AA/FC

Site nearest me looks like they could switch it on today.  Site second nearest to me they've done fiber and nothing else.  And one up in Richfield looks ready to go too but it's been quite a while waiting.  And third nearest to me it doesn't look like much has happened though I've seen an Ericsson truck at the site.  So.  Still in process for a lot of things.

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! 

The problem with the one on the roof of the high school is that it's relatively low to the ground - whereas the 94th tower is between 200 and 300 feet off the ground.  There's lots of trees around the high school too so when I was on ground level I didn't get signal from that tower any farther than 98th and near Oxboro or thereabouts.   They're probably still adjusting it since it hasn't been live for more than a couple of weeks.

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!

Hmmmm.  I also got LTE standing right underneath the tower this evening but the signal strength leads me to believe it was the site at Kennedy (pictured below):

 

 

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!

I haven't seen it go LTE as yet (except ONCE but it may have been the Hampshire avenue tower filling in). If I stand in my driveway I get LTE from the Hampshire tower which is neat but not in the house. Oh well.

 

I forgot to mention my signal strength went from -60 to -119 then back to -60 and back to -119 every 3 seconds for about 5 minutes on friday morning right before 7 a.m. It was like watching a weird stopwatch.

Finally it stayed at -60.

 

Thursday night the Ericsson people were there again and there was another guy onsite looking like he was working on the telco connections. So that was two nights in a row. I'm keeping a close watch on that site, 2-3 visits a day. If anyone sees me they must think I'm nuts.

 

I still don't believe that tower has the necessary fiber connections running 100% as the speedtest I ran a minute ago was half a megabit down and 0.26 up. It will get there though. Soon I'd think. The fiber is in place, it's just not connected 100% as yet.

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!

 

No LTE.....yet.

Any idea when they might go live with LTE?

I sense a bandwidth battle between you and Aliensporebomb on this tower 

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.

They usually say around 8 miles on a tower that is now surrounded by buildings, and not congested.

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....

94th Street and Penn Avenue South in Bloomington.

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

Today we have more people there, a pickup truck, a sedan, a van - lots of people arriving.  I wonder if antenna and cabinet work is going to be done today?  Must be in a hurry, this is the second time on a site where I've seen work on a weekend.

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.

Propagation inside the MOA is great otherwise it's a RF deathtrap.. hence the reason everyone has sites in camp snoopy..

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.

Update: I see a new strong blip of LTE in Sensorly right near the Mall of America - the south and west sides of the mall.....

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.

I'd venture to guess a really old sprint site and Nextel was on the collar below it would be easier to tell if is saw the ground EQ

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)

Welcome to the forums.

 

TS

Thank you, Sir!

It's actually a primary Hennepin county tower that is now tied into armer.... sorta kinda my thing (shrug)

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.

Picture time:

 

 

The tower on the left (to the left of the storage facility) is the one both myself and AA/FC posted. The tower on the right side of the screen (to the right of the storage facility) I believe is the Sprint tower for that area.

 

Some interesting stuff there, it looks like there's both legacy cabinets and the LTE cabinets (it's hard to see due to the immense amount of brush against the fence keeping the facility secure).

 

But there's no sign of any other LTE stuff happening there - the top antenna array is pure 3G and the bottom collar is weird - it looks EMPTY. You can see cables snaking out of the pole to the edge but it doesn't appear there's any elements in operation unless they are very thin or a type I'm in familiar with. Mophomanners will know.

 

Don't try driving back there, it's literally slippierier than an ice rink and to get a closer look at cabinets on the ground you'd have to park in the middle of a driveway, cross snow covered railroad tracks and peek thru a fence that is mostly covered with foliage.

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....

Without looking I would assume it's a hacked out nextel site they have been hacking them out prior to modernization.

Are you able to tell from these pictures if it's an old Nextel site, a Sprint site, or something completely different?

I know that tower well - next to Groth Music and behind the McDonalds.

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.