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Help Antenna (includes GPS), reception discussion

Originally I posted that it supports upto 42 but after having a look around I'm not so sure.. I know it's fast as hell but all that it shows in my settings is I'm connected to HSPAP. The phone does support LTE and I assumed that would be 42

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Those are the specs for the Sprint version. No HSPA in that one. The AT&T version has HSPA+ and LTE Bands 4 and 17. Here is the list of bands per model from HTC's UK site

HSPA/WCDMA:
Europe/Asia: 850/900/1900/2100 MHz
GSM/GPRS/EDGE:
850/900/1800/1900 MHz
LTE:
EU: 800/1800/2600 MHz
US (AT&T): 700/850/AWS/1900 MHz
US (TMO): 1700/AWS MHz
US (Sprint): 1900 MHz
Asia: 1800/2600 Mhz
 
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I have been looking at the review videos and there are a few AT&T ones out there that make me wonder.
Obviously the reviewers are indoors and several that have been reviewing with a sim in the phone seemed to have a low signal going by the bars on the phone in LTE mode.

What I was trying to observe is:
- Position of the phone in the reviews hand
- If the phone changed positions in the hand, like portrait to landscape, upside down and so forth had any effect on the signal level.

Basically... looking for "antennagate" symptoms on the One.
I did not see any and the signal levels may all seemed low on LTE but were useable.
The few that were using the overseas model in the states on HSPA seemed to have higher signal levels which I found interesting.

This of course was not a scientific study by any means, just casual observation.
 
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Remember that there is no common standard for the number of bars at a given signal level. So in general you can't compare bars between different phones, not always between different firmware on the same phone. Whether it can maintain a connection or a call is the real test.

I've not noticed much said about LTE reception in reviews, but in the anandtech review Brian said he was unable to produce a "death grip" effect with cellular reception.
 
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I have been looking at the review videos and there are a few AT&T ones out there that make me wonder.
Obviously the reviewers are indoors and several that have been reviewing with a SIM in the phone seemed to have a low signal going by the bars on the phone in LTE mode.

What I was trying to observe is:
- Position of the phone in the reviews hand
- If the phone changed positions in the hand, like portrait to landscape, upside down and so forth had any effect on the signal level.

Basically... looking for "antennagate" symptoms on the One.
I did not see any and the signal levels may all seemed low on LTE but were useable.
The few that were using the overseas model in the states on HSPA seemed to have higher signal levels which I found interesting.

This of course was not a scientific study by any means, just casual observation.

Remember that there is no common standard for the number of bars at a given signal level. So in general you can't compare bars between different phones, not always between different firmware on the same phone. Whether it can maintain a connection or a call is the real test.

I've not noticed much said about LTE reception in reviews, but in the Anandtech review Brian said he was unable to produce a "death grip" effect with cellular reception.

Like Hadron is saying, there is no universal rule or standard and the actual connection(s) quality in relation to "signal bars". It is going to vary for every device, software build, and carrier vs. carrier. It is hard to try to make any sort of guess until the device is in hand and on your own carrier.

In Sprint's case (my carrier; U.S.), for most of their LTE devices, the "signal bars" have absolutely ZERO bearing on the strength/quality of the LTE connection.
S4GRU.com | Bars Lie for LTE Signal Strength! How to determine your actual LTE signal strength - Sprint 4G Rollout Updates

Case in point, while rare, I had a situation just the other day where I had no bars but was maintaining my LTE connection and browsing the internet with little issue.
 
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I used to work on these systems fellas I get that.
I can't exactly ask the reviewers to whack it into radio diagnostics or download an app so I can see the RSSI and RSRP of the device so the bars had to suffice.

I am really surprised that there is so little on this floating around at the moment especially with HTC using a new (to them afaik) antenna design.
 
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There remains a lot of mystery over the intellectual property cross licensing agreement that Apple and HTC entered into last year.

Or, it could simply be this -

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6683/...r-actively-tuned-versitune-smartphone-antenna

I posed the question about proper reception metrics to the gang at S4GRU.com last year, answer: without a proper setup, there was no telling.

I agree though, some sort of sensitivity curves would be nice.
 
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I can only conclude that it works because a lot of the reviewers that I watched mentioned that they used the device as their daily driver for a week or 10 days or some other length of time at least a week in length.

If they noticed any signal issues it may have been mentioned and none mentioned any issues with it or battery life for that matter so clearly the antenna design "works".

As mentioned above regarding wrapping hands at both ends I can actually see where that is a legitimate use for people that play games and require both hands to move their character around and so forth.

In that case... they are holding onto both antennas or partially covering them so I can see an issue there.

Any of our EU (or US) buddies with this device mind whacking network signal info or signalcheck on there and grabbing it in various places to see if there are trouble spots?

Might satisfy some curiosity I and others surely have about it.
It's supposed to be available the 19th but I am hoping that AT&T ships them out before then so I can play around with it :D
 
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The antenna's are both sealed with that plastic covering, shouldn't that prevent any issues because you don't actually have contact with the antenna or any metal touching the antenna?

The iPhone had a shorting issue. That's where the deathgrip term started.

In retaliation, Jobs demonstrated that even with plastic covered phones with internal antennas, you could get your hand enough around the device to basically sort of block the signal (hands being full of iron-water (blood) make that possible).

And some all plastic-outside, antenna-inside jobs did show degradation, not to the extent that Jobs claimed, and since then, we always take a good look at new antennas under the Death-Grip
 
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At our corporate shops here, they'll run a test they call "an RF box text" - I had a new HTC once with flaky performance compared to my older one. Had the test done, it failed, they replaced it right smartly for me, end of issues.

When you say that your "corporate shops" do you mean the carrier corporate shops or in your case the Sprint corp store?

If so that is surprising to me... RF test boxes can be expensive depending on
the tests they are configured to perform.
I have never seen them outside of a lab or trade show.
 
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When you say that your "corporate shops" do you mean the carrier corporate shops or in your case the Sprint corp store?

If so that is surprising to me... RF test boxes can be expensive depending on
the tests they are configured to perform.
I have never seen them outside of a lab or trade show.

Yep, corporate Sprint store/service. I called Sprint day after I got the phone, that's what they told me. I asked if they were kidding, the rep said absolutely not. I recall the diagnostic printout slightly, that was 2011, but it showed results for all my radios as I recall.

I'd assume that they must have something specialized to lower cost of the test gear.

The stuff in my lab is very expensive, so I understand your point.

By the way, their organization understands the term "RF box test," so I associated that with some standard test setup rather than box as in instrument.
 
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Okay.. some initial observations about the antennas...
This is all observation and in no way scientific.

I have been using a One S and a Nexus 4 in the same spot (here at my desk) for a good long time so I know what the performance of those devices is on HSPA.

The HTC One seems to perform better than the Nexus 4 and One S.

No death grip the signal levels reported in phone info on HSPA are -99dBm.
Not so hot... but it works.
This area of my house is also a bad spot.
If I death grip the phone by holding the top and bottom it will drop to -111dBm
I made a phone call and I really had to work at it to get it to drop the call, even when I got it to -113 it held on for dear life.
The phone like my Nexus 4 appears to REFUSE to hand off from HSPA->EDGE for some reason, it will go into no service before acquiring EDGE.
This is probably network related...

LTE....
Sitting at -103 RSRP on the desk and a death grip drops to -116
When it's at -103 in this location a speedtest gives me 18 down 6 up
If I death grip it the speed test will drop to 3 down 437kbps up which is still very useable.

I do not have another AT&T LTE device to compare with but on HSPA the One antenna performance is absolutely no problem at all.

Holding in both hands as if to play a game in HSPA and LTE there is signal degradation but it's not severe enough at my desk which is already pretty low to cause a drop out sufficient enough to cause problems.

I would say that HTC has got it figured out....
I will observe it over the next few days and see if there are any issues but so far it's been great.
 
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