Is this a cell site?

service

It looks like a cell site.

My friend actually is one of the guys that goes in and wires up new equipment and services to the cell towers. From what I've gathered, cells sites have many different services (Verizon, Tmobile, etc) at each site, and they all lease/rent/buy space on a tower. There's a T1 line going into each one, and at the base is equipment racks to bring in the provider's hardware.

Dave

Yes it is....except here in Florida they are either crooked or sideways.....Ross

Yes, it's a cell site. It's the pretty standard 'three sector' arrangement: There are three 'sets' of antennas, each covering 120 degrees. In each set there are usually three antennas: Two that receive (the signals are combined in a form of diversity reception), and one that transmits. It appears that your tower has the transmit antennas below the receive antennas, but I couldn't really say for sure.

You can also see a couple of covered microwave dish antennas that are probably being used for site to site (point to point) links to other small cell sites, a large hilltop repeater, etc.

Typically, yes -- one company will build a tower, and the other carriers will rent space of the unused space on it. On the other hand, I've seen cases where you have 2 or 3 towers within a few hundred feet of one another because the companies apparently couldn't come to a leasing agreement!

Some of the cell phone companies have maps of their tower locations -- some even with pictures! Sprint's is here:

---Joel Kolstad

arrangement:

each set

combined

appears that

That would make more sense then vice-versa, correct? The received signal is coming from your low-power cell phone, and you'd want a good line-of-sight in order to overcome any transmission power shortcomings.

However, you can transmit from the tower at a much higher power than your cell phone can, so you're not as worried about being lower and can overcome minor LOS shortcomings with brute power, which you can't do with a cell phone.

Dave

Thanks to all to read me and for the informative replies. Was appreciated. I'm looking forward for more replies.

-- Alain(alias:Kilowatt) Montréal Québec PS: 1000 excuses for errors or omissions, i'm a "pure" french canadian! :-) Come to visit me at: