lordsutch

Bear in mind Sprint will be removing the pre-NV panels from most of its towers, so a second panel for NV 2.0 shouldn't be too problematic (and probably can be smaller for 2500/2600-only). And if they were to put S-band on the towers, they could probably use the same panels for both BRS and S-band. RRUs might be a different story though.

I have to say that it looks nice, but I'm not yet sold on "live tiles" interfaces. Plus I'd want to see the LTE performance... there's a reason you make Faraday cages out of metal and not plastic, after all, and the LTE Evo has been rather middling. And I do think inductive charging with the Qi standard is the wave of the future, even if it's somewhat inefficient. You're looking at several thousand times over the life of the phone that you're connecting or disconnecting the micro-USB cable, and while the design is supposed to stress the cable (not the connector, which was the reason why mini-USB went away) there's still the chance of accidentally busting off the micro-USB receptacle in the phone, or needing a new cable pronto, at jacked up electronics store prices rather than being able to wait a day or two to get one from an online vendor. Now if I were still limping along on my OG Evo, I'd be there in a heartbeat, but since I don't get my upgrade until January 1 I'm in no hurry.

Interesting... thanks for the feedback. I think the latest release on Dropbox should fix the issues - I've tightened up the code to only report LTE when the phone thinks it's connected to LTE, not just when there's a valid signal strength. I also changed the app logo to change colors/designs when on pre-4G for consistency's sake.

Ah, the main icon always stays yellow. The notification bar icon is the one that changes color. (I suppose I ought to fix that to be less confusing...)

The defaults on the last release were LTE scan timer 5 and BSR Max timer 4. The new OTA doesn't change them. Instead they probably fiddled with a non-user-visible setting.

Doesn't seem like you got SMR; you almost certainly would have landed on a 224xx SID if you had. Not sure where in the GS3 service menus the 1X band shows up (if at all)...

There is apparently some vague correlation between LTE serving cell IDs and tower IDs, but there doesn't seem to be any algorithm to find one based on the other. With the iPhone 5, if you convert the cell ID to hexadecimal (or alternatively take the remainder after dividing by 256) the two final digits should be the sector number (almost always 01-03, unless you have fewer or more sectors on the tower). and the rest is a unique site ID.

Another day, another update — and it's a biggie: Background tracking is now enabled. This will actively use your phone's GPS for geolocation, so if you're not powered up make sure to use the "Exit" option in the menu to stop it when on battery unless you want to drain your battery. Distinctive icons! On pre-4G you get a red icon marked "3G" in the notification bar; on 4G you get a yellow icon marked "4G." If you want bars etc, use SignalCheck Pro or another app to add those Map tiles are now cached. Orientation changes and warm restarts repopulate the screen much faster. Still on the TODO list: Persistent settings. Fancy stuff (launch when on power, launch on car dock, etc.). Some way to share logs - I don't want to build a giant backend to upload data, but at least an intent to upload your logfiles to Dropbox/Google Drive etc. is probably reasonable. As always, get the latest version from Dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhd729pckawlndm/HomeActivity.apk Still looking for folks to try it out on the GNex w/4.2.1 in LTE areas!

LTE is live around the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Ga.; I just drove around the area on Sunday and the strength is solid all the way around the outside of the speedway. I'd imagine several other tracks are already covered in other Sprint markets.

Here are a couple of maps I put together using the cell IDs for southern Atlanta. First map is last digit of the global cell ID (1-3), second map are the site-specific IDs (hex digits 2-6). Adjacent sites on page 2 may blend together since it's not very smart (yet) about choosing distinct colors for each site. https://www.dropbox....xzce/Rplots.pdf R code (requires the "ggmap" and "mapproj" packages for R); you'll also need a CSV file from my base station tracker: https://www.dropbox....aj6/plotcells.R

Just to add some new info to the fire, Sprint has (or at least had, Sunday morning) at least some 1X active on channel 526 in Newborn, Ga, east of Atlanta, although you'll need a custom PRL to use it.

I've made a few updates to the app over the past couple of days. There's now a menu option to show the base station marker location, although I haven't seen a correct Sprint base station location anywhere in the Atlanta-Athens-Macon area (I did see one roaming location get reported correctly near Byron). I also set the app to keep the screen live while in the foreground, ripped out more dead code, and disabled some eye candy in the moving map that was causing WebView to segfault on my Evo. I also changed the color of the display text to be brighter after squinting at it through sunglasses Sunday. Still on my todo list, now that I'm getting the hang of Java and the ADT: * Persistent settings between launches for both the moving map and the base station marker. * Background logging. Reports of success/failure on other JB devices welcome, although the cell identity stuff still is limited to CDMA+LTE phones even in the latest AOSP code (it'd be fun to see people with the Nexus 4 doing some "T4GRU" work in KC and Toronto, but Google apparently hates them... the internal AOSP telephony code actually populates the CellInfo objects on GSM phones, but the stupid method still returns null on them).

Would someone with a GNex in an LTE area mind trying out my signal detector app to see if it will report the LTE serving cell IDs you're connected to? Details are in this thread: http://s4gru.com/ind...tation-tracker/ In the app, if you have an LTE connection and the code works, under/next to "LTE Cell ID" you should have two values separated by a space: a hexadecimal number ending in 01, 02, or 03 (which is unique within the Sprint network for a specific sector) and the physical cell ID (a decimal number between 0 and 503). Thanks!

I'm sure it's by SSID, alas. Then again I have everything critical on my phone encrypted end-to-end anyway, although I haven't gone as far as using a VPN (yet).