Tower Location

[wayway8]

Does anybody know how to locate towers for the major providers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Cingular, etc.)? I would like to know where they are in my town so I have an idea what kind of signal strength I can expect from each provider.

[jmccrane]

Some (not all) towers are registered with the FCC and can be found either by digging through their website or other sites that have tower databases (do a search). Note that not all towers will show up because technically they don't have to be in the database unless they are around the borders of a market.

Sprint lists most of its towers at www.sprintsites.com (again, not a complete list...I think it only includes freestanding Sprint-only towers).

You should just utilize the trial period for the carriers because towers are sometimes engineered to deliver more signal to some areas than other areas. You never know what could happen. Ask friends or use trial periods.

[bobolito]

www.sprintsites.com shows only towers owned by Sprint. However, most Sprint base antennas are mounted on other structures such as buildings roofs, water tanks, etc. which are not owned by them so those are not shown.

[lilprincess2]

How bout for verizon? I'd like to know where the towers are here in the islands of hawaii as well. If anyone from hawaii is reading this and knows any info would be appreciated. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

[asatoran]

lilprincess2, I'd like to know, also. My house near Waiphau High School is a "dead-zone". I have standing orders with all my friends that whenever they get a new phone, they need to drive by my house and tell me what kind of receptoin they get. Always 0-50%. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Nextel. All suck right where I am. I'm trying to see how hard it is to put up a repeater/booster just for my house.

Last week I ended up doing a "war-drive" just to see where I could get reception. Sometime ya just gotta do the homework yourself. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-frown.gif[/img]

[robrand]

Steve Punter is the guru on finding cell sites. There's Lots of other good info on his website too:
http://www.arcx.com/sites/FindingSites.htm

The FCC database is a tough place to find information about towers. And many towers are not registered. Only towers taller than 200 feet and a potential hazard to aircraft need to be registered, but there are many exceptions. But if you rummage around in the FCC website there is a lot of good educational stuff in there.
http://www.fcc.gov

SPRINT has SprintSites:
http://www.sprintsites.com/search/index.html

Carriers leases tower space on towers owned by companies like Crown Castle. On the Crown Castle site finder if you zoom in and "Display Site Details" on an individual tower they even have photos of the towers, exact latitude and longitude, architrectural drawings of the tower buildings, etc.
http://siteloc.crowncastle.com/sitem...map&ctry_id=US

Similar for towers leased from Pinnacles”
http://www.pinnacletowers.com/Map.asp

Similar for American Towers:
http://www.americantower.com/OasisPublic/SearchSite/

From these maps you still won’t be able to tell which carrier is using a tower or conversely which towers a carrier is using. Your cell phone can help out with that, especially if you can put it into field test mode so that you can see the ID number of the cells. You will find consistent patterns of cell numbering that help you identify where the towers are (for example, on Verizon towers the IDs for the three cells are always different by 168. Drive a circle around a tower and you will see the cell numbers changing by 168 every 120 degrees).

Using a highly directional Yagi antenna helps a lot in locating towers. You can buy them for $60 to $90 or build your own. I built one for about $6 using parts from the local hardware store. There are lots of plans on the Internet for building antennas. But antennas are strange creatures and build-it-yourself antennas usually don’t work unless you really know what you’re doing. You may be better off paying $70 than aggravating yourself with a build-it-yourself that you can’t make work.

Don’t always rely on signal strength to find towers. Signals bounce off of buildings, trees, etc. making towers hard to find. But when you see booming strong signals in field test you know that you’re near a tower.

Happy hunting!

[ZaphodB]

Call the Zoning Administrator for your local jurisdiction (city, township, town, borough, village, hamlet, wide spot in the road, etc.). If nothing else you can look through agendas, etc. and see where they were proposed and whether they were approved. That's not to say they were all necessarily built, but it's a start.

[bobolito]

Great post robrand...thanks!

[spanky]

Another source to check with would be your County's E-911 office. Every county has one - they are responsible for 911 dispatching and whatnot - one of their new responsibilites is to provide 911 support to Cellular users. As part of the deal, all cellular providers in the county must provide the E-911 office maps of its cell tower locations and each towers approx. coverage area.

I've seen these maps, and they are quite interesting and detailed - plus its a great way to see "real" coverage maps as opposed to the generic ones each provider posts on their web sites. It also gives info such as antenna type, omin-directional, etc. and each towers service zones, if it isn't omni-directional!!! (sorry for the lack of technical antenna knowledge.....)

The kicker is I'm not too sure how willing an E-911 office would be to share these maps with you... I'm not sure if they fall under FOIA
(Freedom of Information Act.)

Might not be worth the hassle, but if you really want to know......

spanky