Trip

The problem is that as of right now, they can't hand them out because the network isn't ready. I've done a bunch of driving around over the past week and a half, since I got my Rainbow SIM, and it's kind of impressive how sparse it is. In the city of Alexandria, I'm aware of 9 permitted sites. Of those, only 5 are actually operating today. The site that would be my home site only got antennas put up last week, even though the permits have been around for about a year. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has 37 sites, by my count. While some of those are obviously for capacity, there are plenty of places where the coverage itself is an issue, independent of capacity. It's not ready for showtime yet. I'm not sure it would be ready even if all 9 were operating. (And in Fairfax County, one site I went by specifically to check on Saturday that's had Dish antennas for months is not yet operating. Don't know what's going on there.) - Trip

The list is counties, not cities. - Trip

Got Dish Wireless activated, and it looks like SCP does not handle site notes properly with Dish Wireless. Bug submitted in the tracker: https://github.com/bluelinepc/signalcheck/issues/48 - Trip

So, I made it to the store today. As expected, they were unable to do it on a plan lower than the $40/mo plan, despite my best efforts. He even went so far as to show me on the system that it wouldn't allow him (not at my insistence, but he was going to put me on a non-Dish SIM and I was insistent). Oh, and since in-store activation has a $35 fee, they basically won't let you connect to Dish without paying the activation fee since you can't do it online. But, the guy was very nice, and I now have an activated phone on Dish Wireless. https://imgur.com/a/j3BPgrx Now to file another bug report on SCP since it doesn't handle Dish Wireless sectors properly. (I'm not connected to Edison HS.) - Trip

Mike, I've added another enhancement request based on my experience with the Rainbow SIM over the past 24 hours. https://github.com/bluelinepc/signalcheck/issues/47 - Trip

Utter. Fiasco. So I now have another new Moto G 2023 which did successfully bootloader unlock and is now rooted. I wanted to activate a SIM on the $100/year plan if at all possible, and it's online-only, so I decided to call up my nearest Boost store and see if they had the Rainbow SIM. I tried twice; both times it went to Cox voicemail after 5 rings, and asked me to input my number, as if I was logging in to retrieve messages. Weird. So then I tried the next nearest store, and that one it would hang up as soon as the call connected. Tried several times. Finally, third store was the charm, that one I got an answer right away, and they had the Rainbow SIM. Ran over to the store and picked up two of them, $10/ea. Got home, tried to activate online. Nope, ICCID is given as invalid. Tried to talk with chat, and chat told me I had to call. Called, and the call dropped the first time. Called back, spent a whole hour on the phone with the second guy, and after a lot of talking back and forth, picking the $168/year plan, we got to the part where I needed to give my credit card, and three different cards were rejected. He said it was probably a system issue, and that I should go into a store. Guy was very nice and helpful, but he ultimately couldn't get me started. So I'm sitting here and after all of that, I have nothing to show for it. Not really an auspicious start. - Trip

Mike, I'll create issues in the tracker. I have terrible memory as well, so I definitely get it. Regarding your e-mail, I just dug it out of my junk. D'oh! I'll answer there. Thanks, as always! Possible, of course. I've only checked sites in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland as those are the only places I've been lately where US Cellular can be found. - Trip

Mike, Sorry to be chewing up your whole thread here, but I did some prodding at US Cellular and I think I've found a pattern. It's using three bytes for sector ID, like T-Mobile, but there also appears to be a pattern lining up the NR NCI with the LTE GCI on the same tower. I've checked four sites in random locations and they all seem to agree, so if this is not an accurate pattern, then it's one heck of a coincidence. As an example, I was looking at the Open Cell ID data and found 0x9C41BDxxx, which appeared to be the Falling Water site on the south side of Appomattox. Converted to decimal, that's 10240445. Now that site has two LTE GCIs, 0x7C90E and 0x7D0DE, or in decimal, 510222 and 512222. It looks like the way it works is that to convert LTE to NR, you double the first two digits, which are the FIPS state code (so 51 --> 102), then stick a 4 in, and then double the last three digits, being sure add leading 0s to make it 4 digits, and then add 1. That gets you 10240445. Same story for Evans Hill in West Virginia. 0x83DC9xx --> 540105. 54 --> 108, stick a 4 in, 0105 --> 0210, add 1, NR is 10840211 (0xA56893). Which is what I observed. - Trip

T-Mobile had far better site density than the other carriers even before the Sprint conversions. Otherwise, this aligns with my perception. - Trip

Interesting. While they talk about all of Virginia (which their coverage of which still has pretty significant holes), I'm betting the talk of "new towers" is largely talking about conversions in the Shentel region. In Buckingham County (my favorite example case) they went from 2 sites to 17 sites by converting the existing Shentel sites. I can easily see how they got to 900 new sites if you start counting all of those. Still plenty of work left to do. No sites in Lunenburg County, for example. No service in Chase City. The Shentel site at Gordonsville had to be turned off and the replacement isn't scheduled to go live until next year. Plenty of gaps along highways in places where Shentel stopped building new sites mid-stream pending the merger. - Trip

I have. I have a $160/mo bill, due on the 10th of the month. What I did was I opened a T-Mobile Money account, stuck $180 in it to have a $20 cushion. Set up auto-pay from that account. After the first payment was taken from it, I set up a recurring transfer with my credit union for each month on the 5th for $160. So in theory, the T-Mobile Money account just receives the money--my actual checking account info is not set up within the T-Mobile Money account--and then almost immediately has the money taken back out to pay the T-Mobile bill. Not the most elegant system, but it works for me thus far, and should theoretically keep my actual account information safe. I shouldn't be able to lose more than $180 if a T-Mobile breach causes me a loss, and for most of any given month, it shouldn't be more than $20. - Trip

Mike, I sent you a diagnostic immediately following an SCP crash on my Verizon phone yesterday. Not sure if you got it or if it contains anything of particular interest. I was just rolling down the highway (US-17 maybe?) and it exited. Separately, I have a feature request that may or may not be worth the effort. On my Verizon phone, I've recently been noticing Verizon B48 LTE in the neighbor cells. If I lock the phone to B48, it won't connect, so I'm guessing it's being used as supplemental downlink or something, but that also means the only way to identify sites with B48 is to screenshot SCP showing B48 in the neighbor cells and then review the screenshots later. Since Verizon uses consistent PCIs across bands, I can do that with a high degree of certainty. The same is true for identifying 5G-NR NSA. Would you consider adding a separate trail logger table and an optional function to record info on neighbor cells in LTE? Record the lat/lon, timestamp, PCI, EARFCN/band, and signal level? And maybe also the GCI/PCI it's connected to when the neighbor cell is being recorded? (Recording the GCI it's been matched up to in showing the site note could be useful too, I suppose, but probably less so.) Could this also be used to record 5G-NR NSA data when connected to LTE, since it's more like a neighbor cell than anything else? Particularly on Verizon, I could see this being useful to identify what's going on with bands that can't be directly observed or bands that are less frequently connected to. (AWS-3 regularly appears in neighbor cells but doesn't often connect directly, for example.) While theoretically also useful for NR, in practice it appears that only MediaTek phones support NR neighbor cells at this time, and since only T-Mobile has NR SA on a widespread basis and the PCIs are inconsistent across bands, this isn't something that would be useful to me specifically except in corner cases. Maybe it would be more so when Dish becomes more widely available if their PCIs are consistent. Regarding T-Mobile, in areas where n41 SA is not running, with my Edge 2022 I can see n41 neighbor cells, but as they're just PCIs without any indicator of what the NCI is, that's really not terribly helpful. Supposedly, Cell Mapper can record neighbor cells in this way, but I've yet to figure out how to get a CSV file out of Cell Mapper. I've tried steps I've found online without success, and gave up pretty quickly because Cell Mapper just isn't that friendly. If it's too much work, then no worries. I know this would probably be a VERY niche feature. But can't hurt to ask! - Trip

Okay, so I eyeballed it today, and it appears that even when the signal levels are invalid, the Timing Advance, GCI, PCI, and TAC values all appear correct. So that information is valid, even though the RSRP/RSRQ are not. - Trip

Thanks. I'll eyeball it at the next opportunity, which should be this coming week (the FCC found some money to stay open a while after a shutdown starts) and I will see if the data looks valid or not. If it doesn't, then I'd definitely say that the prior behavior was more correct. If it does, then a judgment can be made on how to handle going forward. I got my Moto G 5G 2023 and like it so far. To my moderate surprise, it too has a built-in band locking screen, which I had thought could have been limited to the MediaTek chipsets. The problem is that, like the Edge 2022, it requires disabling/enabling one band at a time as best I can tell. (Going to experiment with that at some point.) It requires the various adjustments to the TA value to get accurate reporting, so clearly the MediaTek chipset is the difference between TA values that require tweaks and don't require tweaks. Separately, I tested it yesterday locked first to B71 LTE and then B12 LTE and had no issues with it resetting like the Edge 2022 did, though it will need more testing to verify that all is well on that front. I've been unable to get the bootloader unlocked so far, but can actually survive without it, though obviously if it proves unable to be unlocked then I won't standardize on it because I prefer phones where I can do the root-required in-app Airplane Mode toggle and I prefer using third-party apps to enable and disable bands rather than doing it one at a time through the built-in one that requires the dialer on each use. And, of course, there's still no telling what an Android 14 update would look like with respect to NR TA and the built-in band locking menu. - Trip

I've locked all my Samsung devices to the last firmware before access to the Band Selection tool was cut off. - Trip

Oh, by the way, I have a Moto G 5G (2023) on its way to me. USPS tracking says it's coming by 9/28. That one has a Qualcomm chip in it, so we'll see how that one is. EDIT: If interested, I put together a little page about the phones currently in use in my phone collection. https://www.rabbitears.info/kb/phones - Trip

For right now, I think the best bet would be to revert it. The suddenly-full signal bar draws the eye. I'll assume that phone's data to be a loss if it's in LTE mode and not use it, but I generally use it as my n41 phone when out and about, so that's not a huge deal. I'm not planning to go too far out of the area again for a few weeks. The SignalCheck map is correct, so RAvirani, at least, is aware of it. I only figured it out this morning, having spotted the pattern while looking at my otherwise-unlabeled AT&T NR rows. (I've now labeled them all.) https://imgur.com/a/xRxfIDW - Trip

Fair. I mean, most of my other phones show garbage data between sites, just not in this exact way. Usually, the TAC is missing so I know it's invalid and I have SCP set to not log when the TAC is missing. I'll have to try to study the diagnostic screen when it's doing that. Not 100% sure when that will be. Can't really do that while barreling down the highway, and if the government shuts down next week, I won't be on the train again until it's reopened... EDIT: Separately, you may already know, but I've seen some invalid AT&T n2 entries on my T-Mobile phone. Did some poking this morning and it looks like AT&T is using the final 10 bits for the sector ID. Definitely a headache on the "picking through the database manually" side of things, but if you didn't already know, would allow you to set all associated rows when editing in the app. - Trip

Following up, I've gone into the office in person today and took my Edge with me. It looks like it now shows "No service" instead of the -44/-3 value. I saw a lot of "no service" because it apparently does it a lot. I'll check again on the train ride home later. Assuming I'm correct, is it possible to have some kind of middle ground on this? I think it was showing other legitimate values, like the TA, even when it was showing -44/-3. I'd prefer it show the data it has but at -140 dBm in those cases. I recognize this could be a pain to implement, and if it is, then no worries, mostly curious. EDIT: But now I'm sitting here thinking "what if the PCI is bad and I don't know it?" But that can just as easily be the case on other phones that aren't caught. I do regularly see bad PCI entries on my other devices, so maybe this isn't the best option. Bleh, I wish this stuff just worked properly! - Trip

Just installed the update, and it's good! As you recommended, I turned off both TA adjustments, and turned on displaying it when it's zero. The value is basically spot-on. It's bouncing between 18 and 19 for the Cameron Valley site, and it is in fact between 0.87 and 0.92 miles, as displayed in the app. This is probably a better estimate of the TA values than any other device I own provides. As far as the -44 goes, I'll have to take it out and verify that it no longer records those cases. If this device didn't have that annoying reset problem, and got the Android 14 update (and in so doing supported TA on NR and continued to allow band locking), it would easily be the best device I own. Easily. And would be the device I standardize on for the 5G era. I'll probably have to wait for a future device to come out with Android 14 and then see what happens. And I know I didn't have to, but I love SCP. It is my primary tool for tracking the goings-on of the various networks and is very easy to use and work with across my 10 phones. I am very happy to send a token of my appreciation your way now and then. Thanks again! - Trip

In order: This is very helpful to know. Thanks. That makes a lot of sense, though it's showing me zero rather than nothing; it looks like if it's calculating a negative number, I'm seeing zero instead. It makes me wonder how many devices you've tested against which use the MediaTek chipset. This is only the second one I've used, and the first one was very, very old (didn't have B41), so it's possible that the MediaTek chip doesn't need the correction while others do. Separately, I doubt that a real world case will ever see 1282, so I imagine any value above 1281 could be ignored. I would ask you to please not hide TA values of 0, or if you hide them by default, add an option to not hide them. I am aware that, for example, the S22 doesn't report a valid TA value and always reports zero, but zero is a legitimate value and is useful to know when trying to identify sites. I'll look forward to your impending update, and I'm going to send along another donation if I can find the link. Thanks so much, as always! - Trip

Mike, We ended up going out this morning to do errands in spite of the tropical storm. I locked the phone on LTE B41, turned off the TA correction checkbox, and watched it carefully while out and about. I have four screenshots for you. https://imgur.com/a/kCPTCnB First, I happened to get a screenshot of it doing the -44 dBm thing. I also tried to send you at least one set of diagnostics showing the -44 dBm but I don't know where precisely in the process it collects the diagnostics. Hopefully there's something useful in them. The rest of the screenshots are far more interesting. All three were taken within seconds of each other in the CVS parking lot. The phone's diagnostic screen shows a TA of 17, and oddly, the SCP diagnostics screenshot also appears to show a TA of 17. But SCP's normal display is showing 0. Not entirely sure what to make of that. It looks like SCP won't show me a value other than 0 until I hit about 19 according to the phone diagnostic screen. It also appears that when SCP is showing a TA of 1263, that's the equivalent of a null value for the TA--no TA is calculated. The phone diagnostic screen appears to show just "12" when that's happening; the SCP diagnostic screen shows 1282 in the TA section when that happens, a difference of 19, which is highly convenient given what I noted above about the TA value. (I can't test that the phone diagnostic screen is limited to two characters and is thus truncating 1282 to just "12" as I suspect given where I am right now. Had I known to be looking for it, I'd have tested in the middle of nowhere yesterday.) Anything catch your eye? Anything I can do to help more? - Trip

Done. I'll send you another later when it's actually connected. Bonus points if I can catch it at -44. And regarding the TA value, I will. Not sure I'll be able to investigate more before Monday, but as soon as I can I'll try to get you some data. - Trip

Observed yesterday, via roaming on my S21FE. https://imgur.com/a/VYP1iyi Looked for it at several other sites and picked it up at two of them. It's running in Charlotte Court House, Keysville, and Pamplin. Didn't observe it at the three sites I passed in Farmville or any of the rural sites I went by. Signal strength seems to be about 20 dB weaker than the B66 carrier, even with line of sight. My current US Cellular phone (a Moto One 5G Ace) doesn't support B48, so I might need to figure out a way to shuffle my phones a bit. - Trip

Mike, Until yesterday, I hadn't locked my newest phone, the Moto Edge 2022, to an LTE band. I'd only ever used it on NR, where it works basically fine for logging purposes other than the modem reset issue I flagged in the thread I made on the Motorola forum, which is entirely unrelated to SCP. (For the record, it happened once yesterday about 25 minutes into our outing, and then not again the rest of the day.) I was out and about and had it looked to n41 and B41 for the first time, and encountered something new on it. Sometimes, when changing sectors or going in/out of service on the LTE side, where other phones would give bad GCIs with no TAC or something, this phone apparently flashes the previously-seen GCI/TAC but with an RSRP of -44 and an RSRP of -3. You can guess what this did to the log. I tried to screenshot it but it was too fast to catch; here's a picture of what the log looks like sorted by last_time: https://imgur.com/a/LBehfrW Much as I hate to ask you for another work-around, it would be nice have an option to be able to tell SCP not to log in that circumstance, much like how it has an option to not log when the TAC is missing. Separately, it also has a bad TA value that the checkbox only partially fixes. I'm going to do more investigation on that and see if I can figure out what the proper correction factor should be for this device. It may be necessary to consider providing multiple options for adjusting the TA. That said, I can already tell that won't completely help as it shows 0 TA a lot longer than my other devices do. I'm almost wondering if it's off by a constant rather than a coefficient, if that makes sense; I'll follow up on this after some investigation. - Trip