cell phones.

I have T-Mobile. What cell phone or service is best for hunters. I know some phones work better than others. Trying to find good phone for reception in the woods

I guess it depends on your area but At&t works best around here.

As much as it pains me to say it, because I hate them, but AT&T has the best coverage. Been using it for 35+ years, all over the USA, and it works best. Can't tell you how many times I've loaned my phone to a guy standing beside me with a phone getting no signal on another carrier.

Cast is probably right about this. I have Sprint and hunt in Mills County, and it's okay but I'm betting AT&T has better coverage. Might also take a look at Verizon.

ATT

Verizon has the best Customer Service by a long shot, but AT&T has better coverage.

Cell reception all depends on your location, period. What is good for one may or may not be for the other. If your carrier doesn't have a tower nearby then your service will suck. I originally had Verizon when cell phones came out. Their horrible customer service (back then) made me switch to what was then Cingulair, now ATT. It didn't matter about coverage then cause I was in the metroplex and rarely traveled out of town. Fast forward 10-15 yrs and it totally matters. I live and hunt in West Texas and my lease has some descent elevation changes/plateaus. ATT has ZERO service where I hunt and within the confines of my home, in town mind you, I get dropped calls, missed calls and at best have 1-2 bars. If I go 1 mile away form my home I have full bars. At my lease its a 30 min drive to the main road before I get service and even then it's spotty. My buddy has Sprint and gets reception all day long. Other buddy has verizon, and has service all day long. If I drive from Roswell NM to Albuquerque, on HWY 285, there is an hour stretch where I get no service and my friend who has Verizon and Sprint do. It all depends on where you live or are currently at and which provider has a tower or not in your area. There are several phone apps (root metrics is one that come to mind but there are others) that you can download which will give you a reasonable diagnostics of which providers have towers in your location and what the strength of signal is. This may help you.

Very good info here ^^^

Yes Sir...That Pipeline coming thru our place helped out big time

Hearing stories like this makes me wonder if Verizon is deliberately adding cells where AT&T has none. Yet they don't always cover where AT&T does. Is that a good bidness model?

At my lease in Throck, AT&T is it. Works plenty good enuff to run my covert cams.

If it weren't for my unlimited everything plan from 10-15 yrs ago that I wisely purchased when I signed up I would dump ATT in a heart beat. However, you can't beat the plan I am on and because of that I'll likely never switch. This being said, I can hike all day long in the Wilderness outside of Telluride,CO at 8-12,000 feet and have 4-5 bars the entire time. It's all about carrier and carrier tower locations. Best thing is ask the other guys on your lease who their carrier is and what kind of reception they get at the lease.

From what I have been told by my friend who is a regional manager for one of the major carriers, as these carriers are increasing their wifi speeds it actually shrinks their coverage area because of the bandwidth it requires to do so (I could be talking out of my backside about the specifics here so don't quote me). The long story short is however that the coverage map is actually shrinking as speeds increase at least until they can get more towers built. Its all above my pay grade, but it makes since....I guess.

You are correct. In digital radio, the faster you go (baud rate), the smaller your coverage area per cell. I saw this exact same thing in building digital paging systems. Don't know squat about cellular tech, just an educated guess.

Used to have T-Mobile and did not have service at our deer lease. Got Verizon now, not the cheapest service you can get but I have service in areas nobody with me else has.

Verizon is the only carrier that gets reception in my area.

In Unit 30 in New Mexico, I have no reception at camp and I'm on ATT. When I get to the water point, if I stand on the cow pie under the pine tree at the Ranger station, then I get 3 to 4 bars until the wind gets out of the south and the call is dropped. My buddy, who has Verizon, can text and talk just about anywhere in Unit 30. This year, I plan on buying a Verizon trac phone to use in camp.

Sprint was great at home, but sucked at the lease. I asked different leasers and the neighbors what was working best before I switched to AT&T.
Oddly Sprint showed that I should have coverage at the lease and I never got a single bar. I learned not to trust them silly maps that they put out.

I've been on AT&T for years and have found only a few dead spots for the places I go. Out in the middle of nowhere SW of Ozona I even have pretty good service on top, but little to none down in the bottom of the canyons but I can still send/receive text and email, but no phone. Dead spot between Junction and Mason and a couple dead spots between Guthrie & Childress. The type of phone also makes a difference on reception. My old blackberry Torch (business) had full phone service when my iPhone 5s (personal) was blank and upgraded the BB to a Samsung s5 and it doesn't seem to have near as good as the old BB but beats the heck out of the iPhone most of the time out in the boonies.

Verizon gives us better coverage going west.

For me Verizon is terrible on my lease but by far the best where I live. Where I hunt in NM for deer and elk, it doesn't matter who you have. You won't be making any calls. It was a 30 minute drive down the mountain one way to get bad reception.

I got tired of doing that to call my wife to let her know I was alive so I picked up a SPOT device that uses the Iridium satellites. Works great but only sends a canned text message and alerts authorities if you send a distress signal. Wish I had picked up the Delorme product though, it does more.

You should look into the Iridium Go. It's a satellite mobile hotspot that enables your cell phone to work like a satellite phone. It's pricey, but does away with lack of coverage from cell towers.

Spot on with your dead spots Amigo..Ozona can be BAD

Overall I think AT&T is best. I hate having the phone on the lease but it's nice to know you can reach out in emergency.

T Mobile sucks.

In north east Texas it seems that Verzion has the best coverage.

Thanks for response guys

If you live in a metro area, most of them will work Ok. It's when you get outside the metro that you'll find that the two major carriers will have the best signal strength. We are with AT&T and have been for years, but it just depends on where you are as to which carrier will have the best signal.

Some years back, part of my job for a big global chemical company was to negotiate a cellphone contract for North America. After the mother of all spreadsheets, and factoring in the cost of roaming if one of our VP's was in Monaco or Mongolia, AT&T had the best average overall cost to the corporation. It turned out that the real economic deciding factor was the carryover of unused minutes (rollover) that AT&T offered. That would probably still be the factor that really mattered, unless Verizon offers something similar these days.

I have AT&T. But for west Texas I buy minutes for the OnStar phone (booster, I think it's a Verizon deal) in my truck and drive to a high spot. Only use it for checking in with the wife in that situation.

AT&T has gotten better at my place in Jack county over the last couple years but last year in Montana I would say half the state I had zero service and then the upper half of Michigan into Canada I had zero service but even then in michigan it was better than the year before so I would say AT&T is getting better but they may all be. I won't switch I have the good plan from years ago.

While hunting in Edwards and Val Verde counties, I used an ATT $2 a day phone. I had plans with Verizon and T-Mobile but no service out there.

Like others have said, depends on where you are at in the boonies. In the rural areas, they usually have roaming agreements with others, IE Panhandle Wireless, etc. If cost effective, I would get a cheap or prepaid plan for emergencies with the locals as they will have decent coverage in a pinch.

Did I mention that T Mobile sucks?

I've had T Mobile since they were something else. And mostly they are great. But away form populous areas or major travel routes they suck.

ATT worked great when hunting in west Texas. When I was hunting a lot in Colorado when I was younger, the dudes with Verizon always had way better reception than me. Up in Wyoming where I hunt outside of Cody, I swear you could be under a huge rock 100 miles from the middle of no where and still have perfect reception with ATT. Story has it that a bunch of ATT executives have houses and ranches in Wyoming so you can see the correlation there...

Nothing else comes close. Who wants to have coverage that is just good in East Texas or where ever....?

AT&T is better at our place in Colorado Cty. I have verizon and I have to walk up the hill to get any kind of reception and the guys with AT&T are sitting on the camp house porch looking at Facebook.

I often telecommute from my trailer at my deer lease in Houston County. My iPad has hotspot capability and the LTE capability from Verizon provides bandwidth to my laptop that's almost as fast as the wireline U-verse at home.

The cell coverage maps at the link below should help.

I should add that according to the Verizon coverage map, there is no service at my lease. However, it's about half way between two cell towers, which is enough to give me two bars of LTE performance.

Link

On our lease in pipe creek Sprint seems to work better than Verizon. I'm on verizon and my kids are on sprint. They can make calls from our trailer while my phone will have 0 service.

When I did those national contracts that I mentioned earlier, there were offices and locations in the US where AT&T just had bad or no service, so I had to do minor contracts with a couple of other carriers. Back then it was a toss up as to who had the best and biggest coverage area - between AT&T and Verizon. It's probably a pretty close matchup these days too. Just depends on where you are.

The company I work for has been putting WiFi in all DISD buildings for the last 3yrs now. Most of the WAP's (Wireless Attach Points) are running in the 2.4Ghz range which if most of you had a cordless phone it ran the same speed. Some worked really well and others didn't. Well starting back in February we have been adding 5Ghz because the 2.4 band is getting really crowded. This past week I was at one of the schools and was standing under a WAP along side the librarian and I had 5 bars and she had none. I have ATT and she had T-Mobile. I told her to get a different carrier.

Try consumer cellular - rated #1 cell phone company by consumer reports and they use AT&T lines. Any ATT phone will work with consumer cellular.

Go ATT. Works the best overall in TX and west US. Not so great in the south east US. But good from Aransas Pass to Dalhart. Both my wife's ranches have ATT towers.

AT&T works great at my lease in Deep South texas in the middle of nowhere. However at my house in the middle of a town of 50,000 people I have to have a cell booster for it to work - go figure

Again, the coverage maps available from the website that I shared earlier should be helpful in determining which carriers have towers in your area. You'll need to click the Reset button on the map for it to begin showing tower locations. Select the All Networks option and the map updates as you scroll across the map area.

The signal strength maps can be misleading and make it appear that coverage is often limited to small areas along major roads and highways. As I noted earlier, I can get two or three bars of Verizon LTE signal at my lease in Houston County, even though the nearest Verizon cell tower is roughly six miles away. Still, the map clearly explains why I must be near a tower-facing window to get that signal while working in my trailer.

I should have mentioned earlier that if you are somewhere out of your usual area and can't get a signal, turn your phone off, wait a bit, and turn it back on. Your phone should be automatically be checking for towers, but sometimes it won't. A shut down and restart will cause it to do a tower search. That's a tip I got from my AT&T rep, and every now and then it'll get me a signal where I wasn't getting one. Works for my iPad too.

And...T-Mobile and Sprint are good in metro areas, but they just don't have the coverage everywhere like the two big dogs do. The carriers do share some towers and pay for use of others' towers, or at least they did.

Couple of years ago, before I retired, the wife and I are cruising along on a driving vacation and were on the outskirts of Houston. She mentioned that she got a new cell phone to replace 'that one she didn't like' (which was an AT&T phone). She had been in Costco and saw a pretty one that she liked, and the Costco sales guy promised her that the carrier (T-Mobile) had great coverage everywhere. I said "surely you remember that national contract I did with AT&T, and that we both get to benefit from the nice low price, and that the coverage is excellent". She said that it was HER phone and she could buy whatever she wanted, and she chose this T-Mobile phone. So by now we were maybe 25 miles out of Houston on some secondary road. I looked at my phone, and I had a good signal. I said to her that it would be good to call one of our daughters and see how things are going. She grabbed her new phone. Punched in some numbers. Got nothing. No signal. No surprise (to me). Been back on AT&T since then.

So you guys get whatever phone you want, but I really suggest AT&T or Verizon for best overall coverage in the US and overseas. Just be advised that roaming charges in some third world countries, and in some parts of the former Soviet Union can be very expensive.

All that said, I hate AT&T customer service, or lack thereof. When I retired, I was allowed to keep my corporate phone and phone number. All I had to do was take over the monthly charges and to call AT&T customer service to switch ultimate payment responsibility from my former company to me personally. How tough could that be, so I filled out the paperwork and then called their customer service. Things went pretty well until they said they had to ask me three questions to verify that I was who I said I was. Ok, I said, fire away. They asked me how many kids I had, what was my home mortgage payment, and what was the monthly payment on my Kubota tractor. I gave them the answers. They said I was wrong. WHAT? I said that it can't be wrong, and they said I missed one question. Well heck, which question was it? We can't tell you that. I said ask them again, that maybe I had misunderstood one question or they had misunderstood one of my answers. Ok, they re asked. I answered. They said I was wrong. Back and forth we went. They said that perhaps I should talk to the corporate representative. I said that the corporate rep from our side, at least for a few more days was ME, and that I did the da__ contract. And that I really was me. Took a long time to get all that straight and to convince them I was me. A nightmare.

And last, let me tell that AT&T and probably many other major corporations know more about you and your life than you ever DREAMED. They had info about me that they had no reason to have. They knew all of my previous home mortgages. Car and tractor payments, my income at the previous few companies. They knew everything about me, to the degree that it was scary. And this info was open to anyone that had clearance to log in at the company. That really bothered me, but there's nothing you or me can do about it. That's just the way it is these days.

X2

No phone reception=how I prefer it. I know it's good for emergencies but when I'm at the lease I'll leave it in my bag or glove box turned off.

My brother has AT&T and any time we are in the boonies of Oklahoma or even in the mountains of Colorado, that punk has service!!

Sprint has been good about getting voice coverage, but el oh el at data coverage.