Measuring mobile data signal strength RSSI

E39MSport

http://www.nerve.org.za/mdma/

Found the above. Quite handy if somewhat unfortunately named.

long_b

Thanks OP !
So you just slap in the USB key into your laptop and take a wander around the house, watching the Signal figure ?
Does it take long to react to a change in location ?
Is more negative better ?

E39MSport

Yeah - closer to zero is better and it responds very quickly. Make sure your o2/voda etc software is off.

I ended up wandering about the attic at lunch time

long_b

E39MSport wrote: »

attic

I really wish you hadn't said that - I would've been happy just doing the kitchen and the bedrooms :rolleyes:

DonJose

For those of you using this software what kind of results are you getting?

E39MSport

I'm hovering around -80 dBm (in the attic ;-) )and I live fairly near a mast in rural terms.

Although the phone tells me I have good signal (4/5 bars), my broadband and ping times are absolute rubbish. >700ms and .25Mb today.

Last night was fine.

long_b

E39MSport wrote: »

I'm hovering around -80 dBm (in the attic ;-) )and I live fairly near a mast in rural terms.

Although the phone tells me I have good signal (4/5 bars), my broadband and ping times are absolute rubbish. >700ms and .25Mb today.

Last night was fine.

-99 at best - like one particular spot in the kitchen

E39MSport

long_b wrote: »

-99 at best - like one particular spot in the kitchen

And what type of speeds can you achieve with that signal?

long_b

Carefully positioned I can get an average of 1.1, 1.2 and peaks of over 2. That's off peak now, havent' tried weekdays yet.
Also, those speeds are via a 3G router, I have a suspicion I get better speeds from my iPhone4.

E39MSport

Interesting.

I went down this signal strength route after my speeds dropped to .25 Mb and upload to .02Mb !

Tommy Lagahan

>=-51dBm, full reception on the repeater, E1820 and my speed is still all over the place don't you just love 3G -_-

lucernarian

Repeater? What's the signal strength like without the repeater? The repeater will naturally give you good signal strength but if the incoming signal from the mast is poor, the repeater will only transmit a "powerful but poor" signal.

funnyname

doesn't seem to work for me, I'm tethering with my samsung galaxy, anything else I need to do?

Tommy Lagahan

@To be confirmed, cheers, I wasn't aware that the repeater would just repeat a crappy connection, its about -85 to -91dBm where the repeater is currently but I found a better spot in a different room at around -77 to -83dBm. Seems that the signal is never consistent no matter where I go though, was on a hill at the back of me house with a laptop ( just for the craic of it XD) and it was -71 before I speed tested, and -77 after :S.
Even on the hill speeds are only about 1.5mb but at peak times I'm more than happy with that, its the ping jitter that infuriates me on PSN...

William Powell

funnyname wrote: »

doesn't seem to work for me, I'm tethering with my samsung galaxy, anything else I need to do?

Only works with a dongle directly attached to a com port (USB).

funnyname

William Powell wrote: »

Only works with a dongle directly attached to a com port (USB).

Thanks

I have an old payg dongle, will try that over the weekend.

Tommy Lagahan

Damn you never win with 3g. Just moved the repeater and most of my gaming stuff to the room with the better reception, ping times are consistently 140+ but the speeds are class. Pings were 69-80 yesterday :S

Whats the story with the "CELL ID:" on the program? is this to do with what mast you are connected to?
Im getting 4 different ones depending on where i sellotape the modem to the window lol.

William Powell

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Damn you never win with 3g. Just moved the repeater and most of my gaming stuff to the room with the better reception, ping times are consistently 140+ but the speeds are class. Pings were 69-80 yesterday :S

Whats the story with the "CELL ID:" on the program? is this to do with what mast you are connected to?
Im getting 4 different ones depending on where i sellotape the modem to the window lol.

Cell ID is the "Cell" you are connected to, each mast has 3 cells each roughly covering 120degrees around the mast. So if you are seeing 4 Cell ID's then you could be between 2 masts and between cells (which overlap a little) or have 4 masts that you can get a signal from, obviously that are other possible combinations. So what you need to do is find the Cell that has the least contention by testing all 4 Cell ID's for speed at peak times like around 6pm in the evening.

Edit>Check Comregs siteviewer to see where your nearst masts are but bear in mind not all masts are listed http://www.askcomreg.ie/mobile/View_Mobile_Sites.36.LE.asp also the Cell ID from MDMA doesn't tie up with the Site ID's comreg list

E39MSport

William Powell wrote: »

Cell ID is the "Cell" you are connected to, each mast has 3 cells each roughly covering 120degrees around the mast. So if you are seeing 4 Cell ID's then you could be between 2 masts and between cells (which overlap a little) or have 4 masts that you can get a signal from, obviously that are other possible combinations. So what you need to do is find the Cell that has the least contention by testing all 4 Cell ID's for speed at peak times like around 6pm in the evening.

Edit>Check Comregs siteviewer to see where your nearst masts are but bear in mind not all masts are listed http://www.askcomreg.ie/mobile/View_Mobile_Sites.36.LE.asp also the Cell ID from MDMA doesn't tie up with the Site ID's comreg list

I was getting 2 different cell ID's on mine even though there is just 1 in range. THe nice lady at O2 told me that the same site can have different ID's. Not sure why though. Perhaps a different ID for each carrier type.

edit: she also confirmed that the cell ID reading on the app was correct whereas the comreg one was/is wrong.

Tommy Lagahan

Ahh that explains alot, there is ~4 masts in the area :S 1 of which is about 7+ miles away but 2 are within 2 miles and the last one is just behind a hill about half a mile away. Should have seen the amount of cells i went through in the attic, standing in one spot i could get 4 or more just by turning around, each with widely varying ping and speed. Its like a reception anomaly field :S

William Powell

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Ahh that explains alot, there is ~4 masts in the area :S 1 of which is about 7+ miles away but 2 are within 2 miles and the last one is just behind a hill about half a mile away. Should have seen the amount of cells i went through in the attic, standing in one spot i could get 4 or more just by turning around, each with widely varying ping and speed. Its like a reception anomaly field :S

Consider yourself lucky I got no choice, one mast about 10miles away or nothing :rolleyes: Unless of course 3 have other sites and haven't bothered to tell comreg

Tommy Lagahan

William Powell wrote: »

Consider yourself lucky I got no choice, one mast about 10miles away or nothing :rolleyes: Unless of course 3 have other sites and haven't bothered to tell comreg

None of us that have to deal with 3g broadband should consider ourselves lucky but yeah wouldn't be like three to be lazy and disorganized with comreg either would it :pac:

Tommy Lagahan

Sorry to dig this up, but is there any way to lock a modem to a certain cell/ pair of cells? As i said on my window there is 4 different masts to connect to and about 5 cells. 2 of which are perfect speed on one of the masts, low ping and everything, but the rest are crap and the modem keeps changing cell, dropping connection all by itself. I need to have the modem at a perfect angle to pick up the good mast but the reception is about -79dBm, and i have no bother with it...
If I had a directional antenna for the e1820 and faced it the proper direction for the good mast would it stay locked on that one?

Tommy Lagahan

Its actually a disaster, the modem just changed cell 6 times the last 5 minutes and every time streaming,cmd google.ie ping and call of duty drop connection for a second or 2 long enough to kick me from a game and time out tranceFM. -_-

watty

Also signal can be perfect, but if for example 5 people on same sector are trying to watch YouTube you might only get 0.1Mbps.