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Observing my cellphone switch towers

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Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#121

Post by coretx »

salawat wrote: post #117
coretx wrote: post #112

The jolly celltower adventure could ensue by indirectly reading the weather and even to forecast it. The least difficult aspect is measuring humidity. ^_^ Good luck!

Isn't any cell tower essentially a way to measure humidity as long as your receiver sensitivity and signal resolution high enough? Given known EMI patterns along the path of propagation of course.

Meteorologists are using such data on a daily basis already and machine learning does wonders there too but i'm sadly not familiar with the finer details.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#122

Post by dmichulke »

Spooky23 wrote: post #98
qb2021 wrote: post #53

At this one industrial customer I visit every week for a full day, my Verizon cell phone date/time time will suddenly change back by 19 years, six months, and some days (I don't have the exact value). This has been going on for almost a year. My pet theory was that law enforcement turned on a stingray nearby back in 2020, it came up with a default date of 1/1/2001, and has been running ever since. Steel building with…

A guy on a team that I worked on detected one of those devices and called the university police (we were a tenant in a university building), who laughed, and then proceeded to methodically and politely walk the hierarchy of agencies with jurisdiction (sheriff, city police, state police, FBI field office, FCC, etc). I believe he called a member of Congress as well. Eventually somebody figured out that he wasn’t going…

> ... a couple of very pleasant guys popped in and dropped off their business cards. They told him it wouldn’t be a problem anymore ...

> End of the day, if someone is creating interference, they need to stop.

I'm not sure which way to interpret this, your username might check out after all.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#123

Post by Aissen »

qb2021 wrote: post #53

At this one industrial customer I visit every week for a full day, my Verizon cell phone date/time time will suddenly change back by 19 years, six months, and some days (I don't have the exact value). This has been going on for almost a year. My pet theory was that law enforcement turned on a stingray nearby back in 2020, it came up with a default date of 1/1/2001, and has been running ever since. Steel building with…

There is a simpler explanation: I once worked an (industrial+officies) site of high-tech company, and they had their own private Cell tower, with phones that only worked on the site; maybe they forgot to update the time. IIRC, small base stations have been deployed at hacker events(CCC) with similar internal-only features.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#125

Post by pmontra »

It's a side note at most, but the history of technology at the end of the article is a little bit misleading as it lacks the dates for the technologies. It seems to list the most notable devices for each category. Some of them appeared several years after a technology became mainstream.

Examples:

The Nokia 3310 is from the end of 2000 but 2G mobile phones were already in everybody's hands by then, at least here in Italy. The boom started in 1997. I resisted until 1999, then my boss gave one to me because "I don't want to call [another guy with a mobile] to talk with you" :-) It was the Nokia 8110 (Neo's phone in The Matrix.)

3G/UMTS was launched in Europe in 2003, much before the first 3G capable iPhone (2008). The marketing word in 2003 for UMTS was UMTS. The first device was the NEC 606 [1], from the 3 mobile operator (Italy, UK and a number of other countries.) There were a number of popular 3G phones in the 5 years before the iPhone 3G.

By the way, the NEC 6060 did video calls too. The screen was low resolution (not by the standards of the time) and the price was outrageous (4 times the voice calls?) Not a very popular feature and yet it was there.

[1] https://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2015/04/classic-handset...

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#126

Post by _trampeltier »

Balantio wrote: post #3

How do i do this myself now? I always have put my phone in air plane mode when i was in a train due to the modem consuming a lot more energy. I always assumed and still doe its due switching towers and less connecitivy which means using more power. Whenever people argue that public transport doesn't need wifi i would argue against it due to power usage and also for more accessablity of the internet in general.

https://www.wigle.net/

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#127

Post by rjmunro »

londons_explore wrote: post #37
kqr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume this is one of the many things Google is doing with their fleet of Streetview cars. ...and Google services-enabled Android smartphones. Source: I have used a single access points in many locations across the country in a relatively short period of time. When there's no GPS fix, Google always thinks I'm where I just was. (And there are no Streetview cars in some of these locations.)

If an access point moves more than a few times per year, it will be blacklisted from Googles location database as unreliable.

I wish they would do that a bit more preemptively. Maybe things have improve, but sometimes when I went to an event where the WiFi was temporarily installed I was instantaneously transported hundreds of miles, presumably to the WiFi providing companies last job.

It should have been able to figure out that this was nonsense based on the unfeasible speed of travel, or from the fact that the area covered by the cell I was in did not contain the WiFi location, or probably from other WiFi networks in the area that hadn't moved.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#128

Post by hansor »

cesarb wrote: post #105
qb2021 wrote: post #53

At this one industrial customer I visit every week for a full day, my Verizon cell phone date/time time will suddenly change back by 19 years, six months, and some days (I don't have the exact value). This has been going on for almost a year. My pet theory was that law enforcement turned on a stingray nearby back in 2020, it came up with a default date of 1/1/2001, and has been running ever since. Steel building with…

Something similar has also happened to me. In my case, the symptom was that the TOTP 2FA to systems at work started to fail. It took me some time to find that the cause was an around 1 minute offset between my phone and the correct (NTP-synchronized) time as shown by my desktop. Setting the phone to not synchronize its date/time to the network (and correcting its time) fixed it, but it's annoying since without the ne…

You can disable automatic synchronization from BTS, and install some Android application for NTP time synchronization (for sure there are plenty of them). Then its win-win.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#129

Post by dest »

heelix wrote: post #45

Something like this would make it pretty easy to spot one of those stingray devices, I bet. Cell towers tend to stay put, so mapping out an area would go quick. Were a new 'tower' show up in an odd spot -- there may be shenanigans at hand.

https://opencellid.org/ and https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
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