Increasing Cell Phone Signal Strength

I have Verizon Wireless as my cell phone carrier & have been a customer of theirs for about 8 years. All in all, a pleasant experience. Finally stepped up to a Smart Phone almost a year ago.  The HTC Thunderbolt. Very cool phone with it's fair share of quirks & issues. Learned to overcome most of them. Dealing with others. But I REALLY do like the phone!

Lately, though, I've been having an issue that I could neither deal with nor overcome. The signal strength of their regular phone part diminished to an almost non-usable proportion. I can no longer make or receive calls in my house. Sometimes, not even outside my house.   Incoming calls go straight to voice mail. Similar problem at my office but not as bad.  This has nothing to do with 3G or 4G signals. The technical term for the phone call/text message functions of your phones falls under the category: CDMA. This is what your "bars" are measuring ... your CDMA signal strength.

After a few phone calls with Verizon Customer Service (Who, by the way, are the friendliest, nicest, most concerned Customer Service people I've ever dealt with!), it was determined that the Cell Towers in my areas had been RE-POSITIONED. Unfortunately, I'm not in a good "Line of Sight" anymore in either of my locations, therefore decreasing my signal strength reception dramatically. There's not really a good fix for this problem.  They have been nice enough to send us replacement phones, hoping that part of the problem might have been a hardware issue. So far we haven't stumbled upon the right fix.

CJ has just had his Thunderbolt replaced with a Motorola Bionic Droid as an experiment to see if it gets better signal strength. We're still testing it.

But a conversation I had with Semone, one of Verizon's Tech Support Specialists got me to thinking. We were discussing the phones themselves & their antennas. Most phones have multiple antennas for the different functions. 3G/4G have their own. GPS has its own. So does CDMA. (our culprit) I Googled my phone & found detailed pictures of the antenna locations.  Most are built into the back cover. (battery cover)  But the CDMA is built into the base at the bottom.  Best of all, it has a little jack that can be connected to an EXTERNAL antenna.  BINGO!!! It was now time to MACGYVER!!!

I needed some very thin wire. Found an old set of earbud headphones I no longer used. I cut about a 2.5" piece of the wire. Striped & separated it as I only needed one part. (earbuds are a double wire) This particular wire was actually two thin strands. So I twirled them to make a sort of braid.  I then double knotted the end because I needed something I could jam into the ext. antenna jack.  The jack on my phone is covered with a little soft rubber button. Remove the button & SAVE it!

Using a paperclip, I pushed the little knot into the antenna jack. It didn't really want to stay but it didn't matter. Once I replaced the rubber cover, it forced good & immovable contact of the wire to the jack. The balance of the twisted wires I scotch-taped to the outside of the base of the phone.  (see pics below - CLICK EACH FOR CLOSEUP)

  

Now it may not look pretty but it was apparently effective. I instantly got a solid 3 out of 4 bars while sitting in my office. I previously struggled to get ANY. Sometimes I had to get up and walk around until I hit the right position.  So far I'm excited about this fix.

The real test will be when I try it at home.  I will comment my results later.