It appears that in some cases, asking questions can be more effective than engineering.

Due to the construction of my building and the placement of T-Mobile transmitter towers in my area, I was unable to get a signal in the back of the house (where my bedroom is).

My now world-famous antenna, coupled with sometimes leaving the phone in the living room, together pass as somewhat workable (but inconvenient) solutions. Aiming the antenna is a big challenge (especially without a cell tracker application available for the E61), and tethering the phone to the living room window or to the antenna rather removes the ‘mobile’ part of the concept.

As part of my holy quest for increased coverage, I used the Government’s Sitefinder mobile antenna mapping service to locate the antenna giving me issues. I submitted a trouble ticket as a matter of course about the poor reception, thinking that it’d end up in the gunnels of some ASP mailing script on an arcane civil service network.

To my surprise, today I received a very nice email in response to the ticket from Richard at T-Mobile, who is arranging a drive-by test of the signal in my area. He also let me know that they’re building a dual-mode GSM/UMTS transmitter 200m from my house, though he couldn’t give an activation date for it. Not only that, but he let me know that T will be increasing the signal strength on the 2 existing transmitters ‘as we increase our customer base’ - probably quite a gradual thing but it should help as well.

And after all the effort building the damned aerial and the attention I’ve received for doing so, the phone itself is going back to the seller - it has the wrong keyboard language, and I’ve been negotiating for a swap or refund…