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      07-05-2011, 02:16 PM   #13
sfax
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Drives: BMW X3 2011 F25
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Berkshire, UK

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OK short experiment results for you.

My iPhone signal strength is 0 to 5 bars. In my current location I can move around and get it to vary from 1 bar to 3 bars (1 bar can be induced my holding the iPhone in its infamous death grip position!)

This is very approximate but:

-114dBm => 1 bar
-104dBm => 2 bars
-99dBm => 3 bars

So I found that I could get a fairly constant -93dBm to -96dBm (3 bars+) when in the cradle but outside the cradle in various positions inside the car in varied a lot from -93dBm (3/4 bars) down to -114dBm (1 bar).

Now, here is the interesting part. I closed the armrest for 30 seconds with the phone in the cradle and then opened it to see what the last reading was: it had dropped to 1 bar! I repeated this a few times, same result every time. No question. So the cradle only works when the armrest is open, so the cradle does absolutely nothing other than hold the phone in a constant position. This is only true of my cradle of course, which could be defective.

I would be interested to see what other people experience using this test - particularly the armrest experiment! I'm using an iPhone 4 and a basic iPhone 4 snap-in adapter.
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