[pct-l] cell phones

[Patrick Beggan]

I used it in my time in Colorado and the battery lasted quite a long  
time if you used it carefully. Turn off wifi in the woods, turn the  
brightness alllll the way down and only use it in the shade or at  
night (don't really have time to send or receive e-mail or SMS or make  
calls unless its sunset anyway), make sure it doesn't check e-mail  
unless you tell it to, turn off vibrate function (spinning that  
vibrate weight takes more energy than playing a tone) and turn it off  
if you aren't using it and you can easily have the battery last a week  
to ten days using it an hour or so around sundown per day. At some  
point in that range of time you'll undoubtedly have to head into town  
to resupply and it only takes about an hour to charge it from almost  
dead battery to 80% charged, and only another hour or so to get to  
full charge... I'm sure you can find an outlet somewhere for two hours  
to recharge while you're supplying (I was able to in Colorado and  
that's more remote than the PCT...)

Anyway, that's my strategy. I considered a solar charger but it didn't  
seem worth the weight when I just do what I did on the CDT.


On Jan 23, 2008, at 5:11 PM, Lon Cooper wrote:

> I will look forward to your reports Patrick and I will be interested
> in hearing how the iPhone works on the PCT.  I am curious how do you
> keep it powered up on the trail?
>
> -Lon
>
> On Jan 23, 2008 1:35 PM, Patrick Beggan <meta474 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'll have my iPhone on the PCT this year, I can probably give some
>> reports on signal on the GSM band and EDGE network access. I had
>> surprisingly good results on large stretches of the CDT (generally
>> those above the treeline) and expect to at least see some GSM signal
>> along the PCT.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 23, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Lon Cooper wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks, I will be hiking in northern CA later this summer, but
>>> hopefully others will send me reports before then so I can expand  
>>> this
>>> list.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jan 23, 2008 10:25 AM, JoAnn <jomike at cot.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What do you think about something like this?
>>>>
>>>> http://www.pctmap.net/cell.html
>>>>
>>>> ***************************************************
>>>>
>>>> That is wonderful! Is anyone going to continue with it into
>>>> northern CA?
>>>>
>>>> are we there yet
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>>