Post Your Signal Strength!!!

[Rominucka]

The bars on your phone are there to make you feel better. They are nowhere near accurate in telling you that you have good signal.
4 out of 5 bars with a signal strength of -85dbm is retar*ed. On a 5 bar scale -85 should be 2 bars at the MOST!

At -96dbm the receiver will barely be able to decipher the signal from the noise floor. It's like listening to an extremely staticy radio station where you THINK you hear music.

At -85dbm you could at least tell what genre the music is and maybe the artist.
At -70dbm, the static is loud and annoying but you can clearly tell what song it is.
At -60dbm, the static is there but you only hear it during the quite parts of the song. This is considered good (not great) signal strength for OTA broadcasting.

Anything below -70dbm and the phone's receiver tuning function is working overtime to filter out the noise and lock onto the 700MHz.

700MHz is good because unlike WiMax (2+GHz, which gets destroyed by the likes of simple fog in the air) it has no trouble penetrating, not only fog but building structures. In fact 700MHz can be knocked around a little by the likes of clouds all the way up to the density of buildings in a favorable way.
It's raining where I am tonight and I noticed that I was getting 4G in an area of my house that never gets 4G. I drove to the store which is about a half mile closer to Verizon's towers and while waiting at a red light I checked my signal strength, and this is what I got.....

WOW!!! I could be wrong, but I believe the super-thick cloudy sky was causing any stray signal to bounce back, boosting the ground reception. I never get signal that strong, even when I clocking in with 12+Mbps downlink....which brings me to this:

This is the highest Mbps downlink I've gotten so far, and I'm a good 10 or so miles away from the towers. This was actually taken before I took the signal strength shot. I was next to the supermarket and only reading -70dbm at this point. The -53dbm was on the road at the intersection...less structural interference.

So anyway, that's it for now. I'm gonna do some more basic studying on the function of frequency broadcasting. No more guessing and half baked, 3rd party information relay. I know a guy who can help teach me more. He's been the senior technician for the past 10 years for the CBS transmitter at the top of the Empire State Building...I call him Dad.

 

[Yankees368]

I'm not so sure that screen is telling you the LTE signal strength as it is telling you the CDMA 1x strength. My apartment is in a weak LTE area (my primary tower does not have LTE for various reasons) and my Charge reads -80, but so does a 3rd party app that tells you the CDMA and EVDO signals.

 

[executor485]

4/5 bars and -89dBm, that may explain why my calls are so ****** regardless of my signal strength. However, switch over to 3G and it's good.
Doesnt matter where I am either, middle of Dallas and full bars and I can only make out about 1 in 6 words said.
Honestly, reception/signal on this phone is the ONLY reason I hate it. And Verizon cant get their story straight on why my signal sucks either.

Watching my signal, bad thing... it's ranging -80 all the way to -103, regardless of # of bars I have. Would love to know whats wrong. But that could explain why my signal drops randomly, half the time I pick up my phone I have to cycle the network to get a signal.

 

[Ken7]

I think Rominucka's numbers for good reception, music recognition etc. are way over-stated. I routinely have a SS in the mid 80s and no matter what I do with the phone, it doesn't act in any way like his examples would make you think. I'd think when I'm streaming music, listening to phone calls or whatever, I'd be having sound issues if his numbers were valid...I don't.

Perhaps his numbers are more applicable to a conventional AM/FM radio, but they don't seem to have anywhere near the correlation his numbers suggest for a cellphone.

 

[Yankees368]

Yea those numbers are way overstated.
On a digital system, a good signal is anywhere in the range of -45dbm to about -95 or -100dbm. Anything over that, such as -105dbm and you will start to drop calls, have data drop, etc.
Most carriers actually say that a -85dbm signal is considered good, and that isn't too far off.

 

[haza12d]

Mine is showing -73dBm

Here are the results of my Speed Test:

 

[Rominucka]

I think Rominucka's numbers for good reception, music recognition etc. are way over-stated. I routinely have a SS in the mid 80s and no matter what I do with the phone, it doesn't act in any way like his examples would make you think. I'd think when I'm streaming music, listening to phone calls or whatever, I'd be having sound issues if his numbers were valid...I don't.

Perhaps his numbers are more applicable to a conventional AM/FM radio, but they don't seem to have anywhere near the correlation his numbers suggest for a cellphone.

No no, I was trying to make an analogy. I'm not saying that when the signal is weak the sound is bad. With digital, when the signal is too weak there's nothing. Digital is either on or off in terms of signal strength.

Yankee368 might be right about the dbm having nothing to do with CDMA or LTE. I tried calling Samsung tech support and when I asked him what the dbm corresponded to he told me that it stood for "delivery...something or other" I don't remember exactly, but he had no clue of what I was talking about.

I will get to the bottom of this.

And holy mother of pearl haza12d...look at those numbers!!! Thanks for posting that cause I'm probably moving to L.A. in a month or so and I was gonna ask how the LTE is out there.

 

[caelius]

I routinely get between -85dBm to -95dBm (at least that's what the phone says) with LTE in Jeffersonville, Indiana, which is directly across the Ohio River from Louisville. Big Red turned on LTE in the downtown area of Louisville for Derby and didn't shut it off. I gotten a 4G signal in several parts of Louisville, yet we are not even shown on the Big Red's maps as having 4G yet.