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who can help me identify these antennas?

Discussion in 'Cell Tower Hunting Club' started by MarkyD, Sep 29, 2010.

  1. MarkyD

    MarkyD New Member

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    Went cell hunting today with a point & shoot. I'm primarily interested in finding out what all these are.

    I've photographed several Verizon sites. All the antennas look different. Here in OKC, I understand that Verizon uses 850 ONLY. No PCS. That is primarily why I'm confused at the different antennas.

    First, a Verizon site. I'm guessing this is 850 only (no LTE), as it's kind of in the outskirts. They all look the same on this one..
    [​IMG]

    Here's another Verizon tower with antennas that look much different. This one is supposed to be the "dominant" site at my workplace, however, we're doing the cell-site-musical chairs all of a sudden. I'm assuming it's a capacity issue. From the looks of it, there is plenty of space to add more antennas. What else is involved in adding more capacity, assuming back-haul is in place?

    [​IMG]

    This next one...it looks like it must be multi-carrier. The bigger antennas on the bottom row look like they might be LTE...The tower is owned by T-Mobile.
    [​IMG]


    Now these...these are MASSIVE panels I've seen popping up all over the place. I thought they were LTE, but then I realized they were on non-Verizon sites. The antennas are quite large with a line or "split" across the middle.

    [​IMG]

    and lastly...the tower I can see from my kitchen window. It's Sprint owned. The lower panels look like they might be the same as the ones I took in pic 1, so I'm guessing those are Verizon antennas. No idea about the rest.

    I wish there was more good info with pics out there on the types of antennas in use by the various carriers.
     
    #1 MarkyD, Sep 29, 2010
  2. Yankees368

    Yankees368 Compulsive Signal Checker
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    The best, and really only way to determine who a site is locally is to go to the base of the tower and check out the equipment and see who is there and who isnt. It is very difficult, if at all possible, to tell who is on a pole by the antennas.
     
    Stop hovering to collapse... Click to collapse... Hover to expand... Click to expand...
    #2 Yankees368, Sep 29, 2010
  3. MarkyD

    MarkyD New Member

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    how can I tell based on the base station? Usually it seems to just have a sign for the owner of the tower...which is often not who has stuff up there.
     
    #3 MarkyD, Sep 29, 2010
  4. Yankees368

    Yankees368 Compulsive Signal Checker
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    The easiest way is that usually, the power meters for each site will be labeled with each carriers name. Also, if a carrier is using a large shelter, the name or phone number of the carrier will usually be on the door. The same goes for carriers with small equipment boxes, the name is usually on it. Here are some examples:

    http://gallery.wirelessadvisor.com/showimage.php?i=6387&catid=searchresults&searchid=5413
    http://gallery.wirelessadvisor.com/showimage.php?i=6352&catid=searchresults&searchid=5413
    http://gallery.wirelessadvisor.com/showimage.php?i=4218&catid=searchresults&searchid=5414
     
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    #4 Yankees368, Sep 29, 2010
    1 person likes this.
  5. MarkyD

    MarkyD New Member

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    much appreciated! that helps a lot.

    Mark
     
    #5 MarkyD, Sep 29, 2010
  6. LineNoise

    LineNoise New Member

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    [​IMG]

    In Chicago AT&T is using antennas that look exactly like these.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
    #6 LineNoise, Oct 7, 2010
  7. mmillard

    mmillard Junior Member
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    For the T-Mobile owned tower, you can visit t-mobiletowers and zoom in on the map to that specific tower, if it's listed. (Note: For some reason, on my computer, sometimes I have to refresh the page to get it to work right - could just be a problem with my PC?)

    Once you're in, click "Tower Search" and then zoom to the tower in question, click it, and see if it has a "Details" page. If so, click that (a PDF document), and it will tell you who's on the tower, which antennas they have, what elevation and azimuth they are installed at on the tower, and a lot of other information, often including a layout of the property, and the cabinet postiions of each carrier.
     
    #7 mmillard, Oct 10, 2010
  8. rfhunter

    rfhunter New Member

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    Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

    Antennas used by different carriers are usually made by the same antenna companies and are identical. Typically the antenna itself won't tell you anything useful carrier wise just by looking at it. The pedestals and antenna signage are your best bet as stated earlier in this thread.
     
    #8 rfhunter, Dec 16, 2010
  9. Deleted member 154659

    Deleted member 154659 Guest

    the tall skinny ones could be AWS antennai, the ones we have here in Canada used by Wind Mobile look similar, tall and skinny. if you check out 1700-2100 mhz antenna manufacturers you can see the resemblence.
     
    #9 Deleted member 154659, Dec 27, 2010
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