Archive for March, 2009

I have had good service with Verizon. It has served me well for about 5 years now. However, I’m sure many of you have had dropped calls. Up until a little over a year ago, this was a rare enough occurrence that it was easily overlooked. But the fact is, a service can’t work everywhere. And that is an acceptable reality unless the location you can’t get service is in your own home.

My parents have had a “protective” blanket (more like a Faraday cage!!!) over their house for years now, but I chalked that one up to lack of service towers in the area (they live in the country). But when I moved to the big city there was no doubt in my mind that phone service would be fine. Well, apparently I hadn’t figured on moving into the black hole of cell phone coverage areas.

After putting up with it for, oh, a year or so, I have decided to start trying gadgets to solve my problem. You see, my phone actually works if I’m in certain locations within the apartment (preferably near the windows) where the apparently “lead-lined” walls aren’t AS effective. I have heard of gadgets to help this sort of thing and I was thinking more along the lines of some kind of signal booster or antenna. After looking into that, I decided the cost for an effective system wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

Enter the Extreme Tech XLINK BT….Basically it will connect to your cellphone using a Bluetooth connection and the Xlink to any regular home phone using a normal home phone line allowing cordless access to your whole house while your cellphone remains in the best “hot spot/zone” you can find. This device allows up to 3 cellphone pairings simultaneously, incoming/outgoing for each, all the other bells and whistles of your cellphone service. These systems have been around for a while, but it wasn’t until I was reading an article in CPU Magazine (great magazine btw) about Xlink the same day I had multiple dropped calls that I broke down. This was two days ago, so I, of course, haven’t received it yet but I will be sure to let you know how it works out. So far I am planning on combining it with the Panasonic KX-TG8231B. Hopefully (fingers crossed), this will solve my current home phone issues.