I got an Airave

Well I decided to give it a shot and picked one up today. It was a challenge to get one since my local Sprint store apparently hadn't been trained on them yet and I was the first one to come in for one. Eventually they figured out how to activate it and I came home and hooked it up.

After about 20 or 30 minutes it was all set up and ready to go. I did get a nice improvement in signal to the places in the house that I needed it most. As most of you know I have trouble receiving incoming calls due to the dreaded CDMA NID border.

Maybe my expectations were a little too high but I didn't get as good of a signal from it as I had hoped. There were a lot of reviews going around on various forums and most people really hyped this thing up. But so far my call quality has been excellent and I haven't missed any incoming calls as the Airave has it's own NID that doesn't fluctuate.

There is one minor problem involving text messages. For some reason my Rumor isn't mixing well with the Airave. If I attempt to send the same text to multiple recipients it produces an error message on the last recipient on the list. So for example if I send any message to let's say 3 people at the same time it sends fine to the first two but fails on the third. This happens every time. I believe I have narrowed it down to being an LG Rumor bug.

I will post more when I get a chance to use it more and perform more tests on it.

 

Hopefully Anthromatt will post a review on his later tonight. He just got one as well.

 

By the way user 'Gman' attempted to get an Airave today but was turned down because he's on a SERO plan. I still think he will find a way to get one but why discriminate against SERO users?

 

It could just be that the Airave thing in the Sprint stores is so new and not all employees are trained properly about them. Or maybe it's something that telesales can handle better?

 

A few more things to add.

My old and chronic problem of getting duplicate text messages has gone away! Woo Hoo!

Incoming calls all make it to me now whereas before I would miss about 25% of them. Not only that but they come in faster as well.

Even though the signal bars on my phone do degrade as I move away from the base my EC/IO is very consistent. The EC/IO is actually the more important number when measuring signal quality on CDMA phones and I am consistenly getting -02.5 to .-04.5 no matter where I am in the house. This is MUCH better than I used to get before.

Hopefully these good results will keep up over the next couple of days and I will post any more updates as I go along.

 

Ugh!

It took me about 20 minutes to convince my local store that I could add an Airave for only $4.99 /mo. They insisted I would have to pay the $10 or the $20. Eventually I convinced them that there was a $4.99 option and after some searching they found it. But if I had been an uneducated customer like 90% out there I'm sure they would have just stuck me with the $20 option even though I didn't need it. I was the first one to buy an Airave at my local store and none of the employees had even been trained on them yet at this particular location. I had to teach them about it. lol

 

Well another problem came up. The Airave has a hard time handing off to local towers once I leave my house and drive away. It fails to make this 'hard handoff' about 50% of the time it seems. But with multiple NID's and pilot pollution in this area I'm not surprised that this is happening.

 

Things I like about the Airave:

Sprint has made it possible for the Airave signal to dominate the intended area. I no longer have to worry about my phone bouncing around on multiple PN offsets and NID's. It stays locked on the special Airave assigned NID and PN and even if I move outside to where the signal from the regular network is actually stronger it will still favor the weaker Airave signal. This might not sound good but it is because if it were to start yielding to the regular network while I was walking around the house (upstairs and outside) I would be back to the same problem again. Whoever designed this thing obviously programmed it to remain dominant for as long as possible and only to yield when the Airave signal is completely gone. Plus I no longer have to disable Vision after every use. Pre-Airave I would have to disable Vision because of constant data activity on my phone due to the NID bouncing which caused decreased battery life.

Plus the EC/IO (signal noise) is amazingly good! Having an EC/IO of less than -05.0 at all times is something I could only dream about before. In many cases I am even as low as -02.5. With this excellent EC/IO you can hold a perfect call all the way up to -100 dBs or more.

Things I dislike:

The LG Rumor can't function properly for text messaging. If you try to send the same message to multiple recipients the last one on the list fails every time after wasting about 20 or 25 seconds trying. This apparently is only a bug with Rumor or maybe with other LG phones as well.

Handoffs to the regular network are actually 'hard handoffs' and are prone to drop and cut out for a second or two while transferring to the next cell site.

 

Wow first I have heard about that problem. I wonder if it is a phone specific issue?

 

I'm glad I haven't experience that problem. I wonder if these are just software bugs that are phone specific? My LG Rumor has a bug where it won't send multiple text messages to different recipients at the same time. It will send to everyone expect the last recipient on the selected list. Other phones don't have this particular problem.

 

I haven't really tested mine out a whole lot yet. Who knows maybe I'll find more issues after a few weeks but hopefully not.

 

After one week of using the Airave I must say that the device has worked very well and even better than I intially thought it would. I haven't had a single duplicate or triplicate text message come in at home since I got the Airave. That annoying problem used to occured at least 5-10 times a day. I have received every single incoming call in the past week whereas before I would miss about 25% of all incoming calls. Sometimes even more. The only problem is that the hard handoffs do not work all that great when driving away from the house. But I can avoid that problem by just waiting until I am out of Airave range before initiating a call when I am about to leave the house. A small problem in comparsion to what I used to put up with.

I think Sprint has really come up with something amazing here which will make a lot of customers happy.

 

Wow Matt 50-70% is awful! I guess I shouldn't complain about my 25 to 35%.