Working with poor reception

Building sites have poor reception. Concrete, steel, basements and half-built houses in new estates all work against a phone signal.

The app keeps working when the signal does not. A job you have opened stays on the phone, so its screens still open with no bars showing. Anything you save while you are out of range is held and sent by itself the moment you are back.

A bar along the bottom tells you which of those is happening: No signal while you are out of range, then Sending while the held work goes up. When neither is showing, everything is through.

What is held, and what is not

Held until the signal returns: a defect, a diary entry, a checklist answer, hours, a delivery you record, a task you mark started or finished.

Not held: anything you have not opened before. A drawing you have never viewed on this phone cannot appear from nowhere, and a photo still needs signal to upload. Closing the app completely before the signal returns also loses work that was still waiting, so give it a moment near a bar of signal before you finish for the day.

Planning ahead still costs less than hoping.

Load what you need before you go

The most effective habit: open the job on wi-fi before leaving the office, and look at the documents you expect to need.

A drawing you have already opened is far more likely to be there when the signal is not. Three minutes in the office beats twenty minutes in a driveway looking for a bar of signal.

Have a fallback for the critical documents

For anything you absolutely must have on site:

• Save it to the phone’s own files or downloads
• Or carry a printed copy

The drawing you need at the moment of a pour is not the moment to discover the basement has no signal.

Print the one drawing a pour depends on

Digital-first is right for almost everything. The exception is the handful of documents where being unable to open one stops work — the slab setout, the truss layout, the drainage plan. A printed copy costs nothing and removes the failure mode entirely.

Where signal is usually worst

Predictable, and worth anticipating:

• Basements and sub-floor areas
• Inside a steel-framed or fully-clad building
• New estates before the network catches up
• Rural blocks
• Anywhere behind a hill

If a job is in one of these, plan for the app not working on site rather than discovering it each visit.

Practical measures

Wi-fi where there is a site office. Even a phone hotspot from a vehicle parked at the front of the block often beats the signal inside the building.

Step outside. Obvious, and usually enough — most reception problems on a building site are the building, not the network.

Check before you need it. Open the app when you arrive rather than at the moment a delivery driver is waiting.

What to expect when there is no signal

The app needs a connection to fetch fresh data. With no signal you may not be able to load a document you have not opened before, or see orders raised while you were out of range.

When the signal returns, the app catches up. Nothing is lost — it is a matter of when you can see it, not whether it exists.

If it is a persistent problem

If a job simply has no usable signal, plan around it rather than fighting it:

1. Load everything on wi-fi before each visit.
2. Print the critical drawings once and keep them in the vehicle.
3. Do the office work — orders, claims, schedule updates — at the office.
4. Note what you need on site and act on it when you are back in range.

That is how site work was done before phones, and it is still a perfectly good fallback for the jobs where the network has not arrived yet.