Help Wifi on Industrial Worksite, Incomming and Battery

[WanaGo]

Hello,

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to post.

I have recently purchased a Samsung Galaxy 550 android mobile, just prior to christmas. Today is my first day back at work and I have noticed some very interesting things.

On site we have a number of Wireless devices, cranes etc, which transmit quite a large amount of data to devices on the ground etc. I had wifi enabled on my phone and the battery was about 80%. I went out to production and noticed my chest was quite hot. Took my phone out and it was rather warm indeed. The battery was 32% after about half an hour of exposure to the production area. I have a widget for wifi/cell traffic and had a look and my wifi had 13mb on the incomming side, and only about 100kb on the outgoing side. All the wifi on site is hidden SSID so I cant see anything specific with my phone, however I know it is there. I only installed this app on my way to work, so its all stuff from the worksite, not from home.

The question is, is the data I am receiving purely broadcasts from these wifi devices and my phone has to process them and reject the data accordingly since I am not connected to those SSID's etc?

I cannot understand why my phone battery would go so flat so quickly and get so hot...

I have turned wifi off and now its nice and cool and I have it charging.

Its very strange. I have been using wifi at home no problem, for the past few days - downloading stuff from the market, transmitting files around etc. Its just when I came to work today that it experienced this.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I dont particularly want to have to turn wifi off when I come to work and turn it back on again when I go home, as I could forget and end up chewing through my cell data allowence by mistake. I only have a 50mb data plan, just so I can get the odd bit of data when im out and about and not near wifi, but not intended to download stuff using it.

Any suggestions or ideas as to what could be the problem I would be very interested to hear.

Android 2.1 Update 1.

Regards

 

[Demache]

Generally, a wireless device will ignore all traffic unless its actually connected to a access point. All it does when the wifi connection is sitting idle is just keep scanning for wireless networks. It might be trying to find information about the access points because it knows there is a wifi signal nearby, but it can't find the info about it.

It seems your only option is to disable wifi when your not using it I'm afraid. There are apps like APNDroid to prevent you from using mobile internet however so you shouldn't need to fret about that. And many HTC phones have the ability to disable mobile internet right in the wireless options (my Eris does anyway).

 

[WanaGo]

Thanks.

I have found a app called "Wireless Scheduler" which I have set to disable wireless in the morning when I leave for work, and enable it again when I am leaving work - this should prevent it being on at work at least, and will automatically put it back on again for when I am at home.

Still - I was just trying to get an understanding of what would make my battery drop so fast and the phone get so warm.
I was under the impression that data would not pass until you set up the Wifi connection and actually had it connected. It just seemed odd that I received the 13mb of data even when not connected to a wifi connection.

I have also downloaded "Juice Defender" to turn my data off, and only periodically turn it on to check stuff, or when my screen is unlocked etc - but that isnt really for my wifi stuff. It will help with battery life overall, but not really related to this issue.

Still not really clear what was going on though.

Thanks
J