Are there any cell (nextel) towers in the area where you're seeing the signal drop? You could have some overload issues going on. This could explain why adding a better antenna has resulted in worse reception. you could try adding attenuation, and see what happens.
just a thought
jeff.
Jeff,
Yes! Quite a few cell towers. I live near the US/MX border and for some reason there are cell antennas everywhere and now that I read your post I can correlate reception quality to the proximity to these antennas. Don’t know how many of them are Nextel though.
I am still going to try the different antenna and the High Freq. cable as suggested above just to see what happens.
Thanks.