It happens to everyone – you’re driving though scenic Sonoma, bragging to your friend on the other side of your cell phone call (hands free, of course) about the beauty of the vineyard vistas, when suddenly you find yourself repeating into an inanimate object, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Lou?”
More often than not, the dropped cell signal seems to occur at a crucial moment in one’s conversation – right before the punch line, say, or when you’re receiving much-needed directions to the place you’ve just passed while querying “Where am I?” into the void. Some claimed to have lost business deals when a competitor’s call was taken during the eternal minutes it took to regain a signal with their interlocutors. Likewise, romance has suffered when communication has abruptly lapsed into silence. Ever express your undying love for someone, perhaps expecting a reciprocal reply, and heard instead the Arctic winds of loneliness whistling over the windshield? One can only imagine Shakespearean tragedies that have occurred at the hands of telecommunications companies when modern day Romeos and Juliets mistakenly thought one or the other had forsaken them when the line went dead. “Where for art thou, Romeo? Romeo? Can thou hear’st me now?”
So that you may avoid dropped calls and the miscommunication that they engender, photo editor Ryan Lely and I ventured to the far corners of the valley in search of Dead Zones – the cellular blackout zones where calls drop into silence and social awkwardness reaches its deafening peak. Ours is by no means a definitive list and we encourage readers to submit their own dead zones so that we can include them in an interactive map online at SonomaSun.com. Throughout our research, which, it should be noted, wasn’t the slightest bit scientific (Lely drove us around town in his ’68 Ford Mustang while I incessantly refreshed my iPhone and repeatedly called people), a question kept coming to mind, “Why are calls dropped in the first place?”
“The communications system is a set of cells. If you look at a map you see a circle here and a circle there,” said Bob Smith, a radio frequency engineer with Hammett & Edison, Inc., a leading broadcast engineering services firm at which the publisher of the Sonoma Valley Sun is a principal. “They’re close enough together that they overlap a little bit – except they don’t always.”
The “don’t always” part is where one’s calls fall into the abyss and communication comes to a halt.
“The hole is where you’re out of range of any cell,” explained Smith. “That doesn’t happen all that often, but that’s one of the causes. Another cause is that, on paper, the cells are close enough together that they overlap, so you’re always in range of one of the cell towers, but the cell signals are at a high frequency, which means they have to have ‘line of sight’ to your phone.”
The key cell sites servicing Sonoma Valley are located at Arnold Field at First Street West, the Sebastiani Theatre, and the Sonoma Valley Hospital on Andrieux Street. Smaller towers dot the valley along Sonoma Highway; however, dead zones remain prevalent.
“If there’s anything in the way – a building, a tree – it blocks the signal. You can be in a spot where there’s a cell tower close enough, but it’s obstructed. There’s something in the way of your phone and the tower,” said Smith.
Through our research, Lely and I found four major dead zones in the valley – Sonoma Highway at Pythian Road; the 10000 block of Sonoma Highway near the Kenwood Inn and Spa; the 25000 block of Arnold Drive near Viansa Winery and Marketplace; and the 4000 block of Stage Gulch Road at the Sonoma Transfer Station. These are areas where one’s cell phone, seemingly regardless of carrier, goes inexplicably, unequivocally dead.
What’s the remedy? As Smith says, “Build more cell towers.”
“They have micro-cells, which are cell sites with a smaller coverage area and lower power to fill in some of those holes,” he said. “Now they even have ‘nano-cells,’ which cover an area the size of one building or even one floor within the same building. Some of the buildings in San Francisco have nano-cells on an individual floor to improve the coverage inside the building.”
I called my carrier to inquire about having a nano-cell installed into Lely’s Mustang, but as we passed the intersection of Cherry and Verano Streets on Railroad Avenue, the line went silent. Alas, another dead zone.
