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Comment by whatusername | Hacker News Reader

No-one in Australia is having antenna issues. (We can get it to drop 1 bar maybe). Blame AT&T (Or the SF Hype chamber).

I work in NYC, notorious for crappy at&t coverage. 30 people in my office tried to replicate the problem and nobody could.

I'm in the US and can only get 1 bar to drop. Overall the i4 signal is much much better than the 3GS though. AT&T uses 2 different frequencies from what I understand so I'm wondering if one is more impacted than the other?

From my understanding, we really should be looking at the dB drop and not the number of bars lost, as a drop in 20dB or so may only show up as only a bar lost (if you started out at full bars). (or did they fix this in the software update?)

So maybe this is why nobody in Australia is experiencing the antenna problem, because the 20db drop is hidden by only being a single bar loss? That or they changed something in the manufacturing...

But I digress from the original discussion...

If I start with full bars it's hard to lose a bar at all because of the 20db drop and how the bars are calculated. When I start with less than full bars the most I can get to drop is a single bar.

I've never been able to replicate the youtube video even in areas with a weak signal. My guess all along has been that yes you can get a 20db drop in signal with touch, but that also some phones from the early batches had manufacturing defects. Combine the two (plus the software that showed more bars than you really had) and you can get the go from 5 full bars to no signal problem.

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