“I won’t get a call when I’m down here,” he said recently while walking past the AT&T store off Route 9 in town. “But when I’m on my way back up north, I get all these voice mails.”

A section of Barnegat’s downtown along Route 9 is patchy for AT&T service, and for years the company planned to build a new tower to provide better coverage in the downtown area. But residents nearby opposed the plan, and last year the local Zoning Board denied the company’s application. AT&T plans to try again this fall.

That area is only one of several gaps in coverage that are spread throughout the southern half of the state, which the four major U.S. wireless carriers said they are continuing to try to fill in.

For example, Sprint users lose coverage in parts of Buena Vista Township in Atlantic County. T-Mobile users see service drop in Woodbine, Cape May County, while Verizon Wireless users find dead zones in Washington Township, Burlington County. AT&T users cannot get a signal in much of Maurice River Township in Cumberland County.

In many other areas there is coverage, but not enough to make calls from inside buildings or cars, or fully operate devices that utilize 3G technology, such as iPhones and Blackberries.

“People want coverage,” AT&T spokesman Adam Cormier said. “You want to be downstairs in your basement and texting your friend about the score of the game you’re watching or ‘American Idol.’”

To provide for those areas, those companies are planning to build dozens of cell sites in the years to come, while also improving those they already have, in Ocean, Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Burlington counties.

“You’re trying to build a sprinkler system for a golf course,” Cormier explained as an analogy. “If you put them too close to each other, you’re going to be over-watering, too far away from each other, and you get brown spots.”

T-Mobile added new sites recently in Cape May and Atlantic counties, has five planned in Burlington County this year, and others planned for Vineland and Millville in Cumberland County.

Sprint is adding new towers or antennas in Bridgeton and Fairfield Township in Cumber-land County, Woodbine in Cape May County and Mullica Township in Atlantic County this year.

AT&T recently added 3G, or third-generation, technology to 20 sites in towns such as Egg Harbor City, Hammonton, Mays Landing and Buena in Atlantic County and Wood-bine.

And Verizon Wireless, which claims it provides the most thorough coverage in the region, recently added sites in Egg Harbor Township, Atlantic County, and Toms River and Barnegat Township in Ocean County.

“There’s a lot of consumer demand in South Jersey,” said Sheldon Jones, spokesman for Verizon Wireless, “especially along the shore points.”

Those areas that remain uncovered are so for a variety of reasons, such as low demand, geographical ob-structions or regulatory reasons – in fact, usually a combination of the three.

In Wharton State Forest, for example, the Pinelands Preservation Act keeps many people and most cell towers out. That leaves low coverage, but low demand, except for vacationers riding through Burlington County to get to Long Beach Island.

“All carriers have challenges there just with the nature of the regulatory system,” said Kerri Strike, spokeswoman for T-Mobile.

The topography in the area both hurts and helps, too, with miles of trees dulling what would otherwise be an efficient signal carrying over mostly level ground.

For that reason no tower sends out a perfectly round perimeter of equal service.

“I can’t say without a doubt a tower is going to provide eight miles of coverage,” Strike said. “A more wooded area with a lot of foliage will have different propagation than an area that’s flat.”

In Barnegat, the downtown area with patchy AT&T service is only a few miles away from a tower in town, but the signal dissipates as it get there, leaving an oddly shaped section in which customers cannot make calls from indoors.

And the area where the company proposed to build a new tower is near homes and athletic fields, leading to protests by residents – another issue carriers often have to deal with.

AT&T is in the process of appealing the Zoning Board’s rejection of its application. The case went to Superior Court but was remanded to the Zoning Board, where it will be taken up again in October.

“The not-in-my-backyard syndrome is a part of industry,” Sprint spokesman John Taylor said. “It doesn’t do our industry any good to fight to get in a community. We want to go where we’re wanted.”

The same residents who opposed AT&T’s plan are working with the Township Committee to craft a new ordinance regulating cell towers, hoping to find more suitable locations for future sites.

In the meantime, users have had to learn where their coverage fades in and out.

At the local farmers’ market in town, Ginny Melchiondo, president of the Barnegat Chamber of Commerce, tried to get a signal for a call last Thursday.

She described how she could get AT&T service on one street but not another, how she could call someone from inside one building but not another.

“I’ll get service here and then I’ll drive a mile away and not be able to get a signal,” she said.

She stood next to Mayor Jeff Melchiondo, her husband, who described a recent day when he was driving along Lower Shore Road, next to where AT&T proposed to build its tower.

“I was talking to (Deputy Mayor Al Ciruli),” he said, “and I lost the call. I called him back and said, ‘Guess where I am.’”

Anti Electromagnetic Radiation