Analog Towers in my area

I doubt there are anymore Analog Only towers in your area....Verizon, and whoever the other 850band network is in the area need to keep AMPS at some of their cellsites, so you were probably picking it up from a cellsite that has both AMPS and CDMA. Verizon does not have anymore AMPS only, if you were roaming it is possible that the network you were roaming on still has some AMPS only.
http://www.antennasearch.com/
is a pretty good site. Of course, no website will have 100% of the towers listed.

 

Well, at the base of cell sites, there are often tags labeling them, which either have a carriers name and/or a phone number to call in emergencies. That is an easy way to figure out what carrier it belongs to. Now whether or not to find out if a site has Analog, that you need to get much more advanced.

 

what is analog and why is is not around much anymore, do carriers like nextel and cingular, although they use dif. technologies, operate on analog? can one tell by looking at a tower or at the base if its analog or not?

 

To easily and cheaply detect analog towers, use the right equipment. An analog phone needn't cost more that three or four dollars at a second-hand thrift store; get the DC cord for another dollar. It will ignore CDMA, GSM, and TDMA!

COtech

 

Analog used a ton of capacity and did not support popular features that phones come with now like 2 way SMS, Web browsing, etc. etc. NEXTEL does not use Analog, but in areas Cingular is 800 Mhz, they have to keep some Analog up, same with Verizon in their 800 Mhz area and any other carrier that operates in the cellular band in a specific area.

 

Andy,

Wouldn't AMPS (analog) and CDMA be on the same physical sites??

 

I was under the impression that CDMA and analog are on the same sites but there may not be analog on NEWLY built sites.

Maybe I'm trying to say that if there's analog on a site CDMA is also on it; but the reverse is not necessarily true

 

Let's take Verizon, for example, and your statement is correct:

CDMA and AMPS are on the same cellsite, but Analog is usually not on newly built sites and it has been decommissioned on some older sites as well, and those sites are now CDMA only.

And you statement is correct: If Analog is on a Verizon site, CDMA is also on it, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

As for other carriers. There are still carriers, like ALLTEL, that have Analog and TDMA sites only and they are upgrading those sites to do AMPS, TDMA and CDMA, and even roamer GSM in some areas.

Cingular, even though they sign up everyone on GSM, also has an AMPS network in areas where they are 800 Mhz.

Hope this makes sense.

 

I was only speaking for Verizon I'm sure that VZW is glad that they have virtually zero analog in my area Cingular and Alltel are stuck with maintaining the analog around here.

 

I doubt that they are really *maintaining* it. Lol, as long as it works all right, they are not going to care. I think ALLTEL is quite good about maintaining their AMPS, but Cingular and Verizon really don't care much I think.
Sure it's taking away spectrum they could be using for other things.

 

when are companies allowed to start shutting down analog again???