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Observing my cellphone switch towers

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Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#131

Post by 542354234235 »

lighttower wrote: post #72

How much does the positioning of the phone in the car affect it's antenna effectiveness and directionality. I'm astounded that you can "bury" the phone in a pit beside the gear shift with a pile of metal on top (the dashboard) and it still works. The engineering me needs to place antennas optimally! Even though burying the phone in a pit and it still works it still irks me and I want to see it in an optimal placement…

> Why don't car manufacturers have a place for the phone in the roof or something so that it gets optimal antenna placement? Yes it would be unseemly but wouldn't we get much better reception?

Don’t you answer your own question? It would be unseemly. Phones still get signal and consumers aren’t demanding an option for optimal antenna placement. If they did install them, would consumers even notice battery savings when most people charge their phones in the car anyway? So for car manufacturers, it seems like all downsides.

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#133

Post by 542354234235 »

op03 wrote: post #6

> Along the way, five towers and nine cells (a.k.a eNB for Evolved NodeB) What does this mean? Whats the diff between tower and cell?

> Whats the diff between tower and cell?

The tower is what it sounds like, it is one physical structure containing the communications equipment, also called a Base Transceiver Station (BTS) [1]. The cell is the individual communications panel on the tower, also known as a CellID [2]. There are typically 3 panels on a tower, each covering 1/3rd of the surrounding area. So the tower gives you the physical location, and the cell gives you the general direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_transceiver_station

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_ID

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#134

Post by rurban »

franga2000 wrote: post #62
rurban wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing same right now. My cheap soc has no gps module, which would need too much power also, but I can trivially get the tac+cellid from the AT+CEREG command, which have to do anyway to check network connection (I have no roaming with NB-IoT). And from this you can externally get the lat/long gps values via the OpenCellID database. They protected queries, but you can get the source also as csv. Didn't know about t…

Isn't there a specific GSM command or whatever they're called to request location from the provider? I remember seeing it in a GSM module datasheet at some point, but I never tried it.

Modem specific. In my case AT+CEREG? in modes higher than 1 will tell you the connection status, tac and ci

Re: Observing my cellphone switch towers

#137

Post by Breza »

lizknope wrote: post #111
scrozier wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a rental vacation house at the southeastern end of Lake Michigan three years ago. It was a pretty big house, and as you walked from one end to the other, the time zone would change. Really messed with me until I figured that out.

Antelope Canyon is a popular tourist attraction in Arizona. During the summer Utah is on daylight savings time, Arizona does NOT observe daylight savings time but the Navajo Nation within Arizona DOES observe daylight savings time. Antelope Canyon is on Navajo Nation land and requires a tour guide from a licensed tour guide company. The canyon and tour guides DO observe daylight savings time. The canyon is only about…

I once ran an A/B time-of-send test for our readers where I analyzed the results by local time. Timezones and DST made it a painful experience.
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