AA/FC

I am begining to think Sprint forgot to throw the switch on the 94th and Penn ave tower. lol. It's been almost 2 months since the tower has been upgraded and still no LTE. It seems like most of the surrounding towers are already live with LTE.... wonder why they're waiting on this one?

It looks like my post was removed by the moderator.... which I have no problem with. But I do want to say my post was NOT a complaint. I was simply giving some examples of my experience with Sprint service. Back on topic: I am still anxiously waiting for Sprint to throw the switch on the 94th and Penn avenue tower!

Ah yes, very good points! After my last post I decided to check my distance from both towers using google maps. I am about 4800 feet from the 94th and Penn tower, and about 7000 feet from the Kennedy site. So I am a bit closer to the Penn ave. tower than I originally thought. Now we just wait for Sprint to throw the switch!

Hmmm, I had no idea that there was a live 4G LTE tower on Kennedy High School. It now makes me wonder just how good of signal I will get once the tower on 94th and Penn goes live. I live about the same distance from Kennedy, as I do from 94th and Penn..... maybe about 4 blocks closer as a bird flies. I get very little to no signal from Kennedy. Maybe I live in a 4G no-mans-land. lol. I can only wait and see I guess. Again, thanks for posting updates!

Yeah, yesterday morning was weird. I noticed 4G around 8:00am and it came and went several times. Until yesterday morning I havd NEVER seen 4G at my house so I automatically assumed the tower on 94th and Penn was going live. Even my normal 3G connection was turning on and off all by itself. I have the SignalCheck Lite app installed on my phone and I could watch the 1xRTT and eHRPD dissapear and reapear every few minutes or so. While this was happeneing, I would toggle airplane mode about every 5-10 minutes to see if I could get 4G to come back and occasionally it would. I have not seen a 4G signal since yesterday morning. I suppose it's possible that I was picking up anoher nearby tower.... but like I said, I've never seen it before so I'm not sure what was going on. I did manage to get a screen shot of SignalCheck while I had 4G.... maybe you can tell by this which tower I was getting it from. At the moment I snapped this shot, it showed pretty poor 4G signal. However, at times it would drop down to the 80-85dBm range.

I noticed 4g at my house this morning, but now its gone again. They must be working on getting 4g turned on at the tower on 94th and Penn.

Thanks for the update!

Any idea when they might go live with LTE?

Hahaha... Yep, probably. I've never met him, and I don't know where he lives, but judging from his posts this must be his "home" tower too.

Thanks for the replies. I'm a ham radio operator so I somewhat understand the varriables in radio wave propagation. Until sprint started doing these upgrades I've never had any interest in cell networks so this side of things is fairly new to me. My original question was using this particular tower as the example. The tower is fairly tall, the sorounding land is fairly flat, most nearby building are 2 story or less, etc, etc. Your 8 mile answer gives me a good idea of the general coverage area for a single tower. My house is less than 1 mile from this tower (as a bird flies) so I'm looking forward to a strong 4G LTE signal once this tower goes live. Thanks again.

I'm sure this topic has been covered many times on various internet forums, but what is the typical coverage area for a tower like the one currently being upgraded on 94th and Penn ave. in Bloomington? How far will this tower reliably provide 4G LTE signal for Sprint customers? Roughly....

Nice! This tower should cover the area where my house is. Thanks for the pics and updates.

What is the location of this site? I hope when this tower goes live it will give me 4G at my house.

I saw someone working on cell equipment on the Savage water tower on 42 & 27 (Dakota ave.). I know they have been working in the area on other towers...... Can anyone confirm if that is Sprint equipment being worked on. Sorry for the poor picture, I'm posting from my phone.

Yeah, I figured all the major carriers had sites inside the mall...... but I did not realize that the mall structure acted as a true farady cage. lol. I was a construction worker back in the late 80's/early 90's and worked on the mall when it was originally built. I don't recall ever seeing the mall structure being wrapped in metal mesh of some sort. lol

I was at the MOA earlier today.... As I was eating lunch with my sister in the south food court, I remembered to cycle the airplane mode on my phone to check for LTE signal. I tried it several times and I got nothing. My sister tried it with her Samsung S3 and also got nothing. This really surprised me considering how strong the signal is on the other side of the exterior wall of the mall. This is a screen shot of the sensorly map showing the dark purple signal on the south side of the mall. The red "X" shows where I was sitting inside the mall. As you can see, I was pretty close to strong signal.... it's weird how it can go from a strong signal, to absolutely nothing within just a few feet. lol

I see my purple DID show up on the sensorly map (along 86th street in Bloomington) but only when zoomed in fairly tight. It's obvious that not all zoom levels get updated equally. Weird.

Nice find! I took a drive over there tonight and tried running Sensorly for the first time. I was getting LTE signal on 86th street all the way to Nicollet ave from the MOA. Not much signal north or south of 86th, however. We'll see if the purple appears on the Sensorly map..... then I'll know if I was running it properly. lol

I was in Burnsville last night near the intersection of country road 42 and Nicollet ave where there seems to be very good 4G LTE coverage. I was killing time waiting for my next call (I was working) and I decided to run a quick speed test. I was very impressed. See for yourself...... Not too bad! I realize this is probably not going to be the normal speeds once the entire system is up and running but it was still pretty cool to see those speeds on a mobile device.

Gotcha..... Next time I'm in the area I'll see about getting some ground equipment shots. If this is indeed a Sprint site, will this one eventually be getting the new LTE equipment? Or is Sprint re-designing their netwrok to such a degree that some older towers will now be obsolete? (i.e. this old tower will no longer be needed)

Thank you, Sir! I figured it was. I know VERY little about cell towers, or cell systems in general. However, the Minnesota ARMER system is a bit of a hobby for me. I drove over there today and brought my DSLR camera with me to get better shots of the tower west of the storage facility. (near the RR tracks) Pics at bottom of post.... Are you able to tell from these pictures if it's an old Nextel site, a Sprint site, or something completely different?

Yep! I beleive it is also a Minnesota "ARMER" tower, which is an acronym for "Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Responce"..... it's the state wide Police and Emergency two-way radio system.

Hello, This is my first post on s4gru.com. I stumbled upon this site a few weeks ago while searching Google trying to find updates for Sprint LTE in the Twin City area. I was very pleased to find this site and specifically this thread. I thought I should finally register and make a post after seeing tower work in East Bloomington about an hour ago. I'm not sure if this is a Sprint tower or not but there was a man with what looked like a black sweatshirt and hood working up on this tower. (had to see in the pic) There were 2 or 3 other guys standing on the ground at the base of the tower wearing hard hats, and 2 pickup trucks with enclosed trailers.... with no company names visible anywhere. This is the tower located in the Hennepin County DOT maintenance facility behind the McDonald's at 77th and Nicollet in East Bloomington. Maybe someone can tell us if this is Sprint doing upgrades..... or some other company's tower.