Sgt. Slaughter

It was live for a short time but offline right now. But it is definitely there.

2 more LTE towers as of 1/24:

 

Durham (just northeast of Sport Durst Hyundai on 15-501)

 

Garner (70 / 401 split)

Debating the 70/401 split tower... I live right next to the thing basically.....yet no improved service at all...

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M7 is an over hyped over rated device. Anything that doesn't ship with the MSM8974 SoC(Snapdragon 800) is a waste of space in terms of flagship devices...

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I have never seen any sprint deployed half-circle antennas... All are usually rectangles in shape.

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Lots of work going on at the tower near the corner of Rosemary Drive and Hillsborough St (very close to NCSU's campus). Witnessed workers installing the "half-circle" antennas (the ones seen on the tower on Meredith's campus near Whole Foods) and lots of new equipment in the "sheds" inside the tower's fence about 1-1.5 weeks ago. 4G LTE is coming to this tower very soon, if not there already. On a 3G BlackBerry for the forseeable future so I cannot confirm if LTE is live.

"...half-circle antennas..." ????

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Well.... That stuff looks solid....

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Here's something to think about when considering RF performance... Last week a field tech and I put a GS3, an iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5 side by side, put all 3 of them in test mode and got wildly different RSSI readings. We were standing in front of a legacy toy cell and all 3 phones hashed to the same carrier, so by the nature of the way CDMA functions, all 3 handsets should have the exact same RSSI, which should have been around -40, since we were 12 feet from the antenna.

 

With that being said, the dB level is based on a reference, and if that reference is different between chipsets, the RSSI will be inaccurate.

 

Also keep in mind that different phones hash to different carriers and the pilot power between the carriers can differ.

Good point there about the reference causing the RSSI to be inaccurate....at least for comparison sake between different devices...

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Not antenna. TX/RX path.

 

CB truckers with duals can't talk on two channels at once since they have two antennas.

 

-- "Sensorly or it didn't happen!"

u know what I meant. Lol jk

Its too late in the day and week for me to be spot on. Lol

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Hi, mostly been lurking here, I have the G S3, my 1st smartphone actually. I like it alot. I see this thread has been talking about chips, chipsets and radios so if I can ask what might be a stupid question. The note 2 uses a different chipset than the S3 meaning it can't do SVDO which I find amazingly useful at times on the S3. If Samsung brings the chipset stuff in house and not use Qualcomm, does that mean future Notes and Galaxys will likely not be able to do SVDO?

All depends on the SoC and radio chip if separate and the device's internal makings. Svdo is not just chip it has to do with antennae and all that too so its never as easy as one would seem...

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This is a start...

 

http://www.anandtech...-snapdragon-800

 

AJ

and a lil interview with Mr Raj himself....

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/08/qualcomm-interview/

50+ products already being designed based on the 800 and see first of them in customers hands starting in 2nd half this year....

Where is the HTC at CES? Have they shown/announced anything? I've missed it if so...

Nope

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I'll check ten ten again. Wonder if its my phone. Some spots in Raleigh are still bad like south east raleigh. But downtown and the NC states area have seen a marked improvement.

I had to toggle airplane mode on and off when I caught it at tenten awhile ago FWIW...

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Decent SoC announced yesterday at CES by Qualcomm.... Says should see the Snapdragon 800 I'd devices 2nd half of the year and the 600 a lil earlier I believe... The 600 is like the S4 Pro with integrated radios and lil clock bump...

Saw it on engadget btw but lost the link... Looking forward to anandtech breakdown of the SoCs as they seem at first glance to be solid pieces imho... All around improvements....

Question is.... When will sprint get this into a device and IF they can manage to get it into the EVO upcoming long as that happens...

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All these people thinking the spectrum holds more value than the offer is for should ask one question.... If it is valued at much more then why has clearwire had trouble turning profit, and why has there been no interest from anyone else wanting to pick up the spectrum?.....

If no one wants something then its value is zero. That's a fact. Things are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them...

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Look for this to be officially announced next week at CES 2013, as well as a possible announcement of the ZTE Aurora, and possibly the first few 800 LTE compatible phones!

They announced the Nexus and Viper as first LTE devices there last year but I can't expect them to announce any 800MHz LTE devices this early on tbh.... 800Mhz LTE isn't off the ground like LTE was set to be at this time last year. As Robert said before they are planning FITs for it this year... Making putting a device for it this early seeming a lil far fetched imho...

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That depends on how you look at it. Beam width is usually specified as degrees of arc at the half power points. In other words, if it is a 65 degree panel, then the power response is -3 dB at ±32.5 degrees. But the polar response does not stop on a dime. If it did, a three sector site with 65 degree panels would produce coverage that looked a lot like a three bladed propeller -- big coverage gaps in between sectors. So, no, even though the power response is -3 dB at ±32.5 degrees, the polar response continues out to ±60 degrees and beyond to cover the entire 120 degree sector.

 

AJ

Okay yeah I was clearly in another world last night with my posts. Lol

Now would you never want the sectors on the same tower to over lap as that would cause interference...or would that only be an issue with adjacent towers and not wanting that signal to overlap another towers?...

Also was thinking that when you add the point that the 3 sectors are not back to back on each other that would cause gaps in coverage between each sector close to the tower... But what you described rules that out.

*it being late last night and cocktail hour already happened is my excuse for the silly comments about 120 deg overlapping when it goes out... Honestly dunno wtf was going through my head then to say that as its pretty simple geometry there...lol DOH!

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Sprint is actually deploying 90, 65, and 33 degree panels depending on the application needed. We've already seen this panels in New Orleans and I added them to this thread.

 

As AJ was stating it does not stop on a dime. Hence the general rule I've seen is to choose an antenna spec that is 75-85% of what you want to cover. 120 degrees * 0.75 = 90 degrees. Sites with downtilt changes that a bit as you have to think in 3D then.

 

Now based on the application whether it be for additional signal penetration in a dense urban site a 65 or even 35 degree sector will be used. As long as the sites are "meshed" to pick up the slack from the one site you'll be fine. You'll also see the 65's used in areas where only an interstate or highway coverage is needed. This allows more of focused "beam" down the interstate corridor. Of course the less coverage off the side of the narrow lobe is a downside.

 

Two links:

http://books.google.com/books?id=TQwtK5JnT04C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (page 167)

http://docs.commscope.com/Public/electrical_and_mechanical_downtilt_effect_on_pattern_performance.pdf

Terminology down. Was late last night and I follow now. Lol

Thanks as usual

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120 panels aren't used though is what I was getting at.

 

-- "Sensorly or it didn't happen!"

U lost me now.... As 65 panels are not used either...

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No, 120 degrees is essentially correct. Divide 360 degrees by three, and you get 120 degrees. And the overlap between sectors would be effectively the same regardless of distance because the beam width (in degrees) is constant.

 

AJ

That's what I initially thought but with digiblurs post I reasoned why in my head it'd be what he said...

Yeah when I reasoned it I was thinking the beam being in a triangle formation and that would in turn mean the further away from the location(tower) the wider the beam is from edge to edge...which really makes sense tbh... Ugh Ima need a pic now. Lol

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Interesting how they have split up their upgrade to another company much like Sprint. Ericsson is doing ATT down here.

 

That video wanted to make me sick.. I got a good chuckle out of his 120 degree. Try 65 degree for most city sites.

 

-- "Sensorly or it didn't happen!"

Yeah 120 would have a ton of overlap interference between the sectors as you move out away from it... Less u had a ton of downtilt... Right?

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Crossposting from the "How to spot NV RRUs thread", my album of Sprint NV sites in San Antonio.

 

http://imgur.com/a/N4NJQ#0

 

Hopefully will be adding more pictures as I have time.

 

Enjoy!

Lil microwave link site there...

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The Exynos 5 series (aka 5250 A15 dual core ala Nexus 10 + chromebook and exynos 5450 A15 quad core [GS4 / GN3?]) will have everything integrated on chip like the Snapdragon. Right now, the Exynos 5250 in the chrome book / nexus 10 literally takes every single SoC out there (including apples custom designed one) and drags it on the floor.

 

The 5450 is going to be in the Galaxy S4 / Galaxy Note 3 and there will be no questions about it. Both entered mass production in Q2/Q3 2012 on the 28nm process. Keep in mind, this chip was designed to fix what the 4 series could not do, mainly LTE compatibility issues (the 4 were really made with South Korea LTE in mind) and focus on power efficiency.

This right here is why I'm worried Qualcomm/HTC is going to struggle this year more so IF they go with the APQ SoC in devices mostly as that thing has been in production for awhile now and would put Sammy above them too given their chipset offerings this year...

Need the next gen krait SoCs to get going badly to stay ahead of everyone... I believe sammy is working on 22nm also while Qualcomm has been quiet on that front...

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Separate radios?..... Yeah of course... But radios are not grouped in the way you described. There will be 1 LTE radio that covers X frequencies period... Now through connection management they can control priorities of what to connect to first but that is nothing new at all...

At first the thought was the biggest hurdle will be a device fitting the number of antennas and other hardware for each freq needed would be the biggest hurdle, but that seems to not be that big of an obstacle as initially thought...

I hate to sound like a butt here but honestly there needs to be some fact checking before you post such things like this when you are coming across as if they are factual when they are far from it. Heck you could of searched here and likely seen threads/posts explaining this correctly already.

Appreciate the effort at hand though but this is the 2nd thread of yours I've red where both have a gross amount of misinformation in them. Sorry to be so blunt but I men nothing personal by it at all... Just do some research next time or lest cite sources you used to come up with the conclusions made and all...

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Wow soo much wrong with the conclusion being made here in the OP, all with zero facts to back it up...

ONLY way you could say having LTE on is bad is if you were in a no LTE signal area, and the LTE power on the device was cranked out of this world, and scan time was set to a insane low value..... Then maybe you might see a difference...

Like AJ said the Qualcomm SoC at 28nm and integrated radios is much better than the separate chip devices for handling radios implementation like the thunderbolt...

The fact that people still have this etched in their brain is frustrating at the least... All steams from the wimax ordeal as back then if u swapped out LTE with WiMax in this post then it would be more accurate.

Word is that Sammy's next SoC has integrated radios as well I believe too... Might be the next series after the one coming up but swear I read that somewhere.... I'm not a sammy fan anyway, still wiring on the next SoC from Qualcomm here really...

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I have been doing a bit of research lately on LTE Advanced and it seems the main goal is for it to manage interference between pico cells and the macro network. Aggregating carriers is nice to improve peak speeds, but the timeslot management part of LTE advanced means faster data rates for all users.

 

Lemme know when sprint starts deploying Pico cells and this will matter...

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