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Help signal bars

I would have though that the Sprint Hero and GSM Hero have the same signal bar indicator, as they use the same ROM (Only slightly modified to work on their network.) Stock Android also has 4 indicator bars.

The only way to change it would be to ROOT your phone and install a custom signal indicator. Although I'm not sure if anybody has made one with 8 indicator bars, I haven't seen one around anyway.

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Just found this forum thread: http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=25037

May be of some use to you. (Note that they are referring to a Sprint Hero, not the GSM Hero.)
So if you can find the similar Registry Key on your GSM Hero (Would require rooting regardless) then you may be able to edit it and enable more Indicator Bars.
 
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If you look at that link you'll see they're talking about the HTC Vogue, a Windows Mobile phone.

I believe the only way to do it is to do what Fozzy originally suggested.

Yeah, just put the link in there incase there was an alternative for Android devices. I think the easiest way would be Root + Theme.

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You could always send Sprint an email, see if you can get onto their technical department and ask how they do it. Its a long shot but could be worth a go.
 
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More bars or not, it really does not matter. Here's an excerpt from a site, as I don't want to post the link in case any rules will be broken:

To understand part of what's going on, it's necessary to realize what the signal bar indicator on a cell phone does (and doesn't) mean.

Wireless engineers don't think in terms of bars, they think in terms of signal to noise ratio, which is often called SNR. When you're not using the phone, a few times a second it checks it can still hear the control channels that the cell tower uses to send messages to the phones -- messages like "here's an incoming call, wake up and deal with it". Of course, in today's crowded airwaves, your signal is my noise, and vice versa; usually what happens when the signal suddenly drops away is that something has started up nearby and is interfering with your reception. This is like when a car with faulty shielding drives past and you lose your AM radio to the blaring sound of the car's coil discharging.

So, the phone has this number in its head which represents the SNR and that number is constantly fluctuating up and down as the airwaves around you teem with random signals, reflections, and other interference. This isn't a particularly nice thing to show end users, so the phone does two things. Firstly, it takes that ever-changing number and does a moving average on it to smooth out those rapid spikes. Then, it applies some sort of magic formula to approximate that complicated number into a 1-to-5 scale, which it then puts on the screen as bars.
The magic formula is basically made up by the design engineers as they see fit, and it can vary from phone to phone and even between software releases on the same phone. If someone is kicking it old school and getting five bars at your house with their Motorola RAZR and you're getting three on your Nokia 8210, that doesn't mean their phone is better than yours. It might just mean that Motorola's designers made their bars work differently, or it might not.

The tl;dr version of this is: the signal strength bars are almost meaningless and should not be relied on.
Incidentally, this also explains what's going on when you have a strong signal, attempt to make a call, and can't connect. The bars only indicate how well your phone can listen to the cell tower. They don't tell you anything about how well the tower can receive your phone, but that's a pretty important part of making a call. Similarly, the phone doesn't know anything about what's going on in the cell provider's network past the tower; if you're on a really busy cell it might not have any spare outgoing circuits to direct your call to, so even if the radio is working fine, you might still not be able to get through. If you're on AT&T it's probably all of the above at the same time of course.
 
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