TripEricson
commented
8 months ago Going to amend my final statement. Before leaving town yesterday, I swapped my Rainbow SIM into my Edge 2022, so as to get neighbor cells for Dish NR. I could definitely use to have this feature there as well; even though it would only connect to n71 in some areas, it will show me neighbor cells on n70, n66, and n29. And yes, the PCIs are consistent as far as I can tell.
mikejeep
On my Verizon phone, I've recently been noticing Verizon B48 LTE in the neighbor cells. If I lock the phone to B48, it won't connect, so I'm guessing it's being used as supplemental downlink or something, but that also means the only way to identify sites with B48 is to screenshot SCP showing B48 in the neighbor cells and then review the screenshots later. Since Verizon uses consistent PCIs across bands, I can do that with a high degree of certainty. The same is true for identifying 5G-NR NSA.
Would you consider adding a separate trail logger table and an optional function to record info on neighbor cells in LTE? It should record the lat/lon, timestamp, PCI, EARFCN/band, and signal level. And maybe also the GCI/PCI it's connected to when the neighbor cell is being recorded? (Recording the GCI it's been matched up to in showing the site note could be useful too, I suppose, but probably less so.) Could this also be used to record 5G-NR NSA data when connected to LTE, since it's more like a neighbor cell than anything else? Particularly on Verizon, I could see this being useful to identify what's going on with bands that can't be directly observed or bands that are less frequently connected to. (AWS-3 regularly appears in neighbor cells but doesn't often connect directly, for example.)
While theoretically also useful for NR, in practice it appears that only MediaTek phones support NR neighbor cells at this time, and since only T-Mobile has NR SA on a widespread basis and the PCIs are inconsistent across bands, this isn't something that would be useful to me specifically except in corner cases. Maybe it would be more so when Dish becomes more widely available if their PCIs are consistent. Regarding T-Mobile, in areas where n41 SA is not running, with my Edge 2022 I can see n41 neighbor cells, but as they're just PCIs without any indicator of what the NCI is, that's really not terribly helpful.