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Help My Signal Strength Is Never Green (In A Great Area)

Dankees

Dankees

Android Enthusiast
So, not too long ago, my phone was ghost dialing the *22899 number and it updated my PRL. Anyway, ever since then, I have been having problems.

I have noticed that my phone never has a green signal strength. How can that be? I live on Long Island (like 45 minutes from New York City) and I work like 20 minutes closer to New York City, in areas with great reception (in fact, my office is in a county that has 4G) and I never have a green signal strength. My bars hover between 1 bar and 2 bars.

Is my SIM Card bad? Should I manually activate my phone?
 
you mean blue?

boot the phone without the sim card. then shut it down, replace the sim card and boot again and see if that helps.

its no secret this phone has less than stellar signal....really your only option to fix this is to wait for the OTA update or ROOT and ROM and flash the stuff now. I HAD signal issues for the first 3 days...but then i Rooted and flashed 4.0.4 radios and immediately had better signal.
 
I did that SIM thing over the weekend and my battery improved, just not my signal. Must I be in a good signal area for that maneuver?

And, I wanna jump to 4.0.4, but I am afraid to.
 
Dankees said:
I did that SIM thing over the weekend and my battery improved, just not my signal. Must I be in a good signal area for that maneuver?

And, I wanna jump to 4.0.4, but I am afraid to.
Click to expand...

Flashing Radios on this device has never been easier (least compared to my previous incredible)

Radios found here

if it seems to cause you more problems, flash back to stock, no harm done =]
 
My nexus is always like this man. My razr maxx on the other hand always green. Welcome to samsung radios. If I were you I would flash the newer radios and see if it helps. Let us know.
 
It is never green?

Does your WiFi icon.at the top immediately turn blue if you turn your screen off and right back on?

How easy is getting a new ROM? If I have an issue in the future, my warranty won't help me, right?
 
No matter what you do, you can always go back to stock and even re-lock your bootloader. It is almost (note I said almost) impossible to brick a phone these days. I unlocked mine day one and rooted within a few days of owning it.

Unless you do something crazy like overclock your processors to 2.0 ghz and burn the thing out, you aren't really at any risk of destroying the phone. No matter what any manufacturer tells you, just modifying your device in any way does NOT automatically invalidate the warranty. Same with your car. The manufacturer would have to show that the modification you made caused the damage in order to deny the warranty. Its like a car company telling you that if you don't use X brand oil it will void your warranty....but if your wheels fall off while you're driving they can't deny your warranty claim because you used Y brand oil in the engine.

As for your signal never being green.....that is normal. I live outside Philly in a 4G fringe area. I NEVER see green except for when I drive into center city philadelphia. I think your signal strength has to be like -65dbm to get "green" mobile signal in the battery graph. I bet if you ran in CDMA (3G) only mode you'd see green more often but I am not interested in seeing green because it doesn't matter what color the bar is if my phone works.

I am running the 4.0.4 radios. I've never dropped a call or been unable to make a call.

Consider it this way.... Green = awesome signal, bright yellow = good signal, dull yellow = decent signal, grey = 'eh' signal, red = no signal.
 
I was wondering WTF you were talking about with the signal being green....i thought you were talking about the actual signal bars which are either gray, or BLUE.

either way,
backup your "SD card" content to your computer
unlock bootloader
root
flash a 4.0.4 ROM and the radios
Enjoy
if you cannot Enjoy, return back to stock, no sweat of your back
 
Tim, I only run in CDMA and I only got green yesterday while in my car, for a short period of time. It's weird.

Anyway, so is Verizon gonna just release this 4.0.4 thing soon so that I don't have to go through the trouble/risk of updating my phone?

I don't wanna make this effort and change and then really screw myself over. I guess you can understand that.

And, with the issues I have been having, I am extra-reluctant to do so. I think you can appreciate that, right?
 
No one knows the answer but Verizon. I had hoped for it to be out by today as its been 2 weeks since Google pushed out the update for the GSM version. But, with Verizon, everything seems to take forever because of their claims of 'extensive testing'.

I've been running the originally leaked 4.0.4 radios for more than a month. I didn't really see much difference, but then again I wasn't really having any problems. with 4.0.2. Who knows if the next release will have those same radios or newer....
 
Tim K said:
Consider it this way.... Green = awesome signal, bright yellow = good signal, dull yellow = decent signal, grey = 'eh' signal, red = no signal.
Click to expand...

Holy crikees i've been waiting for someone to give their best interpretation of the signal colors. Your interpretation is similar to mine.
 
Tim K said:
No one knows the answer but Verizon. I had hoped for it to be out by today as its been 2 weeks since Google pushed out the update for the GSM version. But, with Verizon, everything seems to take forever because of their claims of 'extensive testing'.

I've been running the originally leaked 4.0.4 radios for more than a month. I didn't really see much difference, but then again I wasn't really having any problems. with 4.0.2. Who knows if the next release will have those same radios or newer....
Click to expand...

i noticed a huge difference with the leaked 4.0.4 radios. mostly in the 3g to 4g handoffs...but also got slightly better signal.

and the OTA update will most likely have even newer radios. there was another thread about signal and some guy had some newer radios on his device which were in internal testing for verizon. so most likely those would be included in the OTA.
 
Turdbogls said:
i noticed a huge difference with the leaked 4.0.4 radios. mostly in the 3g to 4g handoffs...but also got slightly better signal.

and the OTA update will most likely have even newer radios. there was another thread about signal and some guy had some newer radios on his device which were in internal testing for verizon. so most likely those would be included in the OTA.
Click to expand...

I hope so.... then my phone will go from fine to even better!
 
I went outside, in the street, to get my trashcans. For a moment, in CDMA (3G only) mode, my phone got -75dbm signal. My battery chart showed a single green line in a sea of grey-ish yellow....which seems to correlate to about a -83 to -93dbm rate. My 4G signal is in the -93 to -103 dbm range and gives me a mostly greyish signal bar.

So, I'm guessing if you don't see better than -75dbm signals you won't see green. And since 4G signals tend to be weaker, don't expect to see green 4G signal unless you are in a very strong 4G coverage area.
 
I sometimes see solid green signal on 3G in battery stats when I go out to nearby shopping mall or downtown where verizon signal is stronger than my home. Signal bar showed blue full or three bars when I got green, but I didn't check dBm level in my Nexus. I guess it was in -75~-83dbm range.
 
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