bmoses

just got a text from my brother, had him scouting out ames towers for me, he found one a little north of ames off of interstate 35 with new base cabinets installed he also thought the one off of lincoln way might have new cabinets but he couldn't get close enough to confirm.

i would say that all of the equipment is probably going to be mostly the same as what they installed in the first markets. since we are closer to last, and our deployment didn't start until after the nextel shutdown, i would say our chances of having 800 voice and 800 LTE off the bat would be higher as there wouldn't really be a reason not to install it and turn it on while they are here doing everything else and that would save a trip back here.

i will be out in the jordan creek area tonight, will see if i can pick anything up, hopefully i'll be able to drive around to the towers to verify.

ok, so i upgraded to the pro version and went out for a drive and noticed that a few times the EVDO sector ID in signalcheck did not match what was displaying in field trial. for example i was sitting directly by the tower for these two pics. i tried resetting data connection and exiting the app and it never changed to display what field trial was displaying. this is on an EVO 4G LTE running meanbean rom. if you need any specifics or need me to get/test anything to get your more info let me know. otherwise i love everything else about the app and am glad i purchased it!

went to the tower by hickman and MLK and there were guys there working and there was a guide wire up!

thank you! guess thats what happens when you try and request features that are already there that you didn't know about cause you didn't upgrade to the pro version yet /goes off to purchase pro version

hello and welcome i'll do my best to answer your questions. GMO - stands for ground mount option. robert did an article on them here that would be worth reading if you haven't already. Basically GMO sites are low capacity/priority sites that sprint has decided to install new base cabinets and mount the RRUs at ground level and is NOT replacing the antenna/panel up top at this point in time. once new backhaul gets installed the 3G speeds will improve, and if the legacy panels support it, LTE will be turned on. they will not have voice or LTE on 800 though since the panels didn't get replaced. at some point in the future they will go back and convert GMO sites to full build sites if they are able to. Accepted - this means that sprint has accepted/signed off on and paid the contractor for whatever work was accepted. So if a tower shows up as "4G accepted" that means the hardware is installed sprint has sent out an inspector and they have said "yep everything is how it should be" and so they sign off on it and sprint pays the contractor for the 4G portion of the work. accepted does not mean that you can utilize whatever was accepted though, sometimes other factors cause issues. so just because a tower is 4G accepted, doesn't mean you will be able to connect to 4G from it right away. my signature also has some other useful tidbits from robert on this subject. links to towers - when you do this, just make sure you are only doing it in the sponsors area as this info isn't allowed in the non-sponsors area. Basically you go to the thread that has all of the towers for your market, so like the first post in the iowa/nebraska thread in the sponsors area. you click on the pin of the tower you want to link to, highlight the tower ID, then past (as plain text) in your post, highlight what you just posted, go back to the map with the towers, right click on the pop up with the tower info, choose copy link address, go pack to your post you are writing and click the link button on the menu, then copy in the link address. viola! you have a link that is the site ID that when clicked on takes you to the location on google maps hope that info helps

i did a search and it looked like this was mentioned awhile ago, but any chance you could add the EVDO channel and EVDO sector ID info on the screen? I've been plotting the EVDO sector ID's from the towers as i've driven around to them looking for NV upgrades so i can tell what tower EVDO is connected to when i'm at work. Having that info all on one screen would really be nice so i don't have to keep dialing ##33284# to get back to it all the time

welcome to the site! honestly your best option for tower spotting is to become a sponsor, you can find info on becoming one here. that will give you access to a map of all of the sprint towers in des moines, and the entire country. then you won't be wasting any time when you are out tower spotting checking towers that aren't sprint ones there is also this thread here that has pictures of the new equipment they are installing so you will know what to look for. if you do decide to donate and become a sponsor Robert will have to upgrade your account and he is out on a family vacation so it may take a day or so for him to upgrade your account.

that would be awesome! if you can find out where he was i will check it out. do you know what phone he has? like the above poster said, there are 3 Wimax sites in des moines. 1 is on the corner of douglas and lower beaver, the other is at downling high school across from sams club/walmart and the other is way over on the east side. so depending on where he was in west des moines he may or may not have picked those up. of course if he doesn't have a wimax phone and does have a LTE phone then none of that matters

i would guess that everyone is just gone even if they are doing work on downtown towers and new equipment is installed they have to bring the 3G side up in clusters on the new equipment in order to not cause interference between new equipment and legacy equipment. thats my guess anyway

checked out a few more towers over lunch to see if there were anymore deliveries of base cabinets i could find. Only found one new one out of 5 towers checked. this tower is off of 2nd ave south of euclid also drove by the tower at MLK and hickman again and there were a couple of trucks there, didn't have time to stop and couldn't tell what they were doing but presumably it had something to do with the base cabinets that were delivered Monday. especially since the pic for the other tower shows the GPS antenna so i'm guessing they are all wired up, all the other cabinets i'd seen so far they were just sitting there.

do you have an upgrade available now? if you do i would wait to see what tri-band phones get released this fall and go for one of those, with softbank at the helm now you just might get use out of it in the next two years. plus the more towers that come online in omaha over the next few months the less you will notice that the evo LTE sucks i know driving through kansas city on the way down i had no issues with my phone picking up LTE, it was just when i was in an area with only a few towers done and was on the fringe of those towers that i noticed it.

GS3, GS4, HTC One, and iPhone 5 would probably be the top ones. i was in branson, mo a few weeks ago and i had my EVO LTE, wife had her iPhone 5, and my brother in law and sister in law had their GS4's and we were in a fringe area and all of theirs picked up LTE right away. I had to put mine in CDMA/LTE only mode to pick it up.

If you want you can set your phone to CDMA/LTE only mode. If you know or can get your MSL code you can dial ##3282#, choose edit, enter MSL, choose EVDO, then change the preferred mode from "CDMA HDR LTE only" to "CDMA LTE only". Then if you are in an area with a weak LTE signal it will still connect to it instead of staying on 3G. of course in this mode if there is no 4G around you will be on 1x instead of 3G so you will want to set it back once you are done testing.

also to add to this, LTE is very signal strength dependent. So you could be on a sector with no one else on it and have the whole 37.5 Mbps to yourself but if you are too far from the tower or have a low signal strength you could still only get 2-3 Mbps down. and you can't go off of you signal bars either, only a handful of phones show you the LTE signal strength on your bars, the rest show you your voice signal strength which can be a completely different tower than the LTE one you are connected to.

guys, remember in a new market where there are only a few towers live, that 1 tower broadcasting LTE will have many more people connecting to it than when the market is complete and the rest of the towers have LTE too. for example, if normally 1000 people are covered by 4 towers you would have 250 people per tower. if 1 of those 4 towers gets LTE and it can reach 750 of those 1000 people you will have 750 people connecting to that 1 tower. once the other 3 get upgraded it will go back down to 250 people on each tower so there will be less people sharing the bandwidth. the max speed you can get from a single sector is 37.5 Mbps, the more people on that sector, the slower your speeds will be as you will all be sharing that bandwidth. in the future sprint will be adding LTE on 800Mhz and 2500Mhz, each of those frequencies will have their own max bandwidth too. but once people get phones that support those bands people will be split between 3 different frequencies so you all won't be sharing that 1 37.5 Mbps pipe anymore

nothing reported here yet. most of the east iowa market is at least 3G complete. so I would assume the hold up is backhaul, that and outside of the major cities in east iowa, most of the towers are GMO so they are really low priority.

no one knows for sure. but like Dkoellerwx said best guess would be end of august. lots of towers have permits pulled and backhaul in place already, just waiting on equipment and workers. and as i've posted in this thread the first signs of equipment being delivered started last friday (7/12) and according to them workers are supposed to start 7/22. so could be a week after that, could be a month, but its starting so it won't be much longer

i've verified new base cabinets at 4 towers so far. 1) the one by the VA hospital i initially ran into the guys at 2) there is one on the very north side of johnston near camp dodge, saw them delivering here as well 3) the tower by hickman and MLK 4) tower near the interstate by lower beaver. over the weekend i was in ankeny and checked out them but didn't see any equipment delivered there. drove by a few other towers but wasn't able to see where the equipment was to tell if any had been delivered there or not. hopefully what the guy told me holds up and when i go out next week i see workers installing the equipment

my wife is a teacher so we were able to get it through that.

yep, just wanted to get it out here in the non sponsor area where i found them at so people could keep an eye out. it was hard to understand the guy but he made it sound like the other ones he was hitting today were near that tower. and yes, from everything i've seen everything else is ready to go, just waiting on equipment and installers. the only thing that would keep LTE from broadcasting at each tower as its completed would be something with the core not being done yet. there might be a slight delay between seeing "4G" accepted here on S4GRU and picking up a live signal, like there was in NE, but otherwise we should be good. based on the posts in the east iowa thread i would say the hold up there is backhaul, that and about 50% of the market is GMO sites so they will be lower priority for getting backhaul and LTE turned on.

the tower that i found them at was by the VA Hospital next to douglas.

whats that you say? you want to see a picture of a trailer full of equipment being delivered to towers today? OK fine, since you asked nicely i'll show you one thats right, there is actually something tangible happening finally! The guy i talked to that was delivering said he had equipment for 7 towers they were delivering today. He also said that, according to what he was told, workers are scheduled to start installing it on the 22nd!!!! and to think, i almost didn't go out tower hunting today!

no problem, info on becoming a sponsor is located here. once you are a sponsor you will have access to the maps with the locations of all the towers. the iowa one is located here. any info you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!