here is the link to my gallery and the pics i took. id recommend checking back on this regularly for anyone interested as i travel ALOT and there is huge variety of towers in my area and i will be documenting them more and more. also i promise to get a more suitable camera EricN4707's Images - Cellular Phone Towers and Cell Site Pictures
can anyone look at those and tell me if im guessing the carriers correctly? its really a stab into the dark...i have no clue.
Thanks for the pictures...keep them coming! It would help if you could include the city or the name of the highways or streets in the descriptions.
yea all of them. i just wanted a general of idea of what im looking at. im pretty much guessing based off of priority and best service in this area.
In my experiences, guessing the carrier is that much easier with CDMA phones. I often go into the debug mode on the phone and look at the dBm readings... usually, readings in the -50 to -70 range indicate that the carrier is on that particular site.... Also carrier maps, particularly TMobile and Sprint, can help in locating sites. I have also used http://www.antenasearch.com/ to narrow down the carriers, although this is a hit or miss.
So I have a couple tips for determining carriers but they are just from my experience and carriers may build out differently in your area. Verizon usually uses 3 or 4 panels per sector. Verizon sometimes has different panels on the same sector. Rutland Vermont 05701 Verizon - Cellular Phone Towers and Cell Site Pictures That is a Verizon tower in Vermont with 3 panels per sector and all 3 panels are different. Nextel usually has 4 panels per sector and they should all match. If you see an array with 3 matching panels and 1 non-matching panel you have probably found a synergy site. Instead of co-locating on the tower, Sprint sometimes replaces one of Nextel's panels with the Sprint panel. AT&T usually has 3 or 4 panels per sector and they may not all match. Sprint and T-Mobile are often seen using 1 or 2 panels per sector.
thanks. yea VZW ones are easy to tell here as they are split sectors generally everyone else i pretty much guess by how well their reception in that area is by whether they are on that tower or not. also i can tell from the look of ATT only towers or sprint only towers and comparing.
