Cell Phone reception & Kalibrate-rtl

natedawg1604

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So lately at or near my house my cell reception has been terrible. If I run Kalibrate-rtl for a while and it doesn't find any 850 GSM base stations, does that mean my location has no cell coverage?

I did get 1 hit so far on Ch. 4, GSM 900, but I'm wondering if that's for a cordless phone? Or could that be a cell tower?
 
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natedawg1604

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Is GSM still around? Anyway, your phone could use 600 mHz, 700 mhz, 800 MHz, 1.9 gHz or a host of other bands.

Look up what bands your carrier uses.
Ohhh that's a very good point. Maybe I'm better off using LTE-Cell-Scanner.
 

maus92

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I guess. GSM is going bye-bye anyway. You could use SDR# and look at chunks of spectrum - it would be pretty obvious what spectrum local cell service is using.
 

natedawg1604

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I guess. GSM is going bye-bye anyway. You could use SDR# and look at chunks of spectrum - it would be pretty obvious what spectrum local cell service is using.
Do you have an example of what a LTE signal would look like in SDR#? Also how long would a signal typically last? My carrier (Verizon) appears to use some 700 but mostly 1700.
 

mmckenna

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natedawg1604

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Wow, very interesting. It just dawned on me that my RTL dongles only go to 1700 MHz and have a pretty small bandwidth; on SDR Sharp you can input frequencies way past 1700, but I'm assuming that is some type of glitch. I guess if I really want to track LTE stuff I should get a Hack RF device.
 

maus92

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Lol, SDR# can't get as wide band as that spectrum monitor - but I made the waterfall yellow! Below is an image centered on 766 MHz - you can see the LTE signaling drop off as the frequency approaches 769 MHz, the beginning of the 700 Public Safety band.

Screenshot 2023-01-12 225348.png
 
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A Bart’s head. And LTE is a constant carrier.
And either 5 or 10 mHz wide.
Depends on if he's looking at an uplink UARFCN or downlink. And it's possible to find 1.4 MHz, 3, 5, 10, 20 or even more with carrier aggregation as well.

Also, if you know what carrier you are on, that can dictate what bands you have service on. OP, if you have an Android phone, I recommend using this app to see relevant LTE/5G data for your area.


Some other culprits could be the 3G (CDMA & UMTS) shutdown. Again, depending on your carrier you may no longer have that service if you live further out in the sticks.
 
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