"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."

Hopefully you are not at the apex of your success bounce!

 

I’m not bragging, because you are correct in your insinuation that I could be doing better; but quite frankly life could be worse. The bills get paid before they are due, I make double mortgage payments most months and in 2009 I've paid off $65k of the debt we accumulated when my wife was battling ovarian cancer in 2008. I wish we could have more time at home, but we still managed to have 111 days off this year. If 2010 is the same as 2009 I’ll be debt free except my mortgage and truck by March and my ’06 Pete will be paid off by September. I may grumble about rates, but I'm not one of the ones you see posting on CAD worried about how he's going to make it in the current economic downturn. I have made it my mission in life to run as efficiently as possible to survive the hard times without too much pain. I’m certainly not among the many I’ve seen who’ve posted that they are getting out of the business. Come to think of it, I’m also not one of those posters who makes himself feel more important than he really is by taking unsolicited cheap shots at others.

 

Kevin0915, you need to get home or something. You seem stressed and frankly we don't need your attitude here. A Smartphone (windows based) is a great tool for OTR drivers. If I'm dispatched cross country, I can quickly and easily view radar and forecast maps to determine wether to go one way or the other way to avoid or get ahead of the weather. Laptops take too long to boot up and then you have to tether to use cellular data, or sign in to wifi that is extremely slow (basically a shared dial-up connection at the truckstops)

I do not use a GPS mapping system, but I will use my built in GPS and routing in my cell phone (Samsung Blackjack II and MS Bing) as a backup or to verfy if I get in a bind or the directions are poorly written. But you have to be in a solid data recepion area for reliable mapping. And there is not a live-online mapping for commercial truck routing that I'm aware of like you can get wi,th Garmin and other such systems.

With Bing I can easily find current/updated hotels, truckstops, restauraunts, nightlife, etc based on my current location or any location I choose.

I am not a fan of the I-phones for real world trucker use. The new Blackjacks also have wi-fi to utilize when available and faster 3g coverage is flakey at best. I have found a belt holder that I mod'ed and screwed into one of the dash screws so it's easily visible and hands free if needed and stays put.

 

Read a report recently that said AT&T does have the faster network vs their closest competitor in Verizon but the reason for crappy coverage is not like Verizon's ad's paint it. They paint it as if the AT&T network is very small, it's actually because of the increase in demand from the iPhone that the network simply can't handle the overload. The map that Verizon uses to claim that it's AT&T's 3G network is actually the map of non 3G coverage for the AT&T network. You get put on their Extended network in those area's which is like having dial-up service.

The only catergory that Verizon beat AT&T in was customer service. Outside of that it was a draw or in favor of AT&T.

 

The thing is that all the major carriers have agreements where they use each other’s towers. If you have unlimited roaming, which I would think any OTR driver would, the coverage of one wireless provider compared to another really shouldn’t matter. The only difference from one wireless provider to another is, according to my step daughter who is a sales rep for AT&T, if you are roaming on another company’s network, you are given lower priority than somebody who lives locally and has a plan with that carrier. The example she gave was my own situation. We moved to Southern Illinois a couple of years ago and I never changed my phone number. I (unfortunately) have Sprint PCS as my wireless provider. Dani (my step daughter) claims that the reason I have such crappy cell service around my own home is because Sprint doesn’t actually own any towers around me. Even though my phone tells me I have Sprint service and I’m not roaming, I really am. I am disadvantaged two ways… not only am I using another carrier’s towers, but I have a Central Florida cell number which puts me at the very bottom of the priority list. This means I will have more dropped calls, failures to connect and if I’m transferring data, a slower connection than somebody standing next to me with an identical phone but with a local number and a customer of the company that owns the towers around here.

 

That's exactly right. All those Verizon commercials are full of beans.
I'd like to see Verizon's service on highway 82 in west Texas

 

Music, AT&T owns a 315 ft tower a quarter mile from my house, they do not have anything on it for themselves. They instead lease it out to Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile while having their own seperate tower 5 miles away. Always wondered why they would do something so screwy like that, you own the tower but do not put your own equipment on it while leasing space to your competitors on it. Then again they got the tower when Cellular One became Cingular which became AT&T. I have a Verizon aircard for the home computer, it went down a month ago to where I had very little to no signal, next day an AT&T truck went down to the tower, 2 hours later I had a signal again on my aircard........

What's funny Jack is that Verizon's ad's claim my area has no AT&T 3G coverage at all, funny how 3G works here. In fact it showed a lot of VA not having 3G coverage yet I've found very few non 3G area's outside of the mountains.

 

They use/say anything to make a buck. They advertise anything to make a living. Whatever works, is what they use..

 

I'll have to try one weekend. I get a pretty good signal most of the way across 287. I know 82 will be worse, but I'll try. BB storm on Verizon.

 

I went with the Motorola Droid.
Its quite awesome and I haven't touched my laptop since.
so far the turn by turn navigation. Has not failed me yet.