Cellmapper

[NEBRASKACHERS]

I have tried to understand how to use the cellmapper app but it is not easy to understand.  First I launch the app and drive around the cell tower.  It will pick up bands and frequencies and approximate the location on the map with a red dot.  Does anyone know how to make the locations confirmed and add more bands and pcis manually.  The help center is not helping and the people im speaking to about it on twitter seem to be from another country and we are having language issues.  Please help

[ingenium]

You cannot manually add PCIs or bands. It will only log what your phone connects to. So you'll have to just wait for it to collect other PCIs or drive around a bit and let it collect everything.

To move tower locations, you have to load the website on a computer and login to your account. Then it'll let you move them. Just be 100% sure that you're putting the right tower in the right place.

I've found that with enough data, it works pretty well for estimating the tower location. You might also want to change the collection interval from the default of 3 seconds to 1 second. It'll give you a lot more data points.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

[NEBRASKACHERS]

Thank you so much that really helps.  Another question, let's say a tower is on the map with 3 bands detected and someone previously has confirmed it so it has a green circle around a red dot.  However driving around this tower it picks up a fourth band but it's only picking it up on one sector due to switching to another established band so it places a red dot on the map near the other established tower estimating where this band is.  I can move the red dot on top of the established tower but how do I manually say this is definitely established here and get a green ring around it? 

 

[PedroDaGr8]

15 hours ago, NEBRASKACHERS said:

Thank you so much that really helps.  Another question, let's say a tower is on the map with 3 bands detected and someone previously has confirmed it so it has a green circle around a red dot.  However driving around this tower it picks up a fourth band but it's only picking it up on one sector due to switching to another established band so it places a red dot on the map near the other established tower estimating where this band is.  I can move the red dot on top of the established tower but how do I manually say this is definitely established here and get a green ring around it? 

 

When you manually move a tower it will confirm the location. This is not the best system but it is the one they went with. This is why ingenium stressed to ensure your tower location is correct. I have found a number of towers in incorrect locations. 

[NEBRASKACHERS]

Thanks for your help yes this app definitely needs work.  Too bad signalcheck doesn't have a mapping system I would rather use theirs.

 

[ingenium]

Thank you so much that really helps.  Another question, let's say a tower is on the map with 3 bands detected and someone previously has confirmed it so it has a green circle around a red dot.  However driving around this tower it picks up a fourth band but it's only picking it up on one sector due to switching to another established band so it places a red dot on the map near the other established tower estimating where this band is.  I can move the red dot on top of the established tower but how do I manually say this is definitely established here and get a green ring around it? 
 

Are you sure that it belongs to that tower? If you're referring to Sprint, they only have 3 bands on air, and they will all automatically be associated with the same tower (unless it's a mini macro on macro setup, then each B41 sector will be different).

To my knowledge, all the providers except AT&T use the same GCI for a given tower (excluding the mini macro situation above), and will all show as one dot. AT&T will sometimes have 2 GCIs, and thus two dots per tower.

So it's possible that the second dot actually belongs to another nearby tower instead. Especially since you said you just see 1 sector of it. Just be 100% certain that the tower location is correct (perhaps double check that it's actually a tower for the provider you're mapping), because often times people will mark them incorrectly, and that's confusing and frustrating for other users. It's better to leave it as an estimate if you're not absolutely certain.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

[NEBRASKACHERS]

Definitely belongs to that tower using signal check have confirmed it multiple times.  It's actually Verizon who uses 5 bands of LTE.  I use to go searching for all of the towers info when we had Sprint.  Went all the way to Norfolk, Kearney and Missouri.

[Trip]

5 hours ago, ingenium said:

To my knowledge, all the providers except AT&T use the same GCI for a given tower (excluding the mini macro situation above), and will all show as one dot.
 

Unfortunately, this is untrue, depending on location.  For every carrier, I've seen the use of separate GCI patterns for the same tower:

Verizon sometimes offsets by 300000 for AWS.  So I've seen a tower that might have 700 and PCS as 1ADB0xx and AWS as 64190xx.

AT&T sometimes uses entirely different values.  In some markets, it's pattern driven (offset by 6000, for instance), but in others, it's just random.  I've seen it done for individual sectors or individual bands with no real pattern.

T-Mobile sometimes uses entirely different values for 700 in places with certain legacy AWS or PCS gear, and different values for AWS in places where 600/700/PCS all match after 600 is added.

US Cellular offsets by 2000 for 850 in places where they hold 700.

Sprint is the worst offender in this regard; due to the 0x1450 offset of Band 41, any site that has Band 41 has at least two GCI patterns.  Use of Mini Macros or Massive MIMO means every sector has a different GCI on Band 41.  And if a site is or was shared with Clear gear, that's another GCI used or formerly used there.

- Trip

[PedroDaGr8]

Quote

Are you sure that it belongs to that tower? If you're referring to Sprint, they only have 3 bands on air, and they will all automatically be associated with the same tower (unless it's a mini macro on macro setup, then each B41 sector will be different).

To my knowledge, all the providers except AT&T use the same GCI for a given tower (excluding the mini macro situation above), and will all show as one dot. AT&T will sometimes have 2 GCIs, and thus two dots per tower.

 

6 hours ago, Trip said:

Unfortunately, this is untrue, depending on location.  For every carrier, I've seen the use of separate GCI patterns for the same tower:

Sprint is the worst offender in this regard; due to the 0x1450 offset of Band 41, any site that has Band 41 has at least two GCI patterns.  Use of Mini Macros or Massive MIMO means every sector has a different GCI on Band 41.  And if a site is or was shared with Clear gear, that's another GCI used or formerly used there.

- Trip

This really depends on the area. On the west coast, things are very predictable. From my experience in the PNW, the following is true:

Each tower has a single GCI for all bands. Additionally, the bands tend to follow a pattern: Sectors 0, 9, and 18 are B25, Sectors 2, 11, and 20 are B26, everything else is B41. Single-, dual-, and tri-band towers have sector IDs between 0 and 20. MassiveMIMO and '5x B41 carrier'-towers also follow this pattern but will have sectors numbers greater than 20.

MiniMIMOs are the exception because they get a unique GCI for each RRU. That being said, the GCI tend to be 1 to 2 away from each other and the two B41 sectors per GCI are paired as follows: 49/57, 50/58, and 51/59. Since they are typically deployed in threes here it makes it very easy to figure out which GCI go together because you will never have two of the same sector pair in a cluster. 

The following is a typical MiniMIMO cluster (which replaced a Clearwire site) GCI and sector format: 0xB6BC9 - Sectors 51/59, 0xB6BCA - Sectors 50/58, 0xB6BCC - Sectors 49/57 

 

On the other hand, when I visited the bourbon trail in KY, it seems that each band on a tower would have its own GCI and they were pretty random. They were all roughly 202000 apart but the exact amount seemed random. 

[Trip]

In this area, it's a bit of a mess on Sprint.  Here are a few particularly egregious examples.

Huntington:  Base GCI is 0302FBxx.  Had Clear across the street as 04EC81xx.  The Clear gear was replaced by 8T8R on the original site as 03174Bxx.  The 8T8R has since been removed in favor of Massive MIMO, which is 031D06xx/031D07xx/031D08xx.

Lee High School:  Base GCI is 0303A4xx.  Added Mini Macros as 030AA4xx/030AA6xx/030AACxx.  Those have since been replaced with Massive MIMO as 031DDExx/031DDFxx/031E00xx.

- Trip

[mdob07]

11 hours ago, Trip said:

Sprint is the worst offender in this regard; due to the 0x1450 offset of Band 41, any site that has Band 41 has at least two GCI patterns.  Use of Mini Macros or Massive MIMO means every sector has a different GCI on Band 41.  And if a site is or was shared with Clear gear, that's another GCI used or formerly used there.

- Trip

A Sprint Ericsson site with M-MIMO or Mini Macro for B41 will have 5 GCIs for the same site, 1 for B25, 1 for B26, and 3 for B41.

[RAvirani]

59 minutes ago, mdob07 said:

A Sprint Ericsson site with M-MIMO or Mini Macro for B41 will have 5 GCIs for the same site, 1 for B25, 1 for B26, and 3 for B41.

Yes. It's extraordinarily frustrating. 

[mdob07]

Anybody else having trouble uploading points to CellMapper over the last couple of days?

Sent from my SM-G988U using Tapatalk

[NEBRASKACHERS]

I noticed this also

[NEBRASKACHERS]

Seems to be working now

[NEBRASKACHERS]

When cellmapper comes up with a new tower it finds how does it come up with the tower number?

[RAvirani]

1 hour ago, NEBRASKACHERS said:

When cellmapper comes up with a new tower it finds how does it come up with the tower number?

GCI. 

[mdob07]

3 hours ago, NEBRASKACHERS said:

When cellmapper comes up with a new tower it finds how does it come up with the tower number?

 

1 hour ago, RAvirani said:

GCI. 

At least for me Cellmapper defaults to showing the GCI in decimal instead of hex. I always change the setting on the app and website to show me the hex value. If you use Signal Check Pro you're likely used to seeing it in hex form.

[NEBRASKACHERS]

This cellmapper app has a lot of issues with working then not working.

[PedroDaGr8]

6 hours ago, NEBRASKACHERS said:

This cellmapper app has a lot of issues with working then not working.

It seems they process data points in batch form. I can't imagine it is a very profitable endeavor. I upload regularly and sometimes the datapoints post after 24h and other times it can be almost a month before they post. 

[RCM]

I started using Cellmapper a few months ago. I found and confirmed a ton of towers and added a lot of polygons. Then the OTA update came down after SprinT-Mobile won their court case and all of our phones switched from MCC-MNC 310-120 to 312-530. Now I'm having to start all over again 😠. Then we have April 1 rapidly approaching.

[ingenium]

 

 

 

 

I started using Cellmapper a few months ago. I found and confirmed a ton of towers and added a lot of polygons. Then the OTA update came down after SprinT-Mobile won their court case and all of our phones switched from MCC-MNC 310-120 to 312-530. Now I'm having to start all over again [emoji34]. Then we have April 1 rapidly approaching.

 

That's likely because your phone got VoLTE in the OTA. 312-530 is the VoLTE PLMM. My phones have still logged it as 310120 though.

 

For what it's worth, I talked to one of the cellmapper developers a few weeks ago and confirmed which Sprint PLMNs are the same network (those two being some of them). So it should merge them on the site eventually.

 

Edit: Your phone is probably still logging it as 310-120, but may default to showing the 312-530 map. But if it's not showing 310-120 on the Cells screen anywhere, then it's logging as 312-530. Mine shows a blank entry for 312-530, but the actual LTE info is 310-120 (ignore the AT&T entries, my phone is dual SIM so connects to both)

 

 

 

 

 

[jhman101]

On 3/10/2020 at 6:50 PM, RCM said:

I started using Cellmapper a few months ago. I found and confirmed a ton of towers and added a lot of polygons. Then the OTA update came down after SprinT-Mobile won their court case and all of our phones switched from MCC-MNC 310-120 to 312-530. Now I'm having to start all over again 😠. Then we have April 1 rapidly approaching.

I won a V40 from Sprint in January of '19 and ever since I switched to it all my reports show as 312-530  A good chunk of the reporting on Cellmapper for 312-530 in the southern and central US I contributed to.  I'd love to see the data combined into one map.

[RAvirani]

Hi all, I'm looking to purchase an Android for Cellmapper/logging purposes; accordingly, I was wondering if there are any cheap devices you guys recommended that work well with both SCP and Cellmapper. Thanks in advance!

[PedroDaGr8]

33 minutes ago, RAvirani said:

Hi all, I'm looking to purchase an Android for Cellmapper/logging purposes; accordingly, I was wondering if there are any cheap devices you guys recommended that work well with both SCP and Cellmapper. Thanks in advance!

You don't define cheap, but the LG v30 and v40 work well, can be rooted, and can be found for pretty cheap(<$100-150). As expected, the v30 is cheaper than the v40 and I can attest the v30 works very well. That being said, it lacks bands 28, 40, and 71 and has the drawback that Sprint never released Pie for it (the only vendor who didn't). This means some of the 9.0 bandwidth features are not available for SCP, that being said NSG is able to provide this data on 8.0. 

 

Sprint LG V30+ (LS998) LTE Bands:         1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 20, 25, 26, 41 

Sprint Lg V40 (LM-V405UA) LTE Bands: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 20, 25, 26, 28, 40, 41, 71