[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Check your actual signal level to see if it is dying over time or "just chokes and dies" all of a sudden. Go to System Settings/About Phone/Status/ and Signal Strength is 4th one down. See screenshot. Lower numbers are stronger. Last night I was getting -73 and -70 dB. That is good. Right now I got -85, also good. This is a dynamic screen, meaning you can watch the signal strength fluctuate from here. Now at -75 dB. So I am not having an issue, you know, cell towers do fade in and out a bit. But if you see that number climbing higher and higher and never going back down, then yeah, your phone is dying.

Why would it be dying off over time? Uh, for me, all this stuff just started happening. I was updating on top of an install that was tainted to start with. I hate installing all my accounts, apps, launcher, desktops, wallpaper, adding calendar, music, weather, all apps important on one desktop in groups, labeling them, etc., for every desktop. So, I had saved two of my better backups for a long time and would restore, then upgrade on top of them. When something went wrong, wipe everything, even the slot, restore a backup to get my accounts and apps back, then upgrade. Not good, these backups were made a long time ago, when everything in CM11 needed patching plus jbx just to work. CM11 is not like that anymore. It is stable, good, and everything works.

So, deleted slot 1, recreated with each item bumped up one in size, (Always having space issues.) and flashed ONLY cm11 newest and gapps. Gapps contained much of what I wanted, then installed the rest from playstore. Installed xposed framework and some modules after booting to activate it. Installed Titanium Backup which immediately found my previous backups from CM11 on my card and offered to restore my System ID. I said "Yes" because I have some pay for apps that will not download or remain if the system ID does not match that of purchase. And, (knock on wood) it has been good now. Nothing stops working, everything I need works, never have to reboot or wipe dalvik anymore. All but ONE time I saw my signal bars getting low. Then barely one bar and this is a strong signal area. Within a half hour of that, NO SERVICE. Wiped dalvik and booted back to system, fine. Why only one time? I dunno. Maybe phone "settling in", maybe apps updating and everything had to find it's place? Maybe memory manager had to get a read on the phone and learns from it's mistakes, who knows? But that was my one problem and a simple dalvik wipe cleared it up.

I looked last night on phone, about phone, updates, and found two more since 1/27. I really do not want to update every day so if you click the name of the update, you can read the change log. A lot of it is boring mumbo jumbo but I did see this one came with a fix for the dalvik to plug a leak in the system. I know what a memory leak is from my PC days, you get a bad program that "does not play nice" with memory and gradually eats it all up until your system crashes. Memory management should release memory as it is no longer needed back to the system. A memory leak in software is a bad bug and something like that gets patched by the software developer, be it Nero Burning Rom or any other software. So, since the 1/30 release of CM11 does contain a dalvik leak fix, I wanted it and installed it right from the system menu. When it rebooted, I enabled the xposed framework again, rebooted, and was done. OTA software updates from the system menu are not "dirty". They install properly and wipe both cache and dalvik when they install.

So, check my screenshot, find out what your signal strength is, and keep an eye on it over time. If you find that number climbing higher and higher, yeah, you have a growing problem. -70-80 dB is about right, much higher and you will have serious signal loss. dB is not linear and lower is better. So -50b dB is not twice as strong as -100dB. Decibel is different for sound than it is for signals. If we raise sound +3dB, we double it. Every 3dB on top of that, doubles it each time. For electronic signals, every 6 dB doubles it. So if your phone is at -76 dB and drops to -70 dB, you just doubled your strength. Since we are on a minus scale, lower means better. WiFi is measures like that too.

See if it is dropping over time and never going up, dips and rises, or sharply dives and dies. It matters. Dips and rises is normal, just sitting in one spot. But not "huge" dips and rises like several tens of dB. If you keep having this problem, you can try what I did, unless there is something really wrong with your phone, carrier service, or you live way out in the sticks this should work. Make your Safe Strap backup. Delete the slot (I use rom slot 1) and recreate it. When asked to recreate it, you can bump up size values a bit if you find yourself low on space but do not go crazy. I bumped up each one, one notch. Flash latest CM11. Wipe dalvik and Cache. Flash gapps, wipe dalvik and cache, reboot to system. Setup by hand all over again (I know, I hate it too, but you want to get to the bottom of this and over with!) Do not install jbx at this time, any patches or mods. Setup your accounts, install xposed framework apk, tap to install it to phone and reboot to activate it. Go to downloads in framework and pick the modules you want, check the boxes in Modules to activate them, reboot to make them work. Use them judiciously. If you have paid apps and use Titanium Backup, allow TB to restore your system ID. Get most of your apps from playstore. Restore only what you have to from TB. Only install app, not data, unless it is something you really must retain the data from and it is a recent backup from CM11, otherwise don't do it. Take it for a spin and see if it now runs good, it should.

Read change log of new updates and install if they contain bug fixes that you have, new features, or if they seem to address a problem you are having like mine, dalvik cache leak repair. Something like THAT would for sure make your dalvik deteriorate over time and that was exactly my problem. Every problem I was having could be fixed by wiping the dalvik and rebooting. Good luck and keep us posted. :fingers-crossed:

I am at -76 dB again. So it tends to hover in a strong area for Verizon around this number. Got 5 out of 5 bars lit on status bar.

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