nextel coverage in bad areas

is there a way to boost the signal on these phones? im in college station, tx and the reception here just flat out sucks. i could mostly deal with it but the worst part is that in my room i get no reception. so that makes my phone almost useless b/c most of the time im in my room. ive seen on the internet stuff like antennas and the sort that you can buy and supposedly they work. i have an i860 btw. any thoughts?

thanks,
ismael m

Don't quote me on this, but I've heard in different forums that there's a red piece of rubber around the base of the antenna on the inside of the phone housing. This piece of rubber is supposedly meaningless and can be removed to receive a 3db gain in signal strength on both the transmit and receive sides of all NEXTEL models. See if some of the more experienced guys on hee know what I'm talking about. I'm sure one of them can walk you through the mod if it does indeed exist.

cool, i'll definately look into that.

Has anyone else done this? Does it really work?

Any truth to this...Nextel has been going done hill with coverage....Areas where it used to be great, it sucks now.

Here's something else that might work, although not intended for this exact model as part of Motorola's mods...

http://cellphoneforums.net/t167018.html

This is what's called a ground-plane kit for a dipole antenna... meaning: the signal will bounce against the plane of the ground to improve its radiated pattern from the radiation point (the antenna), thus sending signal up into the atmosphere (the normal route) as well as along the ground and outward (through the radials) before bouncing back into the atmosphere. This sends your signal across more land mass and up from more points than if you send it up from a single point using a telescopic/dipole (like NEXTEL's) antenna system without the kit. THIS HAS BEEN USED BY HAMS AND CB OPERATORS FOR 50+ YEARS WITH GREAT RESULTS. If you could imagine, when you pour water onto a concrete slab, you have some that rolls out flat to the sides, and some that bounces back up at different angles from the ground. Same principle here. The thought is that the signal gets spread more evenly across the ground when forced through these radials as opposed to using your body as the ground plane. The bad part about this system is that 1/3 of the ground plane gets blocked by your body making that side of the RF a "dead zone" because you are sucking up that radiation into you and redisbursing it instead of the ground-plane radials having a clean shot of actually hitting ground with signal. This system was designed more for "free-standing" antennae as opposed to hand-held units. Apparently Moto has had luck with the i730 by using this technique... it may not work with all handsets in the same way.