chamb

I can verify that Shentel has activated more LTE around Hagerstown, Md. I have not had the ability to prove it, but I am almost positive that we have two new sites along I-81 which covers almost all of I-81 as it goes through Maryland. I can verify LTE at the Maryland Border with West Virginia. It drops on the Potomac River Bridge between Maryland & West Virgina. But going North through Maryland around Hagerstown, I can hold the signal until I pass the Hagerstown Airport just north of Hagerstown. This is about a total of 11 miles. Too far for one site. Almost has to be two or more. I have tried to locate just what sites are active, but a general lack of time and and the hazard of driving around in traffic while watching signal strength on a screen while being blinded by the sun just does not turn me on. Also, I ditched a HTC EVO LTE because it would not latch onto a LTE signal when it should, but the Galaxy S III is also getting on my nerves too as it will allow me to drive up to a cell site and sit there while not showing any LTE. But drive away, and you get LTE popping up. This makes it very had to prove if a site is active or not. I am fairly positive we have 3 sites active in Hagerstown and while Sensory will take a while to show it, I think we are getting fairly good coverage in quite a large area of the city at least on the street. It will take the activation of a few more sites to cover the city properly, but Shentel is really putting a dent in Hagerstown., I am sure inside building coverage is still not acceptable in many places, but I have been in some buildings that did have LTE coverage. One thing for sure, The Sensorly map for Hagerstown is turning purple and there is more coverage there than shown. I just can not drive down every street and nobody else can either, but I do take some alternate routes sometimes to help fill the map.

Robert - one question -- were you using a standard PRL or maybe one that might have favored 800 for some reason??? When you think about it, using 800 when idle is a great way to have maximum bars showing on the handset. Will make the users say "WOW" after years of seeing one bar or less.

Boosted20V - Yes, that is how it is supposed to work. However, how many different handset manufacturers do we have? How many cell site and core switch vendors? Lots of places for issues to creep in. I am really waiting to prove that I can walk into a building and continue with a call without worrying about it dropping.

Robert, Have you found yourself in a situation where the 1900 1X voice was extremely weak and had your phone switch to the 800 1X. To state it better, have you seen a 1900 voice signal get down to -100 or worse and successfully transfer a working call to 800 meg. Can you prove a call will survive a transfer back and forth from 1900 to 800 and vice versa??? Sprint is going to look awful bad if they do not have this working correctly.

Hello Mr Sensorly, A few comments for you. I think about every heavy user of S4GRU really likes your App. I think you will find some real Techies on S4GRU and at least a few who think they are techies. We are the type people you need for Sensorly. I have been using Sensorly for awhile and thought I understood how to use it. But now, after following a few conversations here, I am beginning to question some things. Could you give us sort of a mini user manual or some instructions. I was under the impression that we had to use "MAP TRIP" to have the app collect and report data to you. I thought we had to hit the "start button". If we want to collect and send data for long periods and make sure it continues uninterrupted while we do other things with the phone, what should we be doing when we start the app?? I had thought that the app might not collect and report unless the start button was depressed. If we do NOT need to be using "MAP TRIP", why do you sort of have it highlighted and why is it there?? I looked at your FAQ on your web site? Some good info there, but not really any instructions on how to use the APP. The app is not difficult to use, but eventually a techie starts digging into it and has questions.

Bakedc4-- YES, as Robert just said in the previous post, grab the Sensorly App from the app store, It is Free. Boot it on your phone and click on "Map Trip" Do this when you are out traveling around especially any area that you know has 4G. It will use your phone to record the locations of the 4G and post it on the Sensorly Map. When you get home, then take a peek at the Sensorly map on your PC. This app does use your phone to collect the 4G data and send it to Sensorly. You have to allow GPS to function on your phone and be willing to allow the program to report the data to the web site. Two helpful hints --- Plug your phone into a power cord if you do this for hours as it does take some power although not real excessive. Remember to turn off Sensorly when you are not using it. I have been doing this around Hagerstown, Md and a cell site just N.E. of there. Take a look on Sensorly at what just one person can do. I had talked to a Lucent technician and it probably was the one you seen. He mentioned several sites in your area but he did not volunteer any exact site names or villages.

I have had that exact thing happen to me several times and I never have figured out why it happens. Most of the time, things work well. I like to click on "Menu" and then "details" after I start the program. I will bring some good info to your screen and you can tell the app is calling home to dump its info. However, it is tempting to watch this screen when you should be placing your attention on driving. Beware, this can be dangerous. I suspect that the app may go sort of "bonkers" when you are traveling through a LTE area and it is reporting this via LTE, and then you suddenly switch to a 3g cell site several miles away. Just a guess as to why it fails, but nothing more.

This is intended for "Sensorly" as well as for the users of S4GRU Web Site. The Sensorly app does work. I personally placed about all the 4G LTE info on Sensorly around the Hagerstown,Md area by just activating Sensory and taking a drive around two new cell sites recently activated by Shentel. The bad part is that hardly anybody else appears to have Sensorly activated on their new LTE phone. I surely burned up quite a few dollars in gasoline and did it deliberately. But this is not the way to get the mapping done fast and totally. We need quite a few people to download Sensorly and turn it on as they travel around. A US mail carrier, a UPS or Fedex carrier might really cover almost every street over a short period. I only traveled some of the major routes just to give some idea of what was available, The question is - how do we get more people to join with us to map the entire country??? Somehow we need to "spread the word" about Sensorly. People need to download the app, boot the program, click on "Map Trip" and then click "start". After your trip, you will see any coverage you happened to encounter as you drove around. On long trips, you need a power cord as the app does continuously use your phone to make checks and send the data to Sensorly. Not a extremely big battery hog, but on long trips, you need to consider the battery usage. And - you need to remember to turn the app off when appropriate.

Shentel turned on another LTE site. Upgraded an old site to Network Vision with LTE. At Ringgold, Md just northeast of Hagerstown, Md. I drove by it in several directions and it shows on the Sensorly Map. 28-29 meg down and about 12-14 up sitting along the road next to the site. Located near 13840 Smithsburg Pike (Route 64), Smithsburg, Md. in an apple orchard high on a hill. While this site has a Smithsburg address, it does not really reach into the village of Smithsburg. The site(s) covering that village is not converted to NV yet.

Robert, Allow me to take this a step further. Even if it did happen in the lab, we do not know exactly how they were doing the test. Did they have a Sprint Cell site, even a mini one, with standard software and seen the problem??? Yes, they seen something, but what? Just exactly how did they see the problem??? Neither one of us was in the lab situation, so we can only guess how they stumbled onto the issue. I will be the first to say that the HTC has a much worse performance, but when you consider that the Samsung will also hesitate to connect to a weak LTE signal, then I question if we maybe have two problems. Problem 1 - the HTC is just a poor performer compared to the Samsung when dealing with LTE. Problem 2 - something else tends to cause BOTH the HTC and Samsung to NOT prefer LTE signals in weak areas. This is new technology and it surely is possible to have two problems or even more.

Digiblur -- Is it possible that forcing the phone to LTE causes the Sprint Cell site to just accept this user and throw out any requirement it may have when a phone is capable of both 3G and 4G??? I surely respect any input you give on this as I can tell you are quite knowledgeable on the subject. Yes, the HTC phone has a serious issue when compared to the Samsung. However, they BOTH have some issues connecting to LTE in weak areas. THE HTC is just much worse in this area, but the Samsung does have the issue to a lessor extent. Could Sprint be comparing signal strength or error rate from the LTE phones and making a judgement to keep the phone connected to 3G even though 4G would work?? Could Sprint be denying LTE to phones in weak areas in order to avoid the transfer to 3G that has a high possibility of happening later??? Maye Sprint does not desire continual transferring between 3G and 4G that may happen in weak areas?? The question still remains-- Could Sprint be causing some of this and the HTC phone just shows the issue more frequently.??

I have a question for the "techies" that understand Sprint's Network Vision cell site equipment. We are blaming the HTC EVO LTE phone for several problems. It will not hold on to the LTE signal in weak areas and it also will not find LTE for us in weak areas. It is much worse in both areas compared to the Samsung Galaxy S III. See my earlier post in this thread. Now my question -- Could the Sprint cell site equipment be controlling these phones and not allowing them to switch to the LTE Signal??? Is it possible that the cell site equipment is looking at the signals from the phone and making a judgement that the user would be better off remaining on 3G. There probably has to be some type of handshake and agreement between the phone and cell site equipment and maybe the Core Switch. Maybe it is Sprint that is not allowing the phones to access the LTE unless the signal from the phone meets some requirement. One thing for sure, the HTC phone is not performing nearly as well as the Samsung. I tested this extensively and actually dumped the HTC phone back in Sprint's lap. I now have the Samsung Gaxaxy S III. A much better phone. It will actually hold on to the Sprint LTE signal for about 1/2 mile further range all around a cell site. This is a very big item as this also probably means it will hold on to a connection as you walk into a building too. The Samsung also has an issue with initially connecting to the LTE in a weak area, but it is much better at finding and connecting to the LTE than the HTC. I proved this time and time again. I did find that the Samsung phone would stay connected to an extremely weak LTE signal and it held on while I ran speed tests that failed because the signal was so weak. This could actually be a negative as who wants to hold on to a weak signal that will not work while a good 3G signal may be in the neighborhood. Since both phones have an issue connecting to a weak LTE signal, could Sprint itself be causing some of this issue with the way the Network Vision software is configured. Could Sprint have some reason to want users with weak signals to use the 3G over the LTE??

OK, here is my comparison of the HTC EVO LTE to the Samsung Galaxy S III. About 10 days ago, just one single LTE site was activated in Hagerstown, Md. I was nursing an old phone and just waiting for LTE to hit the area. I immediately obtained a nice new HTC EVO LTE based on the reputation of previous HTC phones. I had some time to play around, so I first made sure I had the latest software and then I installed the Sensorly app. I started driving around this new cell site to see how the coverage was and how far I could get from the site. I was disappointed. I knew it was going to be less coverage area than the 3G, but I did not expect the coverage area to be so small. Looking at the Sensory mapping after a drive around the area really showed how poor it was. I started to get into the debug menu and the engineering menus to look at signal strength, etc. As I drove away from the site, as the signal strength fell to -109, I would lose the LTE. Again, this did not sound right to me and this web site sort of verified that my sickening feeling was warranted. To make things worse, as I would turn around and drive back the same path toward the cell site, the phone would not find any LTE for quite some time and I might have to get within a block or two of the site before the LTE would show up again. Sometimes I would pull over into a parking lot and toggle airplane mode in an attempt to get LTE back. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it did not. Sometimes I would see the 4G ICON appear and just as quick, the phone would revert to 3G. I traveled several routes repeatedly and the LTE would drop every time at about the same spot. Once it dropped, this meant a trip back toward the site in order to obtain LTE again. I was aggravated at what I was seeing. I either had bad hardware or the software was bad and I could not prove it either way. If I had bad hardware, I wanted the phone to be gone before my 14 day return window expired. On Friday, after losing some sleep over this problem, I returned the HTC and picked up a Samsung Galaxy S III. I had no faith that HTC was going to fix the software anytime soon if that was the problem and I sure did not want any bad hardware in my possession. As I departed the Sprint Store with the Samsung Galaxy S III, I drove toward the LTE coverage area and "BINGO", it went into LTE mode long before I got to the strong coverage area. My first taste of LTE with the Samsung was almost a mile further out from the cell site than the coverage was with the HTC. I pulled over and downloaded "Speedtest". Was getting 6-7 meg download and about 3 up. It was surely somewhat of a weak signal, but it sure beat the HTC that could not get any signal at that location. I sat there and downloaded "Sensorly" and turned it on. I then went to the cell site area and started driving away in the various directions that I had traveled with the HTC EVO LTE. In EVERY case, I could go much further away from the cell site than I did with the HTC. I could always go 1/2 mile further and in one direction where the road was level and unobstructed, I gained a whole mile in coverage. I started smiling as I surely had a better phone and/or better software. Yes, the Samsung performs much better than the HTC. Nobody asked me for a recommendation, but I personally am very glad I bit the bullet and dumped the HTC back in Sprint's lap. The HTC looks nice, is easy to use, and I thought it was my first choice. But now, I would not recommend it at all. To be fair, in the extra territory covered by the Samsung, speed tests were erratic. service was there, but it was not as solid as it is close to the cell site. I even pulled over into some parking lots to run speed tests at the fringe areas and I did run into a spot or two that gave be about 4 meg down and zero up. The download speed was up and down during the test, and you could not even run the upload portion. I am sure the phone was struggling with the weak signal, but at least it saw the signal and tried to use it. To be fair again, the Samsung also struggles with getting LTE back after it drops the signal. When I lost the LTE on the Samsung and turned around,it also took awhile for the phone to allow me to see the 4G ICON again. Toggling the Airplane mode was also a help just like with the HTC. But it did find 4G much faster than the HTC did. If anybody wants to see the results of my driving around with Sensorly plotting it on their map, just input 21740 at the Sensorly site. Almost everything you see there was my testing. This is only one active LTE site at 967 Commonwealth avenue in Hagerstown, Md. No pollution from other nearby sites. Now for the HTC employee that might see this posting ---- About 10 years ago, I had a Samsung phone that was very poor on 3G reception. I tossed it and vowed to never buy another Samsung phone. I told a bunch of people to avoid Samsung because of my bad experience. But now, it is HTC that has the bad product and it is still bad after being on the market for several months. I do not expect to buy a HTC again and surely will not recommend that anybody else buy one. Burn me once and I jump away. If it is bad hardware, STOP churning them out. If it is bad software, shame on HTC for not issuing a fix in about two days. Either way, HTC looks bad. When Samsung gives me an extra 1/2 mile in range around a cell site in all directions, HTC has a problem. When I have an HTC EVO LTE 3 blocks away from a LTE site and it is still thinking about possibly detecting the LTE, you have a big problem. An extra 1/2 mile around a cell site is a whole lot of geography. HTC, your reputation is starting to float toward the sewer. Allow this situation to continue, and things will get even more smelly.

Can somebody around Harrisburg Please download "Sensorly" and use it. It is a battery killer to some extent, but use a car charger when traveling around with Sensorly turned on. You would not want to have it turned on all day in an office building while using your internal battery. No need for that anyway. Go to Sensorly web site and look at Sprint 4 G. (The first one in the list). I am mapping the site in Hagerstown. Just started so it is not complete. I do it whern I can find the time and the LTE is active. It takes awhile to figure out all the little tricks to using Sensory.

I had LTE in Hagerstown today at least for awhile. Looks like it was coming from a cell site at 937 Commonwealth ave. I took a quick look at the site and could see some radios on top of the tower. No technicians were at the site. Stopped on the street and did a speed test, 26-27 Meg down and 10-12 meg up. That was the best reading I got anywhere. As it moved away from the site, the speeds slowed to 14-16 down and 9 up. I did eventually lose the 4g and did not have enough time to head back toward the site to see if I could get it again. I did not find LTE in any other part of Hagerstown yet. Using a brand new HTC EVO LTE. It did pick up the LTE with out any special action on my part.

Yes, Yes, Yes, Very important. Currently, the phones hold onto a 1900 PCS signal until the receive level drops to -105 and then the call drops. But after the signal gets below -100 , you start to notice missing words or partial words in a conversation. With the 800 meg being available, Sprint needs to allow the call to switch to 800 when the receive level of the 1900 meg goes below about -100. Yes, allow it to switch back if suddenly the 1900 level gets very good again. Walking into a basement or building interior while using 1900 will quite often drop the call now. Sprint needs to NOT allow that to happen. When the 1900 signal goes to crap status, they need to switch to 800 BEFORE the customer has issues. This is very important and failure to get this right is not an option.

I am in a one story home with a drywall type celing with loads of insulation on top of it. Then a standard plywood and shingle roof. My Airave will sit in the middle of the home and stay locked onto the GPS about 99.99% of the time. It a bad thunderstorm with lots of clouds, it may lose the GPS for a few minutes, but the Airave countinues to work OK. I do not know what happens if the Airave loses GPS for hours. I never experienced that.

I personally have an Airave and can verify that this is about correct. Depends on the construction type of the home or business, but the figures are about right. Put one in the center of your home and it will cover the entire home unless you have a very big mansion.

When you put radios up high behind the antennas, the received signal from the handset is fed to the receiver with little or no loss. This makes things work very very well. With Radios on the ground, you could crank up the transmitter and feed a very strong signal to the transmitting antenna. But the handset can not do the same on that end. One of the thngs that makes RRU's work so good is the ability to receive the signal from the handset with no loss in the coax before it gets to the radio receiver. The signal received at the cell site from the little tiny transmitters in a cell phone is normally very weak. Being able to capture this signal and process it with little or no loss is what makes things work so well.

Yep, I steer clear of Samsung. When you happen to be in a low signal area, they fail to work properly. Samsung has had the problem for years. I am not positive the problem is there on the latest Samsung phones, but I sure am not going to buy one to find out. I have dropped more calls on a Samsung phone than all other brands combined.