boomerbubba

No, I don't think CDMA Field Test or similar apps show that information, which on my GS3 is available on the hidden engineering screens for 1x, EVDO and LTE respectively. Why is the channel significant to you?

It is hard to find any app that will properly display details about LTE signal strength and IDs that are shown on the LTE Engineering screen of the LTE-capable handsets. If you are just interested in details of your CDMA connections (1x and EVDO), try the CDMA Field Test app. That includes showing eHRPD status on an LTE-capable device.

Thanks. It is disconcerting if true that Sprint's scheme for LTE authentication is inherently flawed and relies on finding some workaround. In any event, from field performance so far -- included tests of the Samsung GS3 -- it is apparent that there is not yet a solid solution.

Doesn't this belong in the Wimax forum?

I think Robert already answered your question. There is not greater geographic coverage. There is greater user capacity.

But we know that the list in the "LTE_available" file is not a list of LTE towers. And as far as the GS3 goes, it does not function perfectly, either. By all reports it outperforms the EVO 4G LTE in holding and/or acquiring an LTE signal. But as someome who has used a GS3 extensively for 4G testing, there also are many times when it will fail to make an LTE conneciton without toggling. So if the root cause of all this is some general weakness in Sprint's authentication scheme, and autoprime knows more detail about this, I would like to hear it and where the information comes from.

Interesting. Can you explain more about how Sprint authentication works? Does this problem also affect the acquisition of LTE signal in the first place or after losing it? Does the OEM workaround involve the mysterious "LTE available" files we have been viewing through the hidden menus on both handsets?

L710VPLI3

LI3 also has some LTE optimization, according to Sprint's release notes and change log.

I guess I never noticed that because I never used it for 2G/3G. But the LTE display is certainly new. As for LTE, I know it is more difficult to harvest data reliably across platforms because the Android API is not so well developed. And several apps mess up some details when they are reporting LTE connections. So I would feel better about Sensorly if they would "show their work" and let me as a user see a local log file in standardized units.

But it didn't apply for LTE because the signal strength can't be reliably collected. I'm wondering if something just went wrong? It's made it incredibly hard to read. I did notice something weird in Chicago.... I never noticed the legend before. What I first noticed was the map itself and its differentiated coloring. I never knew that they were even collecting signal strength data. I wish this data were made available to the Sensorly user locally so we would know.

Has anyone noticed the new Sensorly coverage map online today? I just noticed it this morning. Instead of just mapping the simple blobs for coverage, there now is shading that purports to distinguish signal strength: The legend says: Leaving aside the reference to "bars," which I know will not relate to user's experience on my own phone, I didn't think the Sensorly app even collected signal strength. I thought it just harvested a binary Yes/No value for when a certain type of data connection was present.

Remember that the gain in the antenna comes from shaping its signal to be stronger in certain directions (in 3 dimensions) at the expense of other directions. That gain in this case comes primarily in the vertical dimension, so the signal lobe is flattened. So in theory, an antenna like this atop a very tall tower can have a stronger signal a little farther away than close up. That could be even more enhanced if the test point farther away is at a higher elevation to be closer to the center of the lobe. For example, here is a link to a spec sheet for an antenna that is likely pretty close to what the legacy tower is using. See the "Elevation Pattern" diagram, which shows how horizontally flat the signal pattern is. In very general terms, I would assume that the new antennas would have similar charateristics. Also, if this boomer is configured with two sectors with the lobes oriented roughly north and south to focus on the rural freeway (rather than the more common three-sector tower), that would disadvantage the areas to the east and west.

Or just edit the specific details from S4GRU Sponsor maps out of your post and leave it here. These details really add nothing to your general question. Then everyone can get back on your real topic. There is nothing privilegd about the basic facts that you bring to the topic from your personal knowledge.

Yep. There was really no reason to include details from the Sponsor map in order to frame such a general question. The specific tower ID, location and schedule have no real bearing on that.

If you want to discuss specific tower locations, IDs and schedules from the S4GRU maps, you should do that in one of the Sponsor forums.

It looks like when the connection dropped, the RSRP and RSRQ signal values were populated by your phone's system software with a default value that is the minimum signed long integer value these variables can hold. Not a very elegant user interface. Just think of it like the the values are empty.

Thanks! I also have a stock GS3, and until now I didn't know it even had this utility screen (titled "View LTE_available file"). I thought it was only an EVO 4G LTE thing. Now I have had a chance to browse the populated entries on my handset, scrolling through multiple pages in reverse chronological order as this utility screen allows. And since I happen to be in a city (Austin) that is now in the early stage of LTE development, and I had made some test sweeps today (discussed elsewhere in a Sponsor thread) I had a lot of material to analyze. I am pretty familiar with many of the Sprint CDMA sites in my area, and how their sector BSIDs map geographically to the Sprint tower IDs on the S4GRU master maps. I also am pretty familiar with the state of many towers here as far as their LTE upgrade status goes. I will skip all the screenshots and details for now, but my analysis proves conclusively that, whatever this 'LTE_available file" is, it most certainly is not simply a list of BSIDs on sites with LTE radios. In fact, on mine there are many BSIDs on sites in various states of LTE development, including: BSIDs on a tower that has been confirmed to have a steadily live LTE signal. BSIDs on a tower that has been confirmed visually to have LTE antennas and RRUs, but which has had no live LTE signal available to customers. BSIDs on several towers that unambiguously have no upgraded Network Vision antennas at all. I used to theorize that the contents of this list merely showed which CDMA sector BSIDs were logged concurrent with a detected LTE connection, and this may yet prove to be true. But I think I am even seeing BSIDs in this log that I had connected to when I don't recall even seeing a 4G icon in the Notifications bar. (Of course that anomaly could be a side effect of the GS3's too-often-experienced failure to reconnect to LTE explicitly without toggling the radio. Maybe LTE is being detected under the hood for these purposes even without connecting to it?) So at this point I don't know what to believe about this list.

Just saw this thread for the first time, and I wonder how I missed it before. Along the lines of feedback to Sensorly, at the top of my wishlist is that the app would provide a way for me to capture a log file with records showing my own lat/lon and data connection type, presumably the same data being uploaded to the Sensorly server.

Those are not "sites" in the sense that that term is usually used here -- meaning tower or other antenna locations. Those are 183 points along your own track that Sensorly arbitrarily recorded according to its own timing loop.

What is Tower ID? Where are you reading that? Apparently you are referring to the Serving Cell value on my GS3's LTE Engineering screen. That ID seems to refer to a sector, not to a tower, which typically has three sectors. As far as tracking details in Austin goes, as a Sponsor you have access to this thread, where we recently have published many details of live LTE rolling out in Austin, along with the privileged S4GRU tower mapping data that we really can't discuss in this public forum. We have correlated several towers with multiple sectors to the exclusive S4GRU Sponsor maps.

The app looks interesting if it really logs any LTE details. But it also asks for a breathtaking set of permissions, especially for a paid app: I clicked on the link to "Privacy Policy." It led to a boilerplate "Disclaimer" text on the developer's website that seems to protect the vendor in many ways, but not the user.

FYI for Sponsors, there is quite a lot of Austin news being reported in this thread over the past few days, with appropriate maps and details. Also, I just looked at Sensorly and see several tracks in North Austin filling in areas that were recently blank. In fact, I had driven those areas last week and found no LTE signal. So stuff is definitely progressing.

Some people assume that, but I am not persuaded. For this to be true there would have to be some mechanism for all LTE radios to transmit the BSIDs of the CDMA radios with which they are colocated. But no one has even shown where that might be happening as part of the LTE standard. So I think we don't know for sure what this screen means on the EVO. My own theory -- and it is only that -- is that these are the BSIDs that the phone detects from CDMA radios while there happens to be an LTE connection. Another fishy thing is that this screen is implemented only on this particular device, which leads me to think it is an invention of the handset OEM.

Does Sprint not offer an authorized tethering app for these devices? If you tether unauthorized, I hope Sprint discovers it, makes you stop or terminates your service. Unauthorized tethering is a violation of the Sprint contract, and burns up bandwidth shared by honest paying customers.