[Q] Sudden degradation in radio performance - Thunderbolt Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I am curious if anyone recently has had some degraded signal performance with their TB radios lately.
Pertinent info:
phone : thunderbolt
ROM: BAMF 2.1 remix
Kernel : Sense dreamkernel
Radio: MR2.0 and MR2.5
Seidio 3800 mAh battery
In the last few days or so basically out of nowhere and in geographically different locations, my signal strength has gone to hell and I am having trouble maintaining CDMA connectivity, much less LTE. LTE went live in my area about a month ago.
Currently, it is sitting on my desk next to a blackberry 8830 that has a nice full signal, while my TB is bouncing between 1x and 3G. At work, other TB's in the building( stock ones) were pulling stronger signals.
When this problem started yesterday, I flashed the radio from MR2.5 down to MR2.0.
I am beginning to wonder if I have some sort of hardware fault going on here. Any ideas?
Edit: I also tried the key sequence in another thread to toggle the radio ( instead of toolkit)

Mine has gotten worse over the past week, as has my wife's. I hear a lot of people blaming mr2, but I tried out mr1 on my.wife's phone. Seems as though both are slower speeds and loss of signal moreso than normal. I think it's on Verizon's end

I believe you are right sir. Better behavior today.

Yeah, mines been acting up to.

Related

[Q] 3G acting strange..

So all of a sudden my TB's 3G started acting odd. It disappears (the 3G icon disappears) unless I'm checking for updates, in which case it randomly reappears and seems to be doing work. Toggling airplane mode on and off doesn't help nor does turning the phone on and off. I can still get texts and calls but no 3G...
Tried everything (going back to ROMs that were backed up from a few days ago) as well as flashing that full new ROM/radio update. Wasn't doing anything specific before it went out...
Any ideas?
solved!
solution: http://www.androidcentral.com/having-3g-problems-your-thunderbolt-fix-just-few-settings-away
swimminsurfer256 said:
solved!
solution: http://www.androidcentral.com/having-3g-problems-your-thunderbolt-fix-just-few-settings-away
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I didn't find that this worked at all. Only since the new radio was installed have I found 3g drop because I know I am in a partial 4g area. So for the time being I don't want to turn of the ePHRD. Has anyone else experienced this since upgrading radio and such?
Spencer_Moore said:
I didn't find that this worked at all. Only since the new radio was installed have I found 3g drop because I know I am in a partial 4g area. So for the time being I don't want to turn of the ePHRD. Has anyone else experienced this since upgrading radio and such?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I did upgrade the radio and this fixed the problems I was having. Getting great speeds now. But I'm far away from any 4G areas :/
I am having all kinds of problems today with the 3g icon going on and off. Sometimes when its on I still do not have data connectivity. Is this a verizon problem or just the new radio?
I think it has to do with LTE being prepped to roll out and more intensive stress-tests that they may be planning.
I've been having similar issues. I did the entire rooting process then flashed BAMF 1.5 and had little radio issues, but once I saw the 3G cut out a couple times yesterday, I flashed the radio that was already on my SD card. Since then it randomly cuts in and out, and sometimes requires a full phone reboot to come back. I don't think it's Verizon at all (at least not in my case), although my area is supposed to get 4G sometime this year.
I'm hoping the official OTA has a "better" radio that can fix these issues...since I sort of had issues like this in Boston when I was stock, but at home out in Central MA, 3G was as solid as ever.
Just an update in case anyone was reading this older thread--I continued to have signal issues for a day or two after rooting but I think I just had bad timing on flashing the new radio. I've spoken to a few Verizon customers (my mom included) and many of them had 3G issues the last couple days. Yesterday it was solid as a rock, signal better than I'm used to. So it probably was just a Verizon outage, testing 4G or whatever it was that they've been doing.
It's Verizon outages right now, lots of testing upgrading going on with VZW right now.

[Q] Better 4G signal with MR 2.5 instead of the NEW .627 Radio?

Not sure what everyone else's take on the new radio is (.627), but I personally am not having as good of reception with 4G as I did with the MR 2.5. I ran the speedtest app on both and confirmed this.
I switched back over to the MR 2.5 as a result of my test, and sure enough, the 2.5 is still better.
Anyone else with similar issues?
I agree service wise mr2.5 was much better on 4g and even 3g... however, the new one has not given me even one restart since i loaded it. 2.5 i was having restarts or simple shutdown few times a week.
I have never had reboots with any radio or Rom but with the new OTA radio I lose 4G and it sticks to 3G a lot. If I force 4G I will see 1x a lot of times when I pick the phone up.
I went back to leaked 2.5 and all is right again in the world.

Radio change for better indoor reception?

I've kept my amaze stock and up to date with newest releases. Finally going to root and update rom to cm10. But I have noticed since I got this phone last year, my indoor reception at home, where I used to have 3-5 bars 4g now gets no signal or weak edge. I am sure tmobile didn't suddenly move an antenna on me farther from my house lol.. So I'm assuming the ics update changed something with the reception I am getting.
So... Is it a radio update that caused this? I tried looking on threads here but can't find the specific answer.
ICS signal is significantly worse than GB signal. I noticed that too, as did many others. It just is what it is.
Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

Borked 1x antenna?

Recently I have been experiencing, like many others, difficulty maintaining my 3g connection. It drops out at random times, sometimes staying off for 18 hours at a time regardless of reboots, flashing different roms, resetting my phones profile or reactivating my handset.
One thing I have noticed though, is the fact that my phone never goes to 1x. Ever. It's either 3g or nothing.
Do my questions. Is there a way to test the function of my 1x antenna if it is indeed separate from the 3g antenna?
If they are not separate, is there a way to reset it in some way?
I am currently running the latest radios from The good Capt. Throwback, my thought was to downgrade them and see if functionality returns.
Any ideas on how to proceed after that would be appreciated.
Mr. B.
ETA: running Jamie's latest PAC and have run PAC and RootBox almost exclusively. Stock kernel. No tweaks. Flashed latest radios about 30 days ago.
Mr.BungIe said:
Recently I have been experiencing, like many others, difficulty maintaining my 3g connection. It drops out at random times, sometimes staying off for 18 hours at a time regardless of reboots, flashing different roms, resetting my phones profile or reactivating my handset.
One thing I have noticed though, is the fact that my phone never goes to 1x. Ever. It's either 3g or nothing.
Do my questions. Is there a way to test the function of my 1x antenna if it is indeed separate from the 3g antenna?
If they are not separate, is there a way to reset it in some way?
I am currently running the latest radios from The good Capt. Throwback, my thought was to downgrade them and see if functionality returns.
Any ideas on how to proceed after that would be appreciated.
Mr. B.
ETA: running Jamie's latest PAC and have run PAC and RootBox almost exclusively. Stock kernel. No tweaks. Flashed latest radios about 30 days ago.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try flashing a sense rom and update PRL and profile
Sent from my PoS MoPho
Mr.BungIe said:
Recently I have been experiencing, like many others, difficulty maintaining my 3g connection. It drops out at random times, sometimes staying off for 18 hours at a time regardless of reboots, flashing different roms, resetting my phones profile or reactivating my handset.
One thing I have noticed though, is the fact that my phone never goes to 1x. Ever. It's either 3g or nothing.
Do my questions. Is there a way to test the function of my 1x antenna if it is indeed separate from the 3g antenna?
If they are not separate, is there a way to reset it in some way?
I am currently running the latest radios from The good Capt. Throwback, my thought was to downgrade them and see if functionality returns.
Any ideas on how to proceed after that would be appreciated.
Mr. B.
ETA: running Jamie's latest PAC and have run PAC and RootBox almost exclusively. Stock kernel. No tweaks. Flashed latest radios about 30 days ago.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Jeezz...I had almost the exact same thing happen to me the other night...I had chalked it up to messing with a torrent app...but out of no where I lost my 3g connection, and it went to 1x...and the 1x would also cut out leaving me with nothing at all every 5 mins or so(the weird thing tho, is when the 1x connection would disappear I would lose the 3g symbol but in the network type it would list EvDo now...but I would not have any connection).
Naturally I was crappin my pants lol, I can't use the update profile feature on my phone, it's on Boost. So I went ahead and flashed the phone over again...Still the problem was there....So I did a factory data reset....still the problem was there....finally I went ahead and did the ##786# factory reset, flashed the phone again...Finally I was back on evdo like normal.
(BTW, my Evo LTE is now running 4.0.4 stock and there happened to be two of my friends here with their flashed to Boost Evo's, which were all running on EvDo with no issues...Plus I fired up my OG Evo 4g that is also on my Boost account and it was running on EvDo no problem whatsoever....so I knew this was some crazy issue with my Evo LTE)
I'm just glad the hard reset fixed it, I've been paranoid ever since though checking my network status, making sure I'm on EvDo lol.
Thanks for the responses. I've tried every reset I can find. Flashing the older radios didn't help either.
At this point, I'm just trying to figure out if the 1x radio is functioning. At least I wouldn't completely lose my data connection when the 3g drops out.
This happened to me when they were doing tower work in my area. Lasted a few days then I had 4g in areas I never did before.
Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2
I can only hope that's the case, Thick. It would be the best possible outcome.
By the way, thanks for the kernelly goodness.
It's the most likely cause, sprint has really been stepping up the rollout, in less than 2 months my lte coverage has practically tripled
could be eHRPD switching, I know deck got it all fixed up in the cm10 nightlies.....are you in a LTE area?
if not try setting mobile data to just CDMA and see if it sticks. I had that issue on the early cm10 builds where it would try and switch and just drop data completely.
om4 said:
It's the most likely cause, sprint has really been stepping up the rollout, in less than 2 months my lte coverage has practically tripled
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My area in Jersey is on the short list for LTE activation in the short term, so there's a really good chance of this being the case.
kellyrx8 said:
could be eHRPD switching, I know deck got it all fixed up in the cm10 nightlies.....are you in a LTE area?
if not try setting mobile data to just CDMA and see if it sticks. I had that issue on the early cm10 builds where it would try and switch and just drop data completely.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My confusion comes from not having 1x coverage where I used to have it. Is that coverage dropped once LTE is activated? That would explain my issue.
I have read up on the eHRPD handoffs being an issue, but since I don't have LTE coverage at the moment I ignored that as a cause. I'll check out the newest Deck build and see if that helps anything.
Thanks for the help.

AT&T M8 Bad Reception?

OK so I've had my m8 for a year or so now. Never been impressed one way or another as to bad reception or good reception. However, now twice in one week I saw side by side comparison to other AT&T phone s (iPhone 6 and galaxy s5) and the reception was worse.
Today while traveling in the car with my wife south of Cincinnati I noticed that my m8 had no service. So I checked my wife's iPhone6s. Two bars. This went on and off where I had no service for 90% of 15 miles or so. The iPhone maintained service the entire time!
I posted similar is in the M8 Android Development radio thread after making a trip last week with two iPhone and an s5 user s. My service, side by side, was much worse. It was suggested that I flash the latest developers firmware and radio which I did. 4.16.1540.8. Based on my drive today with my wife it didn't help.
Does the M8 radio just suck compared to the iPhone or does someone have done other suggestions for improving cell reception? And yes I know its different for different areas but I've tried several radios now and the result seems to be the same.
The bars don't mean jack. There is literally no standardization to what the bars symbolize. I've had 2 bars on AT&T plenty of times, and you can't get a call out, much less data. And my wife reports similar on her iPhone.
Whether your phone or hers can make or receive calls and texts, or get data; or what the dBm reading in Settings; those are the only real indicators of signal quality.
jcrompton said:
OK so I've had my m8 for a year or so now. Never been impressed one way or another as to bad reception or good reception. However, now twice in one week I saw side by side comparison to other AT&T phone s (iPhone 6 and galaxy s5) and the reception was worse.
Today while traveling in the car with my wife south of Cincinnati I noticed that my m8 had no service. So I checked my wife's iPhone6s. Two bars. This went on and off where I had no service for 90% of 15 miles or so. The iPhone maintained service the entire time!
I posted similar is in the M8 Android Development radio thread after making a trip last week with two iPhone and an s5 user s. My service, side by side, was much worse. It was suggested that I flash the latest developers firmware and radio which I did. 4.16.1540.8. Based on my drive today with my wife it didn't help.
Does the M8 radio just suck compared to the iPhone or does someone have done other suggestions for improving cell reception? And yes I know its different for different areas but I've tried several radios now and the result seems to be the same.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I used to have signal problems (when I used my Evita and with my M8) for quite awhile where I work. It wasn't until I flashed the Dev radio I recommended that I became the ONLY person to be able to use my phone in an area we all call cell phone hell. Even the Iphone and flip phones couldn't get a signal. I initially flashed the 4.4.4 Dev radio and that did the trick. Now that I have moved on to the current Dev radio, I still see better performance.
Here's the important part though, cell reception areas differ greatly. Any number of issues may cause this. I knew a guy who lived right between two cell towers and the jumping back and forth between the two was killing his battery even though he showed he always had signal. (we confirmed this by moving closer to each tower.) He constantly had dropped calls. So it's possible your baseband may not be the issue.
Anyway, if you have funds, they make cell repeaters you can buy and boost your signal in areas you frequently are for long periods of time. But other than flashing a few radios to experiment (S-Off!) That's the best I can tell you.

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