Cellphone weather inflight

My wife and I made our trip from Wisconsin to Texas on the 4th of July
weekend in our Cessna 172, flying back to Wisconsin the following weekend.
We tried using the Garmin Pilot MyCast application on our Alltel cellphone
in-flight along the way, and while it worked well on the ground during
refuel stops (where we didn't need it since all the airports we stopped at
had an internet computer we could use), we found it really wasn't useable in
the air when we needed it most. We couldn't get a reliable signal above 5000
feet or so, exactly as some folks here had said would be the case, and below
that altitude it was still pretty spotty. We used it for a good weather
update once while we were flying over a larger city (Davenport, Iowa), but
in between cities we often couldn't get a good enough signal to connect. We
tried it when flying over smaller towns, and we'd usually have a good enough
signal while over the town to connect, but the MyCast pages load slowly
enough that by the time we'd get through the first couple of menu pages on
the way to get to the radar depiction, we lost the signal before the radar
picture could load. I suppose we could've flown a couple of 360s waiting on
the radar to load, but it didn't seem worth it. All in all it was a
disappointment, and I wouldn't recommend it. So for us people that only fly
one long cross-country a year and don't need XM weather any other time (and
can't afford it anyway), there just doesn't seem to be a good solution aside
from calling Fligh****ch. If anyone else has had better results I'l like to
hear the details, such as what phone company, type of phone, etc.

By the way, Booneville, Missouri (KVER) had 100 LL for $3.00 a gallon, and
Hannibal, Missouri (KHAE) was even better at $2.95.

Scott Wilson