You must be thinking of someone else. What I said about the law is that we send people to Washington to pass a lot of laws which we then mostly ignore.
I also said that a 3-person company would need two accountants and eight lawyers to comply with all the silly laws we have.
Sorry, I don't care for either.
Surprisingly, not in a couple of decades at least. There's a popular theory in the US that red cars attract cops, which is why 90+ per cent of cars here are ugly grey, white, or black. Given this
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/A3a.jpg
and the fact that I often hit 90 MPH on Interstate 80, maybe I've just been lucky. And I'm careful about the speed traps around Clipper Gap.
The number of illegal RF gadgets used in the USA is easily in the 10s of millions.
Some of this information is incorrect. Towers over 200-feet, and certain types of towers shorter than 200- feet but near navigible airspace (airport runways, heliports, seaplane ports, etc...) are required by law to be registered. You can find these tower in the FCC's ASR database.
Towers owned by public tower companies (Crown, American, SBA, Global Tower Partners, etc...) are often FCC registered, even if they are not over 200-feet.
Carrier-owned towers "may" be FCC registered depending on when they were originally registered. Older FCC rules required the disclosure of these locations, but now, they are generally only updated if the carrier's CGSA (Cellular Geographic Service Area) changes, per FCC Rule 22.911, and typically, this is only done every 5-years when the license renews. Towers not defining the (new) edge of any CGSA's won't be dislosed. And keep in mind, many carriers sold off their tower portfolios to the big public tower companies, which promptly registered them.
Low-Power TV towers were (at one time) required to be registered regardless, but many of these were over 200-feet and would be registered anyway. However, you will occasionally find a short LPTV tower registered that wouldn't otherwise seem to fit any of the categories discussed thus far.
The notion about which technology the carrier is using is pretty much meaningless as it applies to whether or not a tower or rooftop is required to be registered. There is some overlap with the CGSA (a cellular rule, not a PCS rule) so maybe that is what feeds this misconception? Plus, there was about a decade between cellular and PCS buildouts, and in the intervening time, certain registration rules changed. This is also about the time some of the big public tower companies got into the "vertical real estate" business, and obviously, they choose to register their towers (even if not required) for marketing and other purposes.
As a practical matter, tower sites are not difficult to locate. As suggested, many phones can be put into "test mode" and the signal strength (RSSI) read directly. The stronger the reading, the closer you are to the tower, generally. There are many websites and scanner clubs dedicated to mapping towers. You can check the public tower company website for sites -- even those few they may not have registered. Ditto for certain carrier sites. You can also just look at a carrier's web site -- in isolated areas, the tower is generally centrally located in the "blob" of coverage shown. Granted, that approach has limited appeal in metropolitan areas. :)
I recently learned of an iPhone app (Canada - requires a jailbroken phone here) that will decode the tower coordinates off the air. I don't have any more info about this, other than what I read online. (And I don't have an iPhone, so I'm even less inclined to try it out.)
I have two of those locator apps. both free. I fortunately don't use any of those fruity phones, so I don't need to jail break the phone.
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Android, Blackberry, Smybian. Nothing for iphone, but we don't care about fanbois. Cellumap give you the option of transmitting the RSSI and your coordinates. I may be sniffing more data from the phone as well. The idea is you feed them a data point, and it goes into their database.
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Blackberry only.
Fairview has a forum for their program. It is frequented by celluar techs so you can get accurate information there. Uh, much better than usenet. ;-)
This is the cell site database most apps use. I assure you it is full of crap for GSM.
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In the San Francisco bay area, check out
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This guy has a service monitor, which makes the detection job much easier. This database is far better than what the google owner database provides since the person actually tracked down the sites physically rather than shuffle paper, albeit electronically.
I have a t-mobile account. Last weekend I was in northern California (Dixon) and the cell phone coverage was, well, interesting. In the hotel room, I had no bars (I can't remember how long since I have seen that in any urban area), and one "dot" bar in the hotel lobby or parking lot. In my room I could receive text messages, but not send them. In the lobby, all functions worked completley.
The hotel staff said AT&T accounts worked ok in the area. I thought all the cell phone companies had interchange agreements by now that eliminated this problem, but with the cost of a "roaming charge" added fee.
If it is GSM you must be within the cut-off limit (35km) Although there are schemes that provide double this distance, I haven't seen it being implemented. It requires 2W handsets or boosted systems. These systems are normally designed and fitted to vehicles . It also halves the number of timeslots available per frequency to accommodate the extra delay in the signal path. (actual explanation is complicated)
Various passive signal booster and RF coupled antenna are available for cellular frequencies from
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Take a specific look at under the heading - Cellular Antennas
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Also see different types of antenna couplers as most of the new handsets aren't fitted with antenna sockets.
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E-mail Poynting to get their recommendation on the best solution for your problem. These antennas are used by many local farmers in rural areas. In rural areas, base station antenna patterns are often adjusted to provide better coverage along the main roads, resulting in bad coverage in adjacent areas.
An antenna limits roaming but in many instances it is mainly used for data connectivity (GPRS or 3G) where there no other reliable data services exits.
There are US and European distributors listed on the site.
TMobile has (3) sites serving the Dixon, CA area: site_name site_id address city state county postal_code lat lon region status structure_type structure_height SA047 McCune & 80/Raw Lan SC06047A 7699 BATAVIA RD DIXON CA Solano
95620 38.43855 -121.86067 WEST current Monopole 58 SA121 Hwy 505 & McCune Rd SC06121A 8685 WINTERS RD WINTERS CA Solano
95694 38.49239 -121.95197 WEST current Monopole 110 SA046 Rt 80 & Tremont/Dav SC06046A 8757 PEDRICK RD DIXON CA Solano
95620 38.49591 -121.80781 WEST current Monopole 87
Not sure how far these are (were) from your hotel. It's possible the hotel has an internal distributed antenna system which excludes T-Mobile. Or, T-Mobile's 1900 MHz system just can't penetrate the building very well. Or there was localized interference to T-Mobile's uplink, or a nearby site could have been down for maintenance. It happens.
As for roaming, there's an FCC proceeding going on now about whether or not carriers should be forced to allow roaming (specifically, data roaming). Back in the old days (well, not that long ago, but it seems like it), carriers embraced roaming because it could make their footprints larger than they actually were. Sharing was a good thing. Now (in the US anyway), we essentially have a duopoly, with Verizon and AT&T having the vast majority of subscribers. Both have their own nationwide buildouts, and are therefore less interested in roaming on other systems, and vice-versa. Yes, technically, they still allow roaming to all compatible roaming partners who request roaming, but I'm not sure the rates are as favorable (to the smaller cell operator) as they once were. In reverse, especially in very rural areas, smaller operators greatly depend on roaming revenues by the big 2 (sometimes big-4 if you include T-Mobile and Sprint). Some licensees in remote areas rely 100% on roaming revenues, and don't even offer their own phones - there's no store you can go to to buy one of "their" phones! But, handset exclusivity problems with the big carriers are taking a bite, even out of this. This situation promises to get worse with the new 700 MHz systems being deployed (again, with Verizon and AT&T getting the bulk of the non-D-Block spectrum allocation).
Also, carriers (the big ones anyway) are presently fighting the FCC to prevent mandatory DATA roaming, even as they continue to allow VOICE roaming. It's easy to see why: Data revenue is largely replacing voice revenues on the networks. Follow the money.
Not sure if that's entirely so. I have a VirginMobile phone which runs on the Sprint network. AFAIK it cannot roam and I never had any roaming charges. This phone works just about anywhere I ever traveled. So they must have a rather thick blanket of sites.
[...]
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Virgin Mobile is an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), or at least it used to be. I think it is owned by Sprint now, as you indicate. It surely uses Sprint's network. Here's a list:
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Even with it's MVNO's Sprint is the number # player - a distant 3rd place from Verizon & ATT, both in terms of revenues and total number of subscribers. There are persistent rumors that Sprint and T-Mobile will eventually have to merge in order to compete. However, even that merger would place the combined entity in a distant
3rd place. Yikes!! They recently teamed up on the Clearwire venture, so some read the tea leaves as fortelling the eventual merger. Plus, in my humble opinion, I just don't see Deutche Telecom's vision for 4G absent a merger. (parent of T-Mobile).
I have a Sprint phone also, and it does indeed "digital roam" (at higher rates) when I visit Mom. So, either the MVNO doesn't have roaming partners, or you're just lucky enough to never go where Sprint lacks service. Sprint is one of the 4 nationwide footprint carriers, so that's entirely possible, if unlikley.
It's a bit difficult for AT&T customers to roam on Verizon and vice versa since AT&T is GSM and Verizon is CDMA. In fact, AT&T and T- Mobile have incompatible 3G bands.
For the indoor end of this antenna, you should get another copy of your physical phone - a defunct one would work, since you'll only be using its antenna - but it should be ideally matched to the phone's antenna, and impedance matching should be trivial for a full-on engineer. :-)
Then either a yagi or log-periodic - I'd vote for something more like the log-periodic, because of its bandwidth - aren't cell phones using spread-spectrum these days?
Owned by Sprint, that's probably why the really good plan I have seems no longer available for new subscribers. $15 every 90 days, which buys airtime at 18c/min, which rolls over pretty much forever. If you need more minutes you can add as needed, same rate. It doesn't get better than that.
Wow, I didn't know there are this many.
You might be right there.
I've had situations where I let business people make a call with my lowly VirginMobile bare-bones phone because their fancy AT&T phone couldn't get a connection, and they were in a pickle because of that. The topper was a seasoned business traveler who has a fancy phone and then another one. Exactly my VriginMobile model (Nokia 2115i), just in case, and he had his reasons to carry that along ...
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AT&T is GSM, and they are also HSPA and UMTS. And coming soon, LTE.
You do realize there are 164 different carriers in the United States, right? I was not implying that ATT / Verizon have any real interest in roaming on each other's networks, nor could they in most areas of the country due to incompatible formats. About the only places that I know of where they have overlapping technologies would be the recently merged/acquired stuff. Like the recent acquisition & splits of Frontier Wireless.
Also, there was a phone introduced last month (to some limited fanfare) that could do both GSM and CDMA. I guess this is the non-ATT world's answer to roaming in Europe? I wonder if that product will be a commercial success? It would have to be more expensive - considering the IP licensing??
Isn't AT&T rated worst mobile in the nation? (And Verizon the best?) ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
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The Ground Zero Mosque IS Appropriate When Renamed...
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No idea. And I don't really care because the big ones do not offer good plans for people like me with extremely low cell use. Heck, I don't even use up the 28 minutes my $5/month buy, it keeps piling up. By now I could talk for 15 hours straight without paying one extra dime.
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That would waste signal. It is better to use an antenna with a good reflector. For example a bowtie mounted under the ceiling where John and his wife use the phone the most. Of course, those have a really low WAF unless tucked away somewhere.
Doesn't matter, the cell bands are rather narrow.
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I've been conducting an experiment for about a month... forwarded the home phones to the cells. Works just fine, and I got a listing of minutes... ~190.
So I'm going to dump my land lines and save $122/month ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
The Ground Zero Mosque IS Appropriate When Renamed...
The Obama Monument to American Impotence
"Narrow" is a relative concept. The PCS bands span 140 MHz, (1850 to 1990 MHz) though no single network provider could occupy all of it (i.e., be licensed for it). However, you will find providers who have more than one block of spectrum in a given market.
See Bandplans:
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The Cellular bands span less spectrum, but you're still looking at tens of MHz's. Ditto for the new AWS bands coming out.
And if your provider operates in both bands (as AT&T does in many places) then you'll need a broadband antenna.
Still, not hard to come by. This technology has been beat to death.
You must have done something wrong there. My land line charges add up to maybe 1/5th of that. Ok, long distance has been completely cut off from Missy Bell because we can get that at a fraction of the rates and without any monthly charge. Missy Bell had a hissy fit about that one. To add insult to injury, they now have to do the billing for that 3rd party.
International calls and phone conferences can be lengthy, hours at a time. But at prices between zero and 3c/min, oh well, not much skin off my nose there.
Then about a month ago cell service out here dropped dead. As in zero bars, nada, zip, zilch. Was down for over a week until they fixed the tower. That would be so not cool for business.
And how do you plan to send a fax now? Web service? Or run over to Kinko's?
Oh, hint: When you are in several phone marathons with client design teams 1-800 dial-ins are not free on cell phones. Then you'll really see the cost skyrocket unless you have an expensive super-fat cell plan. Also, sometimes the voice quality over a cell phone isn't quite the same as that via a professional office-grade speaker phone. I don't use more than 10 cell minutes in some months but I sure spend 20h or more per month on the office phone, with clients.
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http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
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