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Sounds like it may have a permissions issue on older Android platforms. I'll take a look and see. If you downloaded it yesterday you may want to update - I fixed a bug in the timing advance display code that led to a force close if you have it set to display the tower round-trip time instead of the distance. I also made it reduce the amount of log spam it produces - it will now only update the log when there's a change in the signal information, and not on every location event, which should cut the storage and power usage substantially.

Strange - obviously it shouldn't do that. It should be compatible back to Android 4.2 (API 17), but I suppose it's possible I screwed something up and broke backwards compatibility. I'll see if it at least runs in the 4.4 emulator and will try to remember where my Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are hiding to see if it will work on them. In other news, there's an app update now available at the usual place. The logs now include the mcc and mnc in ltecells.csv; both ltecells.csv and cellinfolte.csv also now log the milliseconds since the Unix epoch (midnight January 1, 1970 UTC),* along with a flag for FDD or TDD (1=FDD) based on the band determination/guess and an estimate of the tower distance in meters (m) if the timing advance is available. There's also code internally to adjust the tower distance estimate for TDD sites (i.e. bands 33-48, including band 41 for Sprint), so now the displayed distance and location estimating circle thingy are corrected. I also fixed a typo (299.7/2 is 149.85, not 159.85) that affected the distance estimates that were being displayed before. Have fun spotting towers... * See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2666112/convert-milliseconds-to-date-in-excel/2666177.

Ok, I'm a complete moron. A bit of searching on the Internet finds that the LTE timing advance value for TDD LTE is adjusted by the equivalent of ~20 microseconds, which works out to be about 3 km round-trip or ~1.5 km (just under 1 mile) one-way. So the reason I could never get within a mile of the site is because... I was already right on top of the site. Thus I can say the band 41 site is definitely the one on Moody Road at the intersection with Feagin Mill Road. It's the only one I've spotted so far around here, and seems like an odd choice since it doesn't seem to cover a lot of people - it is probably the closest one to the old protection site, so maybe that's why Sprint decided to upgrade it as opposed to one in a more critical location. As for indicating Mini Macros and Magic Box sites, I'm happy to add the necessary code if it can be done without adding too much extra clutter - although at some level if SCP already does it I'm not really sure duplication in my app is worthwhile.

Just to briefly update things, the straggler 3G-only site on the north side of Warner Robins on US 129/SR 247 was finally updated to LTE. As far as I can tell, it's another GMO with the old PCS antennas still being used. I haven't had a chance to check any of the sites around Macon lately though. I haven't seen any evidence of any more band 41 deployments beyond the mystery site in Warner Robins, which still defies my efforts to definitively locate it.

The EARFCN is recorded if the radio reports it, but none of the phones I have report anything other than the signal strength and PCI for neighbor cells (registered=0 in cellinfolte.csv). The other suggestions are good ideas; I'll plan on tackling them soon.

I've got a big box that says it's an ONT on the side of my house with battery backup and it's plugged in, so I assume it's FTTH - copper wouldn't need all that, no?

Ditto. Funnily enough, I have fiber to my house - about the only neighborhood in the area that has it - but I'm on cable because Windstream only provisions up to 75 Mbps here, at the same price that Cox will give me 150+ Mbps over coax. Go figure...

Good point. Heat's not good for electronics in general, and passively-cooled ones in particular; I wouldn't put it in an attic here in Georgia, for example.

Been a while since I updated the public thread. The towers along I-16 between Macon and Dublin and beyond (at least to GA 29 or so) are now broadcasting Band 25 only too. The range isn't great but parallel US 80 also gets covered mostly, and the signal on GA 96 gets you almost, but not quite, to where you can pick up the tower in Bonaire - I doubt you'd have much luck with LTE indoors in Allentown or Dudley though. The "urban" GMOs (one in Vineville/Ingleside, one on the north side of Warner Robins near the ANG base, and the one by Hawkinsville High School) still don't appear to have been touched, so maybe they're in line for new antennas with GMRs at least. The mystery band 41 site remains a mystery. I can pick it up somewhat reliably near the Booth Road Walmart in Warner Robins, and can also pick it up on Moody Road south of Feagin Mill, but when I get closer to any of the candidate sites I drop to band 25 or band 26, which seems backwards. Hopefully I'll hit paydirt soon before I spend too much on gas driving in circles chasing this thing down.

Is the attic an option? That was always popular for TV antennas back in the day, and you probably get less attenuation the higher you go. If you do go with an outdoor option, in the pictures it looks pretty bulky (something like 13x9x3 inches, if I'm eyeballing it correctly in the FCC photos), plus the wall wart to power it; you probably would need something more doghouse sized. Plus you might need to worry about heat dissipation if it's in a sealed environment.

It only rebroadcasts (acting as a small cell) on band 41, but it connects to band 25 and band 41 sites. If you only have band 25 it'll help your indoor coverage but not help much with speed (unless you normally connect to band 26 and it's crowded in your area, in which case you might benefit from potential CA or wider channels on band 25). If all you can get even at your window is band 26, it won't work.

I've never seen a band 25 site do more than about 10 miles of range. At 25 miles, you're going to need the upcoming Airave 3 if you have backhaul available - but I think that's going to be Sprint's LTE solution for small businesses and corporate campuses, and not really for home users who can largely rely on WiFi for data. The good news is that Sprint is hitting the Georgia market (which includes the Auburn-Opelika-Phenix City area) hard with upgrades of the 3G-only sites - the low-priority GMOs that were deferred due to relatively low usage - at the moment; they seem to have upgraded most of the sites in central Georgia in the past few weeks so hopefully they'll head in your direction once they're done here. The GMO upgraded sites will broadcast LTE on band 25, so they'll work with the Magic Box even if band 25 is weak indoors at your location - without band 41 on the tower, you won't get any real speed benefits but you will get the indoor coverage benefits. So if you have a EVDO/1X-only site near your location, there may be hope finally.

It's been pretty solid the last few times I've gone south to around Valdosta (excluding the GMO at GA 26, which is now upgraded although the map is out of date)... then it gets flaky between Valdosta and Lake City, where it gets solid again. It may be exaggerated when you get a few miles from the interstate, though; I suspect they optimized some of the sites with "shooters" (90-degree antennas rather than 120-degree antennas) to cover I-75 as much as they could, which may not be accounted for properly in the maps.

For Google Maps on a slow connection, I'd strongly encourage downloading an offline area when you're on WiFi or before you travel; that way all you need to use data for is traffic and other updates, which should be usable enough.

Discovered some more doings in the Georgia market on a drive this afternoon: Four GMOs are now broadcasting LTE on band 25 south of Warner Robins and Perry: three in southern Houston County, and one on the outskirts of Hawkinsville. Site IDs and more details in the premier GMO thread. Also, I've narrowed down the band 41 site to one of two existing towers in southern Warner Robins... it may not be fully open to traffic yet, or eCFSB isn't enabled yet, so my connections are intermittent. At least two distinct carriers (EARFCNs 40521 and 40719) and four sector IDs are active.

That and I expect a lot of carriers want traffic off HSPA and GSM so they can refarm the spectrum for LTE, particularly now that VoLTE is becoming widespread.

Project Fi would be ideal for a Nexus 5X.

One other thing from today's driving around: I had a brief band 41 sighting near the ex-WiMax protection site in Warner Robins (Russell Parkway near Moody Road). I didn't stay on band 41 long enough to be sure it was coming from the protection site and an airplane mode toggle nearby put me back on band 25, but that's the most logical guess based on the timing advance value I saw. I didn't have time to investigate more. I'll try to swing by the Macon ex-WiMax site in the next few days and see if it's broadcasting LTE too. EDIT: Ok, this is weird. If the data I have is accurate, the band 41 site is nowhere near the ex-WiMax protection site - it was just a coincidence that I picked it up about 1 km east of the protection site. It's broadcasting a Sprint MCC/MNC 310-120 with GCI 04545739 on EARFCN 40719, 2602.9 MHz. So it may actually be a full 8T8R build.

Ok, here are the results of my experimentation: Voice calling seems to fall back to 1X. In my current location (my office in Cochran), it falls back to Verizon, but I've seen 1X on Sprint 800 and 1900 around too. In the "Phone info" APK, LTE/UMTS auto (PRL) seems to have no effect (staying on LTE, with 1X fallback). LTE/WCDMA and WCDMA preferred drop the phone to 1X/EVDO(!). So no dice there trying to connect to UMTS or GSM for voice. Also, Play Services keeps asking me to "add my new phone number," so whatever's going on may be working with a fake phone number behind the scenes to keep things working somehow.

The Pixel XL doesn't have a GSM/UMTS-only setting when a Sprint SIM is installed; the only options are LTE (preferred), 3G, 1X, and Global.

The 1x signal was bouncing between Verizon and a very distant Sprint (1900) tower, either in Hawkinsville or on I-16 near Dudley (I'll have to look in the CDMA log to figure out which one it is). In the screenshot it's the Sprint tower. I didn't try a voice call. I'll probably be back down there midweek and can test it then.

LTE roaming on AT&T in Cochran, about 35 miles southeast of Macon in their old Alltel territory, is definitely enabled; it's slow (presumably throttled, unless their local network is crap) but usable for basic purposes and beats the Verizon 1X network at least.

Here's a weird sighting: when playing with Signal Detector yesterday, I found a few weird things near downtown Macon along I-75: First I found an out-of-sequence GCI where it appears band 26 on a tower is misconfigured and off by one (the tower at Ocmulgee East industrial park off I-16). Second the Mercer University site seems to be broadcasting just on band 26 with a GCI in the Cxxxx range, instead of the 3Axxx range elsewhere in the market. Third, the phone briefly connected and registered to an AT&T band 17 site before dropping to EVDO. This may be connected to scattered reports of other AT&T connections in other markets; it's possible there's a widespread misconfiguration by AT&T, or it's possible Sprint does have an unannounced roaming agreement with AT&T in place. This seems worth additional investigation.

Warning: semi-technical post follows. If you don't want to play with code, this post isn't for you. Here's something I've been working on for a while to post-process the log files and help you find the location of towers. Obviously if you're a sponsor you don't need this functionality for Sprint generally speaking, but it may be helpful with new deployments (mini-macros, Clearwire site upgrades, Airspan and Mobilitie sites, LTE Airaves, etc.) and other carriers where that info isn't available. It relies on your device reporting the LTE Timing Advance value, which (due to the laws of physics) gives you a reasonably accurate distance to the base station location, to a much greater extent than a guess based on the signal strength that is affected by terrain, ground clutter, etc. Here's the code; it requires R and several R packages: the ones listed under the library() calls at the beginning, plus any dependencies. Here's an example of the output map. Compared to ground truth, only one tower location (3A492) is wrong, which is understandable given that there are only 3 data points for it. It's not purely plug and play because there's no general way to determine which cells are co-located across markets, but I figured I'd throw it out there in case anyone else finds it useful as a starting point for their tower hunting. You can ignore co-location and try to estimate locations too (that's what the "drawnmap3" maps are: example), but having the site co-location heuristics set for your market (the code involving "base2" does this) will improve accuracy a lot since you can constrain the location solutions better with data from multiple bands. Anyway if it breaks both pieces are yours. Enjoy!

I'm pretty sure Sprint wants folks on Wi-Fi at the airport, given their Boingo partnership and including no-login-needed Passpoint support on most of their recent (non-Nexus/Pixel) phones. But in general Sprint is pretty good until you hit the market boundaries and transition to ex-affiliate territory, where performance falls off due to the lack of B41 deployment (and, to the west on I-20, even LTE deployment).