It's one of the great mysteries of life:  You're standing in one place, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic in your car, on the phone, carrying on a conversation when all of a sudden - Poof! - your call is dropped and you're talking to a dead microphone for a minute or so before you know it.  How does this happen?  You can understand it when you're driving at 80 MPH and your call might be dropped as you move from one cell to another, but standing still? 

And what about all of those places that appear to be within the coverage "bubble" on the carrier's map but you know you don't get coverage there.  Why not?  And why do they put your location within that bubble when you know darn good and well that there's no coverage there at all? 

Cellular coverage - or the lack thereof - is still the number one complaint amongst users (besides the ever-present billing questions which I will not attempt to explain - ever - because cellular company pricing is the only pricing mechanism I'm aware of that's more complex than the airline's... and that's saying something).  Dropped calls have even become a source of advertising for Cingular/AT&T, promoting "Fewest dropped calls!"  What does it say about an industry when the ads that are placed to attract customers are fundamentally saying, "Hey, our service sucks less than the other guys!" 

Cellular coverage isn't an exact science - while there are incredibly complex propagation models that predict where coverage from a site will be transmitted (sometimes with surprising accuracy) cellular companys' maps don't reflect real-world experience.  They are, by definition, predictions.  Knowing where all the things that can impact coverage exist, and there are many, can be a daunting task.  That said, I'm not trying to defend the cellular companies here - quite the contrary in fact... I believe that cellular companies would be a lot better off spending less of their resources on fancy features and more on the basics like being able to make and receive a call without having to try three times or getting dropped twice during a five-minute call.  That's what most people care about anyway.

So let's look at what actually causes the dropped calls and then analyze the situation for possible approaches to fix it.

1. The first and most obvious thing that causes calls to be dropped is poor coverage due to a lack of cell sites (towers) in the area where you're trying to use your phone.  This is the most basic issue and isn't easily resolved.  Contrary to popular belief the cellular carriers DO want to put more towers around town; most of the time they are thwarted by the zoning boards, lack of available properties or the unwarranted fears of radiation. 
   
2. Old phones, weak batteries and broken antennas.  You'd be amazed at how many of the coverage difficulties come from simple mechanical problems.  Older phones don't offer the same radio sensitivity as newer products do.  Phones with weak batteries sometimes don't have the power to reach a primary or secondary serving cell (more about that below) and just can't "shout" loud enough to keep the call going.  Some of the older phones with either retractable or stubby antennas contribute to the problem; you'll frequently see people playing with them, holding their phones by the antennas, screwing/unscrewing them as a pastime the same way you would tap a pencil on a table and much more. 
   
3. Overcrowding of users.  This is directly related to number 1., above, but it's important to understand the difference.  When you're on the freeway in a traffic jam and everyone around you is using their phone the cell that you're all being served by gets overpopulated with users, i.e., there simply aren't enough radio channels in the cell's equipment to devote to all of the calls.  When the cell recognizes that it attempts to hand off the call to the next most likely serving cell - sometimes unsuccessfully - to offload some of the users.   Sometimes your call can get dropped when you are standing perfectly still and this is frequently the cause.
4. Terrain or other physical obstructions.  While the carriers try to get coverage wherever they show it on their maps there are always going to be places that can't get it because the signal emitted by the tower is blocked, or somehow interfered with, by a physical object.  Sometimes it's a building, or a hill, or a moving truck that gets in the way - and sometimes it's completely innocuous like tinted windows.  Yes, the tinting that is added to windows - not the kind that comes as original equipment in a car or already "baked in" to the windows in a home or office - contains microscopic metallic particles that reflect the sunlight back into the atmosphere and, thus, keep it out of your car or house.  These metallic particles can serve as a reflector of radio signals, too, and will often interfere with a cell phone's signal. 
   

How to solve the problems:

1. Work with your community to allow more cell sites than you currently have.  You'll be astonished at how many times a carrier proposes a new site in an area that residents reject on the grounds of either aesthetics or health concerns.  The health concerns are a bugaboo and baseless.  There's no proof anywhere that having a cell site near your home - or even in your back yard - provides more than a tiny bit of radiated energy... certainly less than you would get from electrical wires and probably a whole lot less than you get from pointing a hair blower at your head for 10-15 minutes.  The aesthetics issues can be resolved, too, with the advent of "stealth" cell sites that are made to look like indiginous trees, built into church steeples, camoflauge-painted towers and many more ways of keeping them unobtrusive.  In short, get more towers.  The irony is that those who often complain the loudest about the potential site spoiling their view or emitting some electrical energy are the same people who scream that they can't get coverage in their house. 
   
2. Petition local governments to advocate - or legislate - co-location.  In many parts of Europe carriers are forced to allow all other carriers to have access to their towers, thus putting them all on an even footing coverage-wise, but also significantly reducing the number of towers that blight the landscape.  This is a smart idea all the way around as it reduces the investment that carriers make to create a redundant, overlay coverage when that same money could be put towards providing better customer service and cheaper prices.  I'm not a big fan of legislation but in a case like this a little nudge in the right direction by local municipalities "encouraging" carriers to co-locate might be a prudent approach.  
   
3. If there's no cellular coverage in your home and it's important to you, do something totally radical - call the company.  Recently a close friend of mine moved from one house to another just down the street.  Coverage in his old house was just fine (on Sprint, although my Cingular/AT&T service was awful) but non-existent in his new home.  He lives on his cell phone - I wonder why he's even got a landline in the house but he does - and was pretty much dead in the water.  He called Sprint and actually got to speak with someone who, incredibly, sent an engineer to his house to take some quick measurements and then made some adjustments in their local antenna site.  Voila! Instant coverage.  Now, keep in mind that this is a pretty dense urban area and not some remote house out on the prairie.  Adjusting coverage for him wasn't something that he expected but it happened and now he (and his family, who all have Sprint phones) will be customers for life. 
   
4. Look into some of the new equipment that boosts, or repeats, the cell signal in your house.  There are lots of them and, while I haven't tried any of them and thus won't offer any criticism, I can tell you which ones to avoid.  Stay away from anything that says "passive repeater" as these claim to simply receive the cell signal in the area and boost the range of it without any electrical equipment invovled.  You know, like those silly patches that people used to stick under their batteries or a passive antenna that just stuck to your car window claiming to make your coverage better.  The level to which they work - if at all - certainly isn't worth the cost and hassle of buying them.  There are some good pieces of equipment, though, that have gotten excellent ratings from others and I may review them in the future.  But for now, a Google search yields the results found HERE.
5. Complain to your carrier that your phone doesn't work properly.  Many major carriers provide an easy way to exchange phones if there's something wrong with it that you didn't cause and that's covered by a warranty.  Cingular/AT&T for example, lets you set up the entire thing on their web site and get an exchange for your phone.  If you truly are getting lots of dropped calls, static-ridden connections or other audio problems, try a different phone.  Before you do, though, make sure that you back up the contents of your phone, maybe using the method I've described HERE.  (I'll be posting some other thoughts about backing up your cell phone in the future using hardware devices but the one described in the post noted above is a quick-and-dirty way to get your contacts offloaded so that you can re-load them to your phone yourself.)  If you can take the phone to a company-owned store from a major carrier they may very well be able to move all of the contacts from your old phone to your new one. 
   

There are other actions you can take, of course, like doing all the simple stuff (keeping your phone charged, making sure your antenna connection is tight, etc.) but these five will probably help resolve your problem if it is, in fact, resolvable.  Some coverage problems are never going to be fixed.  If you live out in the middle of East Awfulgosh and are the only user the cellular company has within 10 miles you're not likely to get a lot of response - or respect - from them.

Finally - don't be afraid to make some noise... tell the carriers that you're going to contact the survey companies like JD Powers to inform them of your feelings, that you'll be sending letters to the local Better Business Bureau and the consumer crusader-reporter on the local TV news.  Carriers don't like bad press coverage and are likely to make some concessions to you in order to keep the negative buzz about them to a minimum. 

You may not be an engineer - but you can still do some things to improve your cellular coverage.