Which app do you use to scan/debug GSM/CDMA cellular tower signal strength?

A dual SIM phone, with both SIMs active, and using different carriers, not only *can*, it *must* :-) . 'Zat help? Cheers, -- tlvp

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Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Reply to
tlvp
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Was this at Fish Camp, and I guess at some place other than Tenaya Lodge or the Narrow Gauge Inn?

No big deal. But in this area there is only Verizon coverage (native Sprint customers can roam though). There is no AT&T coverage and no T-Mobile coverage. A pay phone was probably a 30 minute drive away. This was not out in the middle of nowhere, it was in a residential development just off one of the main park roads.

Usually if I take the Southern route (41) to Yosemite I will spend one night at either Tenaya Lodge or the Narrow Gauge Inn, both technically in Fish Camp on hwy 41. I get good Verizon coverage there and both have free in-house WiFi. In Yosemite, depending on my actual plan and time of the year I spend one or two nights at the Yosemite Valley Lodge, which also has free in-house WiFi and Verizon coverage.

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Regards, 

Savageduck
Reply to
Savageduck

Boy! You misrepresent the content of a thread and what folks actually wrote too much.

Did you actually think that I wouldn't challenge what you wrote above?

As I said in rec.photo.digital, I never used the words "better" or "best" with regard to Preview. I did say that it met my needs for simple annotation work, including what you claimed was tough to achieve, "curved arrows". I even provided examples.

I didn't say that I had never used Paint.Net, but since I don't use a Windows machine I guess you could imply that. Other than that implication the paragraph above is a twisted rendition of the truth. Perhaps, a part of your alternate reality.

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Regards, 

Savageduck
Reply to
Savageduck

this isn't about dual sim phones.

Reply to
nospam

You could use GPS coordinates or just scan all the frequencies:

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LTE is a pain, we're just moving from a global 3G/UMTS product to LTE. This means a different antenna design, LTE module version and whatever for each region and even operator specific ones :-(

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mikko
Reply to
Mikko OH2HVJ

that's the only LTE CellSpot I've seen. It has blinkenlights.

Those are 4G LTE signal boosters which I've never seen before. They were not on offer from T-Mobile when I asked about a CellSpot for my home.

-50 is the maximum possible, and below -120 there is no signal.

my iPhone displays the dB in the upper left corner. I's at -78 again.

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I mistook thee for thy better Hamlet Act III scene 4
Reply to
Lewis

No no, orange juice isn't from oranges! First you have to peel the orange, and then you have to squeeze it. It's not part of the orange!

Whatever.

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I'll have what the gentleman on the floor is having.
Reply to
Lewis

Smoking some good stuff, eh? Clue: Amazon Web Services was never required.

Cheers, -- tlvp

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Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Reply to
tlvp

clue: don't comment about things you don't understand.

clue#2: don't smoke whatever it is you're smoking.

Reply to
nospam

Right. No three phones, just two. And no tests "for weeks on end," just casual observations. T-Mo vs. VZW:

  • Most places in NE I check signal, they're both present and adequate.
  • Some places I find T-Mo service utterly absent, but VZW strong enough to
  • use (in some of those, at&t is accessible, but won't allow T-Mo roaming).
  • Some places I was hoping to find VZW, that one's absent, but T-Mo is OK.
  • Still other places neither is usably present.

Others' experiences are almost sure to differ. Cheers, -- tlvp

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Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Reply to
tlvp

In that scenario, you really have 2 phones and each attaches itself to only 1 antanna/radio.

Just because a phone can SEE signals from multiple antennas does not mean that it has concurrent active communication to multiple antennas.

Reply to
JF Mezei

Fine with me. Just how much can a person make from app-advertising?

And yet people do it...

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Cheers, Bev 
    "My dad used to say: Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. 
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Reply to
The Real Bev

a lot.

During the second quarter of 2016, Alphabet's revenue hit $21.5 billion, a 21 percent year-over-year increase. Of that revenue, $19.1 billion came from Google's advertising business, up from $16 billion a year ago.

Reply to
nospam

Hi Jeff,

This article describes the three 120-degree sectors: Alpha is the North FACING vertical antenna on the cell tower Beta is the Southeast FACING vertical antenna on the cell tower Gamma is the Southwest FACING vertical antenna on the cell tower

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There is a way to tell which sector antenna you're connected to from the cell id. Also, the newer Android APIs now seem to expose the frequency bands:

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Reply to
Stijn De Jong

Thanks for confirming which one, because there is an entire thread on the various very different "things" that T-Mobile MARKETING calls a "Personal CellSpot" which they also call a "4G LTE CellSpot" such that saying those words is rendered meaningless.

If someone says they have a CellSpot, or a "Personal CellSpot", all they're definitively saying is that they have a micro tower, but there are multiple types of similarly branded micro towers, each of which is quite different in operation.

  1. One type is a signal booster, which is purely cellular.
  2. Another type is a microtower connected to your Internet router.
  3. A third type is a router (I have not tested this type yet).
  4. A fourth type is an access point (I haven't tested this either, yet).
  5. And, while we're at it, there is WiFi calling (which isn't a "cellspot")

Yes, but my point is that they also are branded by T-Mobile MARKETING as a "Personal CellSpot" and they all say "4G LTE".

The only difference in branding is in the final word *after* the meaningless "CellSpot" brand name (and in the case of the one you have, they don't even put a final word after the meaningless "CellSpot" brand name).

I knew how you got the decibel RSSI (received signal strength indication), but the question was how do you know which "tower" you're getting your current signal from.

As far as anyone can tell, it's impossible to get the cell id tower from the phone on an iOS device, so you have to use an Android device to figure that out.

I have a similar setup to yours, except that I have at least three (and maybe more) towers for my phone to choose from (two of which are inside my own home).

So just having a decibel reading doesn't tell me *which* tower I'm connected to (since there are at least three or more to choose from).

The good news is that my decibel readings are now in the -50dBm to -60dBm range (instead of the minus 90 to minus 100 decibel range as they were before I hooked up the micro towers!).

Reply to
Stijn De Jong

based on what you've written, no, you did not know that.

wrong.

maybe you do, but the rest of the world doesn't, assuming they even care what the tower id is.

everyone *other* than cellular engineers don't care, and the cellular engineers have *far* more sophisticated equipment to find out than by using an android or ios phone.

Reply to
nospam

Hi Jeff, I'm still trying to figure this stuff out, but I noticed this MIT app (CellTracker) "attempts" to show both what the GPS says and the latitude and longitude for Verizon.

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CellTracker:

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Reply to
Stijn De Jong

This finding-where-the-tower is stuff is all new to me, but from what I've been reading, it's impossible to do on an iPhone, and, the directional pointer on OpenSignal is, at best, a wild-assed guess.

I'm still trying to figure all this out, but, it seems that OpenSignal is likely a phony app that simply uses your cellular connection to *guess* which cell tower you're connected to (based purely on your signal strength and carrier).

The actual location of the tower is well known to be wrong, since it's merely an average location of the *cell phones*!

Yup. They don't locate the tower. They simply average the location of the cellphone locations!

Says so here: "In OpenSignal ... the tower locations reported are not the actual antenna coordinates but the average of coordinates where cell phones were when they connected to that antenna"

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Here's a classic result of the OpenSignal inaccurate averaging algorithm:

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Reply to
Stijn De Jong

I had never used these apps before a couple of days ago, but now, after using a dozen of these cellular reporting apps, I'd assess OpenSignal to be almost non-functional compared to the apps that actually report correct information.

As a "toy" app, OpenSignal is fine; but for correct and accurate information, OpenSignal appears to be a veritable bust.

Still, it's one of the only related apps that my iOS device can run, so, even a toy app such as OpenSignal appears to be (compared to, say, Network Cell Info Lite) is better than nothing I guess.

Reply to
Stijn De Jong

The great news is that I've gotten my cellular signal up from around

-100dBm to consistently better than -60dBm, which is an astoundingly astronomical improvement in signal strength!

For example, here is a reading, just now, of -53dBm on my cellphone:

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From what I've read, cellular signal doesn't get much better than that.

However, there is so much data that each of these apps output that I'm still going through all the useful information to figure out exactly which device is doing what (since I have an old micro tower and a new femto tower in my house).

Reply to
Stijn De Jong

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