Imminent change warning

Abstract

A cellular telephone, in its most preferred embodiment, performs a method for notifying a digital cellular telephone user of an imminent communication disconnection. The preferred method includes, at least, generating at least one condition indication representative of at least one communication condition, analyzing the condition indication, determining whether a communication disconnection is imminent, enhancing quality of received communication signals when possible, and notifying the user of an imminent communication disconnection. Exemplary condition indications include, at least, continuous count and rate indications of frame checksum errors, insufficient quality frames, symbol errors, and chip errors, output power level indication, received signal strength indication, soft handoff status indication, other pilot signal indication, and current pilot signal strength indication. One exemplary analysis technique of determining when a communication disconnection is imminent includes evaluating whether any of a set of condition indications violates a predefined threshold indication, while other exemplary analysis techniques include evaluating whether fixed or historically adaptive combinations of condition indications violate run predefined thresholds, and evaluating combinations of condition indications weighted according to the degree of threshold violation. The process further uses a memory flag in a delayed redundant comparison before enabling a warning, examples of which include visual, sensory, and audible notification methods, including adding generated noise to the received audio signal. Alternate methods of the invention include notifying a user of an imminent inter-system handoff or an imminent change in communication mode.