BANGOR – We’re all familiar with the commercials.

A man wearing a light jacket is walking through some sort of environment, such as a construction site or a living room, when he stands still just long enough to ask on his cell phone: “Can you hear me now?”

Jon Veinot, a systems performance engineer with a major cell phone company, wants to know the answer to the same question. Luckily for Veinot, he has more equipment at his disposal than just a cell phone and his legs to test his company’s service in eastern and northern Maine.

He gets to use two cell phones, a black IBM Thinkpad laptop computer, and a 2005 white Ford Explorer, among other things.

Veinot is one of three such engineers who work for U.S. Cellular in Maine. Using the laptop, which is mounted next to the driver’s seat in front of the dashboard of the Explorer, Veinot spends about a total of six months a year driving around the company’s coverage area to test how good its cell phone signals are.

The laptop, equipped with a global positioning satellite receiver, documents Veinot’s route as he drives and records how well his cell phones can access and stay on the company’s network. One phone is programmed to make repeated short-duration calls to see how well it can connect with the network while the other makes longer calls in order to determine where a signal is weak and runs the risk of being dropped.

During a demonstration this week of how this is done, Veinot said he doesn’t have to keep one eye on the computer screen and another on the road. The laptop records the data collected on the drive so he can replay it – and the varying signals that are represented by about two dozen yellow, green and blue bars that rise and fall on the computer screen – when he gets back to his office. A GPS display window on the screen tracks his position along the route as the computer recalls the fluctuations in the network’s signal strength.

“We drive around and gather all this data and put the data on a map,” Veinot said, steering the sport utility vehicle through Bangor traffic Wednesday afternoon. That map helps the company determine where it should erect new towers as they are needed.

The company has three radio frequencies operating on each tower in the Bangor area. Each frequency can carry about 100 calls at a time, according to Veinot. A weak spot can result in no service – a problem familiar to many cell phone users in Maine – while too many users making calls at the same time can clog the network. When this happens, according to U.S. Cellular Director of Sales Jim Holmes, the call can get blocked, resulting in a fast-paced busy signal coming out of the earpiece.

Holmes said the company can add more equipment to existing towers to increase capacity, but that it is more cost-effective to put the additional equipment on a new tower. This way there is more coverage area and the network signal can be spread out so there is less clogging during high-use periods.

While driving a winding loop through Bangor and Brewer, Veinot said the company has erected three new towers in the area since December. One went up in Kenduskeag, another in Corinna, and a third at Bangor International Airport.

Each time a new tower is erected, Veinot takes a test drive through the target area before the tower goes up and another after it has been built to see how it affects the network. Any adjustments that might need to be made are done before the new tower is programmed for customer use, he said.

Veinot said it takes the six months every year to drive once throughout eastern and northern Maine to test the existing network and make sure it’s operating properly. Sometimes a change in foliage, from summer to winter or vice versa, can affect the intensity of a signal and require an adjustment on a tower, he said.

Sometimes, he said, he investigates a customer complaint to see whether there might be an equipment failure the company hasn’t detected.

“Things don’t work 100 percent of the time,” he said. “It seems like every other day I have to go out and look at something.”