug in it, but never got around to plugging on in. This year, I will do that, which I expect to help on the fringe areas and might even consider an amp for it. I've actually been really surprised at how much rural coverage Sprint does have. We noticed the card on a few occasions roaming on data as well and no overcharges came in.

 

[Gene Moore]

I upgraded last year to one of the newer Sprint cards that has an external antenna plug in it, but never got around to plugging on in. This year, I will do that, which I expect to help on the fringe areas and might even consider an amp for it. I've actually been really surprised at how much rural coverage Sprint does have. We noticed the card on a few occasions roaming on data as well and no overcharges came in.

The external ant plug is great, I have a WI-FI card with two of them, but don't use it now that my HP laptop works so well without one.

I'll have to think about the air card when my contract expires next April. It would be nice to forget excess battery drain from the cell phone, even though I can charge while using it. Also, it's never certain how many dropped connects I get with the auto-redial software working better. The biggest consideration for me is I have a system that works (my V557 is much better than my original V551) and I'm on the $25 unlimited plan

which I hear is gone now. I hate to lose that...even for more download speed. It seems every time I switch to a new phone/technology it takes a season of bugs to get it working right. There are newer phones than my V557 now, but it's not certain they are better for downloading data in most of the coverage areas I use.

Please let us know if you have better range with an amp. As I've stated before with old school analog through TDMA it was helpful, but with the new digital (packet) technology I didn't see an improvement worth the investment plus extra wires and battery drain. The less equipment I have to keep up with the more time I can spend watching the sky (and the road

). Did you know some cell towers are set to reject high power incoming signals, at least that's what I was told by a technician that works on towers?

gene