If normal sim gets coverage, will promotional sim also work?

Slingshot

Slingshot

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I'm staying in an area with borderline coverage by Cell C. The techie came to test coverage at my place and could only pick up gprs/edge. He said I'm out of luck on coverage for now.
Out of stubbornness I bought a Cell C "voice" sim for R10 and found a usable 3G signal at a certain spot in my flat. Does this mean that I will get the same signal on a promotional sim with the HSPA+ network?
I'm currently using Vodacom 3G with about the same signal strength as Cell C, so I won't lose out much on signal if I switch to Cell C.
 
Yes, there's no difference between a promotional sim and a normal voice sim. There are also options to boost your reception like a corner reflector or a high gain antenna like this or this.

It is also possible to use software like MDMA to force your modem to use 3G, which could be useful when 3G is borderline.

The corner reflector coupled with a 5m Active USB extension cable did the trick for me.
 
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I bought the antenna and router bundle from Uniterm http://www.dbg.co.za/list/newsletters/newsletter_v4_i3.html but it doesn't seem to make any difference at all. The antenna is pointing in the direction of the tower, and I tried the coupler in different orientations on the 3G modem, but buggerall difference. Frustrating! Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if there's just no chance of boosting my gain. (Between -103 and -95). I do use MDMA to check for signal strength.
I also built the corner reflector, and it did make a small difference but not enough to get excited about.
 
I'm sorry to hear this. The corner reflector gave me a signal boost of between 8 and 15dBm. I went from -97dBm to -85dBm and sometimes even -81dBm. I would suggest slowly rotating both the antenna and corner reflector 360° - maybe connecting to a different tower does the trick. Hopefully someone with more experience with antennas can give you some tips.
 
I sounds to me like the antenna works great, but the coupler doesn't. Is there any other way to connect the modem to the antenna? I wish these CellC modems had external antenna connectors!
 
Viva said:
I'm sorry to hear this. The corner reflector gave me a signal boost of between 8 and 15dBm. I went from -97dBm to -85dBm and sometimes even -81dBm. I would suggest slowly rotating both the antenna and corner reflector 360° - maybe connecting to a different tower does the trick.
Click to expand...

What he said.
You need to find the tower by rotating the reflector (or any other antenna with high gain) slowly, say 10 degrees at a time and waiting 30 seconds for the modem to potentially switch to the better tower. The corner reflector will not work if you don't use one single piece of foil as discontinuities in its surface will mess up its reflective properties. But all the details are in the thread linked to earlier.

EDIT: Just need to add that if you're stuck on a crappy tower then finding the right tower won't work.
 
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I tried rotating the deflector and dongle a bit at a time, changed the spacing between the two, the angle to each other, distance from the corner of the room, everything I could think of. The foil is one piece. I've got the gps coordinates of the towers in the area and used a compass to get the bearing right. The closest tower is about 2.5km away and there's at least one block of flats and a hill in the way.
 
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