Does anyone have a reliable way to find out how many Nextel towers are in a specific area, and where they are located? I have a Nextel phone through work which receives virtually no signal in my apartment, even though there is what I believe to be a Nextel tower less than 1/2 mile down the street.
Learn what antenna they use and id by sight? You can also query the FCC but that results *will* be complete and sometimes they will be non-existant. Those are your best bets. Sorry.
The tower down the street from you does not carry nextel service if you have no service in your apt. If it is really within a half mile of your apt you would have 4-5 bars of service in your basement Mike
I have a file somewhere(it's about 1 1/2 years old) that has all NEXTEL locations on it. I'll try to find it again on my computer. BTW, it's on this forum too, somewhere
Yea third post down is a link to that file or here: http://forums.wirelessadvisor.com/showthread.php?t=11702 Mike Oxford GA
Thanks for the link. I out the info that was in the file for my area, but it must be VERY out of date - it shows that the nearest tower to my apartment is about 4 miles away. I seriously doubt I would get ANY signal with this phone if that were the case. Oh well.
Well, if it's not this specific tower then it must be very close by. When I am within a few blocks of it I have full bars on my phone (i730). As I drive away from it towards my apartment, the signal will drop to about 3-4 bars or so and vary wildly from minute to minute. Inside my apartment, I will occasionally have 3-4 bars of signal for a few minutes and then it will drop down to nothing every few minutes. As I think I mentioned earlier, this is the 3rd phone I've had with Nextel in the past year and they have all behaved exactly the same way so I doubt it's the handset. I sent Nextel a feedback form on their website about the problem about a month ago, and their only response was that the problem I was experiencing was due to "Poor coverage" (duh!) and that they were scheduled to install a new tower in my area "in the near future". If I am sitting very close to a Nextel tower, what sort of db reading should I see in diagnostic mode? Sitting in my office right now, I see 4 bars on the phone and am getting a -02db -80db reading on the phone. I know that there is a tower about 1/4 mile from here at most so that makes sense. What is the cutoff db level where I will start to lose calls?
Interesting update to this - about 2 weeks after I posted that last message, I suddenly noticed that my Nextel phone had almost perfect coverage in my apartment for the first time in almost 2 years. I don't know if Nextel repaired/upgraded an existing tower near by, or simply added a new tower or antenna to a Sprint tower, but service is now nearly perfect. Now if they could only do the same everywhere else so the phone wasn't nearly useless a majority of the time they would have something!
The easiest way is to locate the electric meter at the cell site. Normally they are located out where they are easily accessed for the power company meter readers. Normally they have a sticker identifing the cell company's name. Hope this helps...
LOL! Yeah I just came across this site and signed up. I noticed after I sent my reply of how old the thread really was. Sorry. Well the info I gave should still be correct. I use to work on cell tower and we always identified our sites with a label on the actual power meter (maybe thats a Maryland thing). Hope the info helps in the future if needed.
