So much for new and un-molested

Soon.

Had my Rogue hit about a month after I purchased it too. Repairs took forever because parts manuals were still incomplete at the shop, first year 2008 Rogue, being repaired in 2007. At least I got to drive a decked out Maxima as a rental (hideous gas mileage though, when you can see the needle dropping as you drive...).

Biggest issue with taking a hit (several actually), was in the resale value. Everyone pulls a Carfax report when reselling cars nowadays, and it's very clear on the report that he car has taken a hit. When I traded it in for the Prius the trade in was a couple thousand less than it would have otherwise been.

Look on the bright side though, my second hit was from an uninsured driver and I had to pay my own $500 deductible on that one. Talk about being POed. Uninsured kid driving an '86 Silverado with bald tires during an ice storm. Couldn't even defensive drive out of that one, was stopped at a traffic light around the corner that he didn't quite make.

 

Why does my phone die more quickly in an area where I drift in and out of service? Does that only happen when it drifts and out, and not when it can't find any control channels at all?

 

My knowledge is based on GSM and the UMTS version of 3G so my comments may not apply if your phone uses a different technology. The main reason for people having increased power consumption from coverage issues is due to the phone doing excessive location updates. Your phone will do these anyway at specified intervals (chosen by your carrier and applied to all their customers) and when you turn it on or off. The other time it will do this is if it moves from one region to another.

Carriers will define groups of cells into regions (known as a LAC - Location Area Code), how big or small these regions are depends on how the carrier has built their network and they can and do change these as they build new base stations and optimise their networks. If your phone selects a cell in a new region (or has drifted back into coverage that is from a different region), it will do a location update. On old GSM phones and old audio equipment this used to generate a very distinctive rat - ratatat - ratatat - ratatat interference noise.

Roaming is not normally permitted between carriers here, but clearly if your phone did roam to a different network that would also cause a forced location update as the phone attaches to and registers on the new network.

 

The correct answer is yes. As your phone is transitioning radios internally (from 4g to 3g to Edge and back up again) it is trying to find a tower. When it locks it holds steady, but as mentioned before, when it is searching, it is throwing power out until it locks.

 

Thanks for the info! (and sorry for going on a tangent in this thread).

I experienced battery drain a lot with CDMA (Verizon) when I drifted in and out of service at work, depending on where I was in the room, the tides, etc. I think it's happened since switching to GSM/AT&T, but I'm not completely sure about that. In both cases, it was a non-smartphone, so though it did have a 3G connection, it was never actually used.

 

Most modern phones cap at a quarter watt of output power at most. If it can't hear a control channel, then it will try a broadcast on the last known channel at an interval the last tower it talked to told it to perform this function at, and it will do it at maximum power. What's most likely happening is either rapid switching as mentioned above, or multiple attempts to connect to a tower that it can hear, but the tower can't quite hear it. Remember, the tower is outputting about 40 times the power of your phone! It will retry multiple times to try to get to the tower and that will eat a ton of power in the process. Towers also produce "fake power" levels. They have a value that gets added to what the phone thinks it sees the tower at to produce a "tower quality" value. This value is used to compare that tower to its neighbors to determine if its time to jump or not. Not sure about CDMA, but in GSM there's a value in the control channel that tells the phone the minimum difference in "tower quality" that must occur before a switch may happen. This prevents constant and rapid switching in GSM networks. From what I've seen of CDMA networks, I don't believe the network really gives a crap about how quick a phone switches. (Basing this off of watching my phone's interactions with the Sprint network using XenSurvey.)

CDMA uses a spread spectrum at a low power, where as GSM uses more power over a 200KHz channel. Depending on how "clear" the tower was, CDMA can consume more or less power than GSM just on the basis of power consistency over the spectrum for that particular cell ID. CDMA also likes to hop between cell IDs frequently in my experience. GSM generally seems to want to stay on whatever its latched to for as long as it can.

Fun fact: Did you know that T-mobile has three cellular channels in most major cities that are completely unused? They're network engineering channels that are used to test new technologies and give the network engineers a place to work out problems with the network without interfering with the existing infrastructure.

Also available for satellite communication, network routing, information security, and bar mitzvahs! Remember to tip your waitress!

-Steve

 

IG, glad to see you're in pretty fair shape. I hope that continues.

At least the kid had some sort of insurance. Everyone that whacks me is very much without any. My truck had ONE payment left and got whacked by a kid skidding on rain-slicked surface. The Z28 got whacked by an self-centered-"Can't nobody-do-nuffin-to-ME"-type female in a hurry. She left a piece of paper with her insurance info on it in her wake, but I discovered the policy had been cancelled right after she received that piece of paper.

Geez, I hope none of your "tools" got roughed up sitting in the back. That'd be a danged shame.