Kinda hard to make any assessments without more than two trips - not enough data points to even begin formulating a theory.
Maybe one or more cell towers were down for maintenance. Maybe there was a localized source of RF noise near the tower you were talking to. Maybe humidity or intense localized rain shower you couldn’t see between you and the tower. Lightning.
The thing with digital phones is that there is a fine line between operating fully, and not operating at all. Once the error correction is unable to keep up, you’re done. So its not unreasonable to see good performance one day from a marginal location, and then small variations in signal strength result in zero connectivity the next. In fact, the signal strength bars on a digital phone don’t really tell you anything - if you have any bars, you’re good to go. No bars, no service. They could replace the signal bars with a red/green dot signalling go/no go, and it would be just as useful in most cases, since having any connectivity means you will be able to do digital data transmission (with one caveat - better signal strength means less reliance on the built in error correction, which means better bandwidth in general)
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-Scott
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