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boomerbubba

S4GRU Premier Sponsor
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Everything posted by boomerbubba

  1. I did not "smack down" anyone. Sorry, but straightforward technical facts are what I am most interested in here, not stroking noobies. Perhaps the new user didn't even realize that he could get access to the Sponsor maps, or how to go about actually determining LTE coverage for specific towers. In any case, I challenged his unsubstantiated claim that he had isolated a certain tower, and I still challenge it based on facts, not feelings. I see no evidence that TonyLibations isolated that LTE tower at all. If he has such evidence, he can just explain it. And please don't misstate my comment. I did not make an "assertion that Sensorly may not be useful." In fact, I said, "Sensorly hotspots provide a very useful clue, but they do not resolve the analysis with certainty." That is factually correct. Not trying to start a war either, but I stand by my comments. Sorry you took offense, but then I wasn't even addressing you in the first place. Have a nice day.
  2. It's fairly easy to tell which one is Sprint (I posted some pictures of the Baymeadows Sprint tower being upgraded earlier, dated Oct 18th) and the Sensorly map displays coverage for Sprint, the strong signal areas will be closer to the site, whereas the weaker signals will be farther away from the site. I wasn't asking a general question. (I know very well how to determine which towers are live.) I was asking a very specific question about a specific comment by user TonyLibations, who had asserted without evidence that he knew the tower providing his LTE signal. This was only his second post here, and he is not even an S4GRU sponsor so he lacks access to the authoritative maps of Sprint towers. In addition, although he provided no signal strength reading, his Speedtest results were just middling. So he likely was not very near the LTE tower in question. In my experience, such comments are wrong more often than they are right, often based on the wrong assumptions. BTW, I also quibble with your generalizations. Sensorly hotspots provide a very useful clue, but they do not resolve the analysis with certainty. The only way to do that, for a hypothesis that Tower X is live, is to get up close to that tower and survey all sectors with strong RSRP readings all around using the device's LTE Engineering screen. Sometimes that effort disproves the hypothesis instead of proving it! Also, physical evidence of NV upgrades do not prove that a site is live. I live in an active LTE development area, where we at S4GRU have documented all the live towers to date, right down to their individual sector IDs. But we still have several examples of towers that have had obvious upgrades for weeks, with no LTE signal yet. So while physical evidence is useful corroboration, it is not sufficient to prove any such hypothesis.
  3. How do you know this tower is providing the LTE signal? There is no app or utility that directly provides this information. It takes some legwork in the field. For that matter, how do you know this tower is a Sprint site at all?
  4. Now that I have had a chance to try the latest Sensorly version with a live LTE signal, I see that it does report the RSRP and RSRQ values for LTE (not RSSI). I still prefer to use the system LTE Engineering screen because -- in addition to this signal strength information -- it also shows LTE-specific IDs for surveying which tower the LTE signal is coming from. I can just keep Sensorly running in the background for its primary purpose, which is harvesting crowdsourced data for the Sensorly server.
  5. I don't know. I always just use the GS3's system LTE Engineering screen to get the RSRP signal strength. I typically am using that screen to get LTE sector IDs anyway when I am surveying for LTE towers. I noticed that my Sensorly app just updated with a new feature that is supposed to enhance its LTE signal strength display. I'll check it out.
  6. As a sponsor, you have access to the exclusive master maps at S4GRU that essentially show all Sprint towers, because they all will be upgraded sooner or later. Look at the interactive Indianapolis map to see what Sprint towers are nearby that might be live. You also have access to the NV Sites Complete maps that show which Network Vision sites have been accepted by Sprint's project management. (These might or might not be live with LTE, but likely are.) None of the IDs from Netmonitor have anything to do with LTE. These are 1x CDMA IDs. Correlating these CDMA IDs to physical towers is possible, but it takes some trial-and-error field work. But that still won't show you where the LTE signal is coming from, because the LTE signal might originate at a different site than the CDMA signal does. Also, the signal strength shown in Netmonitor is the CDMA 1x signal, not the LTE signal strength. This thread shows how to find your LTE signal strength. Then you have to do the field work at a tower you suspect have the LTE, by getting close to it and logging -- or failing to log -- a strong LTE signal. If you really are ambitious, you can survey around the tower to log the strength of each sector radio. Another resource is the Sensorly site, that shows hospots where others have found strong LTE signals. You can run the Sensorly app yourself to contribute to that crowdsourced data.
  7. Netmonitor (and several other utilities including CDMA Field Test using the Andoid telephony API) do report the coordinates broadcast by the base stations. But those are not always the actual coordinates of the base stations themselves. See this comment in the FAQ thread, and this thread in the Sponsor Forum: CDMA towers that squawk the wrong coordinates
  8. Unfortunately, the signs posted at tower sites often do not even identify the carrier(s). The most authoritative source for Sprint tower maps is the set of Sponsor maps at S4GRU. So long as you avoid Sponsor status, you are crippling your abiltiy to survey Sprint sites. What I don't understand, since you already visited the tower on Railroad, is why you assumed that was not a Sprint tower, but you assumed that the tower you saw on Ulmerton was. Or why you asserted above that no such tower existed north of Ulmerton if you had been there.
  9. If you explore the cross streets on the north side of Ulmerton, in the vicinity of Sprint's pointer about midway between 119th Street and Ridge Road, you will find a cell tower on Google Street View. I am not going to confirm for you, here in this non-Sponsor thread, whether or not this is Sprint's tower. (If you go to that physical location, maybe you can determine that for yourself.)
  10. You need to understand that utilities such as CDMA Field Test do not always show the exact location of sites. Sometimes the locations are offset because the towers themselves are squawking these offset coordinates. For starters, read my comment on the FAQ thread. Then you will understand that while using such utilities is not so simple as you think, they can reliably identify CDMA sites -- when used in conjunction with the S4GRU master maps of the actual tower locations, and a bit of field work. And your factual assertion that the tower you found is the only cell tower in the area is just wrong. Even without employing the S4GRU maps, just using Google Street View, I can find another tower closer to where the map marker actually is plotted on Sprint's own map.
  11. I think you are misreading the Sprint map. That is easy for either of us to do, because Sprint does not allow the user of this interactive map to zoom in with precision. But the way I read the Sprint map, their tower is plotted a bit north of Ulmerton Road. But the tower you show in your own Google map is south of Ulmerton. Also, the tower in your Google map is clearly west of the center of Sprint's map marker. Once again, I suggest that you just become an S4GRU sponsor to gain access to precise maps of the Sprint towers. (I have the advantage over you in this factual discussion, because I can see the S4GRU Sponsor maps and you can't.)
  12. Uh, how do you know this, or think you know this?
  13. Just become a sponsor and you can look up every Sprint site yourself precisely. Hint: The first task at hand would be to see if this is even a Sprint tower at all.
  14. The bogus sites mapped in OpenSignal maps have nothing to do with the coordinates squawked by the CDMA towers, which is a different issue entirely, evident in different apps altogether. OpenSignal purports to compute the tower sites itself from crowdsourced signal-strength data, and the results are pretty useless.
  15. Depending on the OEM screen for CDMA properties, there might be a latitude and longitude shown. But often the value is a raw integer for each one. (And on my GS3, for example, the Longitude value on the 1X Engineering screen is wrong -- simply a bug on the part of Samsung. Other utilities show the raw Longitude correctly as a signed integer.) Assuming the integers are correctly shown for Latitutude and Longitude, to convert them to decimal degrees convert the values to float and divide each one by 14400 . This is an artifact of the obscure definition of the raw integer values within the CDMA standard. It is the raw-integer format that is squawked by the towers. (Each integer increment represents 1/4 of an arc second.) Once these values are properly converted to decimal degrees, you have just done the math that most utility apps do for you. Then you still have to deal with the problems described in this FAQ comment to map the actual towers.
  16. It is certainly possible to isolate towers from the CDMA coordinates shown on devices (either on field test screens or via specialized apps.) But it is not simple, and you might have to do some field work with the S4GRU maps as an additional resource. See my comment in the FAQ thread.
  17. I also don't think Sprint can "launch" until they get decent coverage around downtown, the Capitol complex and the greater UT campus. And while it is tricky to compute percentages until we define the boundaries of the metropolitan area in question -- a smaller area than the large "Austin Market" including Waco, etc., that is tracked in the Running List thread -- my commonsense estimate is that the tower completions in and around Austin are at about 10 percent today. Also readers should bear in mind that the existing Sensorly tracks are pretty faint in many areas, and are partly a function of activist testing that often involves manual toggling to get an LTE signal. Also, Sensorly tracks are almost always captured outdoors. So Sensorly may overstate the coverage that normal users would experience routinely. BTW, folks following this Austin thread in the public Markets forum are advised also to follow the Sponsor thread in the Interactive S4GRU Maps forum, where we have been pretty good at tracking, mapping and logging local progress tower-by-tower.
  18. Those were not maps of sites completed. They were maps of scheduled activity during the coming month (and Sponsors got more detailed interactive maps.) The NV Sites Complete map, available only to Sponsors, tracks actual progress weekly.
  19. Where do recall seeing such maps. The NV Sites Complete map is restricted to Sponsors, and I notice that you don't have that status yet.
  20. Looking at all the available evidence -- Sensorly tracks, the screenshots upthread and the all-important Sponsor maps that show the actual tower locations -- I think it is more than clear that there is only one live LTE site discovered anywhere in the vicinity so far. Wildman located it easily, apparently with the aid of the Sponsor maps, but properly did not identify the Sprint tower ID in this public thread . All the other tracks in the area just confirm that coverage pattern around the site, and confirm that no LTE registers at any other nearby Sprint tower. (Almost certainly, that could be verified empirically with the aid of the LTE Engineering screens to compare the IDs of the sector radios at various observation points.)
  21. Just looking at the current Sensorly map and your Speedtest screenshots earlier, I suspect that the source of your LTE signal might be found around the Sensorly hotspot about 2-3 miles to the northwest of your track on Rockledge Blvd. It is pretty clear from both Sensorly and your own screenshots that you did not have a very strong LTE signal where you were, even though your CDMA 1x signal -- as shown on your status screen and notification bar -- was quite decent from a different, nearby tower. (And once again, I gently suggest that it would help if you gain access to the Sponsor maps so you will know where to look for the Sprint tower sites. That really saves a lot of time and guesswork.)
  22. I'm just trying to help. A common error among new users around here is to assume mistakenly that they know where their connections -- especially 4G connections -- are coming from. If you don't want help, go your own way in peace.
  23. What makes you sure there is a Sprint tower where you think it is? Even if you knew that, how do you know which tower was providing a 4G signal? The first thing you should do is become an S4GRU sponsor to gain access to the actual Sprint tower maps. Then go looking for the actual site hosting the LTE signal. It may be further away than you think.
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