Thanks a lot Yea, I, of course, remember you from there - was unsure if you may have forget about it (as I'm so slow to deliver )

Ah, that kind of beast. Well, the more choices, the better



In case of GSM radio, it causes - sadly - quite a lot of directionality (for other types, like WiFi, too, but not as much, due to lower operating range as a whole, and higher frequency). This is, probably, reason why N950 sucks so much @ signal strength compared to N900 - even despite clever helical antennas design (similar to helicals found in early mobile phones). I'm sure they aimed at getting circular polarized waves - ideal for devices, which should work no matter of position/angle toward base stations - but, due to limited space and reflectors (metal parts behind and between), it seems to produce either vertically or horizontally polarized one. This result in super signal when aiming device at "correct" angle, and 80% worse, when changing it just a 40 degrees (both numbers made up, to give and idea of what I'm talking about).

Consider, that iPad is designed to work with WiFi, not GSM/3G - especially the former will get affected.

Heck, I had quite a experience with designing antennas, but after starting body replacement project, I feel like I've studied for master thesis in antennas theory. (Damn, even during checking something for this every post, I found myself spending ~4 hours of constant reading, because I noticed interesting information in one article that may affect work on project, then followed link after link...)

And even now, I know just a tiny fraction of how those things (should) work - I'm absolutely amazed by talent of antenna's design pioneers, especially those, who did it in pre-personal computer era... What they achieved using just trial and error and manual calculations is AMAZING - you could literally spend a lifetime, just tweaking one design for one purpose (and sometimes, they invented quite a few).

Summing it up, maintaining non-worse signal for metal body replacement - of any shape - is a, sorry for word, "b|tch" of a task (mostly responsible for my delays in delivering hardware awesomeness to thirsty "masses" ). Don't underestimate it - personally, I'm, sometimes, cursing myself for not promising wooden replacement (which, depending on type of wood used, may be much more elegant than metallic one, without practical differences in heat dissipation), instead of metal one. I plan to keep working on it for some time in hope for getting decent reference implementation for metal-body N900 - but, if it keep failing, I'll do a survey around per-orderers, if they would accept wooden variant, instead.

/Estel