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Have you tried an external antenna? Get one of those, and one of these (a cellphone docking station that connects to your house's landline), and you should be able to replace your landline pretty easily. Here's another docking station with better phone compatibility.

Do they live in a small valley or something?

First, as everyone else has suggested, run a bunch of antenna feedline down to the phone, from an antenna parked in a good location. This sucks, because there's a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. Also, the antenna connector on your handset may or may not be very durable. However, if you're going to go this route, check a truck stop for adapters. Truckers generally spend a lot of time outside traditional cellphone coverage, and any well-equipped service plaza that's more than a hundred miles from a big city will probably carry an assortment of antenna adapters. They generally use TNC as the "common" antenna connector, since it was the standard on the old analog bag phones.

Second, you could leave the phone upstairs where it gets decent signal already, and bring the voice downstairs. Do this with a Cellsocket or a Dock'n'talk cellular POTS adapter. Run a regular phone line down to where you spend most of your time, or hook up a cordless phone to the analog port.

Next option: Leave the phone upstairs. Get a really long headset cord, if your phone supports voice dialing and an answer/hangup button on the headset. :)

Yet another dumb idea: Leave the phone upstairs, and use a Bluetooth headset to bring the audio down. You should be able to dial by sending commands from a Bluetooth-equipped PDA.

Does this work with more modern cell phones - the only thing I could find was this. It seems to work with only old analog Microtac cell phones. A more modern product is Cell Socket. However I don't know if it would work with rotary phones.

People have been using cellphones at a large scale for about a decade now, and I don't see brain cancer rates skyrocketing. Cellphones don't have "high-power high-frequency" signals, unless you consider 500mW high-power.

My advice? Get a headset. Every cellphone has a jack for one.

Better yet, get a "Cellsocket" too. It lets you connect your cellphone to your in-house phone wiring, so you can use standard landline phones, but access the network through the cellphone.

Anyone know of anything similar that's more in the, say, $50 range?

Right now, I just wish that the cellular carriers would provide hardware to plug into my house POTS wiring

I was looking into this a while back when I dropped my land line in favor of a cell.

cellsocket

I recently have been looking for that exact same product (I remembered seeing something similar on a late-night infomercial)...the closest thing I can find is CellSocket, but I know there are competing products out there. Hope this helps!

There used to be a product called VoxLink that did this for Nokia and Motorola phones. It looks like may be gone now, but there's another company with a similar product called CellSocket.

Right now I've got Sprint PCS as my cell carrier, and broadband for internet access. As long as I'm on the Sprint network, I pay no roaming or long distance charges for calls inside the US.

I will be switching to Verizon as soon as Cellsocket announces their new models. I am tired of Sprint dropping my calls, and being in spots without coverage.

My grand plan is to get a Cellsocket with external antenna, disconnect my home phone wiring from the phone company, and use phones throughout the house, with my cell making/receiving all the calls.

You mean this? http://www.cellsocket.com/

I would think that, if you really wanted people to know anything about the device, you would have linked to cellsocket.com.

Go to Mike Sandman's site, http://www.sandman.com/pouches.html (look for the "Indoor Cellular Antenna" and the "Cellular POTS Adapter", either of which may help - a competing device similar to the "Cellular POTS Adapter" can be found at http://www.cellsocket.com/).