Motorola Razr Audio Dropoff

[Mookie]

Hello all,
First,I am a newbie from the colonies (US) so forgive me if this should be posted elsewhere. I recently moved from our less than wonderful CDMA network here in the States to a GSM Motorola V3.
The aesthetics of the phone are extremely appealing (a lot like Apple designs) and I generally like Motorola hardware. But I have been experiencing a problem that is either specific to my handset or generally to the digital network.
With my old CDMA digital/analog service when the phone dropped out of digital, analog would pick up and the call continued. When in analog there would occassionaly be a fading of the signal and a dropoff in volume.
I thought a digital (GSM) conection was all or nothing. You either had a connection or not, but the voice quality would not differ based on signal strength and therefor the volume would not change.
Every now and then while in a phone conversation on the V3 the volume will drop so low I canbarely hear, and then it comes back normally.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is it maybe my cell? Or is this possible in the digital network?
Many thanks in advance.

[Mr.The.Spoon]

Can't say I've had that problem over here in the UK. I've got the same phone. Then again, in London there's a signal pretty much everywhere I go (and I haven't been trying to talk on the phone while heading to the Underground).

I know a few years ago, when signals were weaker and not frying our brains, when the digital signal dropped out, it could get a bit crackly before cutting out.
Actually, thinking about it, when I'm on a train and it goes in a tunnel, I can be talking to someone fine, and then suddenly it will just cut off, no degredation first.
Might be just because the train moves quickly from full signal to no signal.

[Gadget_Nik]

Could be a number of things. Firstly, we don't have analogue in the UK. I remember when signal was fading back in the days of analogue it would fade gradually, but digital is a binary signal, i.e. On or OFF. I'm aware that when you are RIGHT on the edge of a signal or between transmitters there will be some breakup as it goes in/out of signal reception, but usually it re-establishes the connection where available. The thing with digital is that they can actually set the perimeter of where the signal transmits to (I know this because of digital TV, they have to set it so that it won't go over the channel into France, so they stop it at the coastline.) This obviously means that it very quickly cuts off when you go into an uncovered area, otherwise you'd blend "seamlessly" into the next transmitter area.