Just a followup, I have found a site where you can measure connection speeds,
www.speedtest.net This allows me to monitor changes to antenna configurations etc. I can download at 2100 kilobites, the aircard is supposed to be capable of a speed of 3100 so I have purchased a wilson dual band booster, I suspect this will achieve the desired result but I still had the problem of dropped signal. Turns out if you run the watcher program from Sierra in "evdo only" then it doesn't try to jump back and forth from evdo to 1x and cause problems. Next I noticed that from reinstalling watcher several times that it created many com port connections, so I deleted most of them. I am left with com 1 & 2 in use, 3 is printer and the aircard assigned to 2, 8 & 10. Not sure how to handle these but the conflicts have pretty much stopped and surfing is good. Hope this may help someone. I run across a lot of ppl who have the same problems that I had and they are very frustrated as I was
Thanks