caspar347

Not sure about your issue (never had that happen on my 5) but that's almost half what I paid for my N5X 32G on launch (before the $50 play credit, so more like 2/3rds). So that's definitely something to consider. If you're comfortable taking the back off of your N5 it should be pretty easy to see if something's jammed up in the power button. Just take off the back and unscrew the six screws on the upper plate cover and then you have full view of the power button assembly.

I guess I just didn't phrase my original question well. I meant to ask if the document specifically said how many carriers could be aggregated.

So the problem is that the third carrier EARFCN Sprint happens to be using is not contiguous with the other two?

Ahh so 3x counts as non-contiguous since the first and last carriers aren't touching. Gotcha.

So "Intra-Band Contiguous CA Operating Bands - CA_41" means just two carriers? The document is kinda ambiguous there but I don't have any experience reading these things.

From Clear gear? Shouldn't that all have been disabled a long time ago? And that's another thing, my stick maxes out at 2150 (and I'm pretty sure the tuner was designed for sub-1ghz OTA TV so certainly no optimization for the frequencies I'm after) whereas the pro analyzers that cover PCS usually at least cover up to 2.4 ISM. I'm actually a little bummed out that I can't see AWS-3 since the stick I got is advertised as working up to 2.2 Ghz. Chip fabrication is hard I guess. How high does yours go?

Oh for sure. All I can really do is see whether a given block is in use and maybe guess what's in the block based on the guard band sizes. Comparing this to a real analyzer on capability is like comparing a bike to a car. Totally different functional leagues. But that's pretty much all I need it for. I don't need to actually do a whole lot of proper "analysis". I'm just mildly surprised nobody else on the forum has ever stumbled upon this, especially back when we cared more about which/how many live CDMA carriers were on a site. Because this is basically the only cheap way to do that. Unless of course you already have a real analyzer or live near someone who does.

Beats a $1000 pro analyzer for sure. I'm surprised nobody's tried to do this before.

Well I was only kinda lucky. I haven't successfully gotten it to tune above 2152ish. So I can see all of AWS-1 minus part of the F block. But the part I can see is enough to tell me T-Mobile's running a 15x15 LTE carrier in it. So it doesn't matter a whole lot. I also found some better software. http://eartoearoak.com/software/rtlsdr-scanner It took a good half hour of fiddling with the dependencies (the whole package works better on 32-bit systems for whatever reason ) but I eventually got it working. I can save outputs like this: Really cool stuff.

That's actually a pretty attractive and tidy setup compared to the other small cells I've seen. The whole thing could be pretty easily confused for a coax splice box and an oddly-mounted transformer by a layperson.

Was this done recently? If so that's really good news.

I'm totally new to this whole thing, so I'll probably have some more weird questions. The stick actually works temperamentally at the frequencies I need without cooling but it definitely works consistently when cooled. I'll have to try that out. I'll have more time to play with it tomorrow but it looks like I was lucky enough to get a tuner with AWS inside of its operational range!

And a wider sweep shows what I expected if I'm interpreting this right. Nearby carriers at 325 and 375 plus a distant one at 350. Nothing in the 200s as I believe that range is usually reserved for high capacity setups in my market.

Tuning to the UL frequencies gives three distinct spikes.

The stick is here! And it kinda works. As far as I can tell, it gets too hot anywhere above FM frequencies to be useful (i.e. it can't see anything over what I assume is internally generated noise) while mobile. The weird part is the chips themselves don't get hot. It's the antenna connector. I opened it up to verify. But in the freezer and connected to a laptop with a USB extension cable, I can see this: The way the waves keep bumping I can see three distinct sections which must be CDMA carriers on channels 325, 350, and 375. I'm using a program I found through 10 seconds of googling and I'm open to suggestions on better programs. Can anyone think of a way to get the stick close enough to a tower to see active carriers on that tower without bringing a mini-fridge?

And I assume these aren't repeaters based on the photos. So are they conventional fiber-fed small cells? I know they have their own GCIs and are confirmed B41, but I wasn't aware Sprint (Nokia specifically) had any conventional 41 small cells in the cards.

Amen to that. Now if they can spread the love to secondary markets... Y'all have any feel for how long it takes to set these up and whether they're all WiMAX small cell conversions or a mix of conversions and new cells?

I'm not an expert on the subject, but IIRC the benefits lost going from 8 to 4 mostly involve cell edge performance (MIMO would be impacted if we had devices with more Tx antennas but that's not gonna be an issue any time soon). So (again if I recall correctly) the plan is to switch to 6-carrier 4T4R configuration in super-ultra-extreme capacity-constrained locations where there are a ton of sites (density and cell edge performance are not a problem) and the absolute highest Mbps capacity possible is required. Like around a stadium or an airport without a B41-capable DAS. And that can be done on a site by site basis without impacting sites nearby. Other sites will be kept in 3-carrier 8T8R mode for the cell edge performance (coverage) benefits. The great part is Sprint is super-flexible here. Y'all feel free to correct me but that's what I remember.

Reddit has moderators. The big problem with fierce was people could say basically anything without fear of reprimand. Which unfortunately included a lot of personal attacks and trolling.

Awesome! I just ordered the SDR that I linked.

I just happened across a couple of apps on the Play store that look like they could potentially be used as low-fi basic barebones spectrum analyzers for looking at spectrum utilization. Both apps advertise the ability to scan the full range possible with an RTL-SDR stick (nicer ones with an Elonics E4000 tuner can apparently pick up 55mhz through 2200mhz with a small gap somewhere around 1200mhz) but as far as I can tell (without an actual stick and USB-C OTG cable to test with) you can't view more than 120khz at a time with SDRTouch. However (again without actual hardware to test with) it looks like you can set custom scan sizes with RF Analyzer as long as you aren't trying to demodulate. SDRTouch: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=marto.androsdr2 RF Analyzer: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mantz_it.rfanalyzer I'm totally unfamiliar with a lot of the terminology involved, but it looks like RF Analyzer should in theory let me look at frequency use/carrier size if I bought a dongle? Anyone have any experience with any of this stuff? The involved hardware isn't too expensive ($35 for a "guaranteed genuine Elonics E4000+RTL2832U"; apparently there are a lot of shady generic dongles out there, and $1 for a powered OTG cable) so I'm considering going ahead and picking this stuff up and trying it.

I can't speak for Anthony's area specifically (fraid I live on the opposite end of the city and I don't end up in that area a whole lot) but we still have just 5mhz of B25 DL BW. We're a 15mhz FDD A-F market (10mhz + 5mhz non-contiguous) so I really don't understand why they haven't refarmed the 5 non-contiguous mhz, but that is what it is for now. So it makes sense that B26 performance suffers here in places where entire towns are covered by single site sectors. HOWEVER - I still think Sprint is holding back big time on B41 power levels for some reason here. At least in my corner of the Charlotte market, you basically have to have line of sight to the 8T8Rs to hold a connection more than a mile away. This hasn't been my experience in other markets. So if that's an issue market-wide here, Sprint could really improve capacity of B25 and B26 by fixing that. Plus like I said I have no idea why they haven't refarmed some more B25 yet.

Case in point: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/6714-charlotte-premier-map/?p=484699

Isn't there some sort of "no reselling" clause? What kind of loopholes are they jumping through?

This is awesome! (But I still wish they'd open Ingress portal submissions back up.)