Manual Roam - The Most Useful Cell Phone Feature They Don’t Teach You

February 19th, 2008 by admin

Cell phones have a nasty habit of losing reception at the most annoying of times. You’ll have all the bars showing perfect reception all day until the one time you want to make a call and then suddenly… nothing.

There are two main reasons for this to occur.

The first is that your phone’s software is playing up - a common occurence these days with our highly advanced handsets. It might be that the software was faulty to begin with, or that slowly over time the software has got corrupted and it can happen at any point in time so don’t think just because you’ve had your cell phone for some time that it’s not a software issue.

If it is the case that the software needs fixing you will need to get it upgraded either by a professional (try taking it back to where you bought it - many suppliers offer this service or know someone who does) or do it yourself online.

Be aware when it comes to upgrading cell phone software that you have backed up your important files - pictures, videos, contacts etc as upgrading to the latest release of software will wipe all these files from your handset.

The other, more likely option is that you need to carry out a manual roam on your handset. It’s such a useful feature to help improve the reception on your cell phone yet unless you’re in the industry you’ll likely never have heard of it.

Here’s how the average cell phone works by my understanding:

All over the country are hundreds of base stations - big aerials that receive and transmit cell phone calls.

You make a call on your phone, the call is routed via the nearest base station and sent along the wires to the destination.

Cell phones are designed to “jump” between these base stations so they’re always in contact with the closest one to you. If you go on a long drive your phone will be constantly searching for new aerials and swapping to the best one for you. It means generally a stronger signal and less battery needed to communicate.

But it’s in this “jump” - when your handset stops communicating with one transmitter and starts with another that can cause a problem.

Sometimes your phone will show a great signal because it is looking at the aerial closest to you, but it’s actually trying to communicate with a different one - sometimes one that you passed hours or even days ago.

That’s why sometimes somebody says they tried calling your cell but they couldn’t get through even though you know your phone was on at the time - the system was routing the call through the wrong transmitter.

The way to fix this problem is either by switching off the handset (a little slow and repetetive) or with a manual roam. This will cause your phone to literally search manually for any signals it can, and then latch onto the strongest one going.

The process differs from phone to phone (if in doubt, ask whoever sold you your cell) but here’s a general process:

In the menu, looks for a “settings” submenu and locate a “network settings” or “network options” area.

Within this area you should find a “Network Selection” option or similar that will allow you to switch between “manual” and “automatic”.

Select “manual” and the handset will take a moment to search for any available signals - often finding quite a few.

Select any network *apart* from the one you’re actually on (at which point the phone will often complain or show an error) and then select your actual network.

This takes your phone offline and then back onto your home network and should, in 90% of cases, sort out most signal problems such as poor reception, dropped calls, texts not coming through and so on.

Once you’re comfortable doing it you can carry out a manual roam in seconds if you need to.

Note, however, that if you *keep* needing to do manual roams for signal problems (which is what you should always start with) - then it is more likely to be a software fault and an upgrade should be sought.

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