Seeking Your Opinion on an Upcoming Roadtest: SNYPER-LTE GRAPHYTE

Dear Randall,

A very interesting device - count me in as being very interested. In Australia, we are a great expanse of country which often has a lot of its area not well covered by mobile signals. The three major carriers (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) operate on a variety of bands in LTE (01, 03, 05, 07, 28 and 40), but despite this, in many areas (including my house), LTE performance is poor due to congestion, high path losses due to distance and high frequency but also due to competing signals from other stations raising the noise floor.

As a radio amateur and as someone who has suffered from this - I have long been using tools such as Mobile Signal Guru (an app) running on a rooted Android phone with a Qualcomm chipset so I can at least read out information such as the RSRP, SINR, and Cell ID values to know which base station I'm on and if I'm receiving a good signal or better still, carrier aggregation. I spent quite a bit of time on this post on my blog looking at what the local carriers had in terms of frequency/bandwidth/MIMO spatial streams to make some deduction about their relative quality of coverage at my house.

Above is a snapshot of the signal at the office - on Optus, Band 40 indoors. Not a great result. There's another base on Band 07 that might be usable, but its signal strength is poor despite having a better quality ... the phone doesn't choose to roam to it. The biggest issue with using such an app is that a lot of the better features cost a significant amount of money and that its accuracy and performance are in no way guaranteed. In fact, the values that are read can depend heavily on the antenna design of the mobile phone, the orientation in which it is held and the version of baseband firmware that is loaded on the phone. It's also not able to give a snapshot of "all band" and "all mode" performance without a lot of hoops being jumped through (i.e. manually disabling all the bands and enabling one at a time).

While it seems obvious to use the unit in coverage verification tasks (e.g. to address consumer complaints or check a new base station is achieving coverage improvements as expected), having one of these units, depending on its capabilities, should allow for the identification of long term signal trends as well. This is especially important as illegal "dumb" coverage extenders can spew noise into the bands at certain times of the day or oscillate in runaway feedback and reduce quality of service for all. Likewise, changing conditions (traffic, trees blowing in the wind, base station outages) can affect the signals as well.

Looking at the specs from Siretta, the bands supported are:

LTE / 4G Network support

• B1 – 2100 MHz

• B3 – 1800 MHz

• B7 – 2600 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

• B20 – 800 MHz

UMTS / 3G Network support

• B1 – 2100 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

GSM / 2G Network support

• B3 – 1800 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

This matches fairly well with the bands used in Australia - bolded. It does miss out LTE Bands 5, 28 and 40 and UMTS 850Mhz which are also still used in Australia which is a little unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Unfortunately for the US players, this band plan doesn't work at all, with the US using none of the supported frequencies as far as I can tell. 2G networks have all been switched off in Australia.

Definitely an interesting unit and one I'll be keeping an eye on when (and if) a RoadTest occurs.

- Gough

Dear Randall,

A very interesting device - count me in as being very interested. In Australia, we are a great expanse of country which often has a lot of its area not well covered by mobile signals. The three major carriers (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) operate on a variety of bands in LTE (01, 03, 05, 07, 28 and 40), but despite this, in many areas (including my house), LTE performance is poor due to congestion, high path losses due to distance and high frequency but also due to competing signals from other stations raising the noise floor.

As a radio amateur and as someone who has suffered from this - I have long been using tools such as Mobile Signal Guru (an app) running on a rooted Android phone with a Qualcomm chipset so I can at least read out information such as the RSRP, SINR, and Cell ID values to know which base station I'm on and if I'm receiving a good signal or better still, carrier aggregation. I spent quite a bit of time on this post on my blog looking at what the local carriers had in terms of frequency/bandwidth/MIMO spatial streams to make some deduction about their relative quality of coverage at my house.

Above is a snapshot of the signal at the office - on Optus, Band 40 indoors. Not a great result. There's another base on Band 07 that might be usable, but its signal strength is poor despite having a better quality ... the phone doesn't choose to roam to it. The biggest issue with using such an app is that a lot of the better features cost a significant amount of money and that its accuracy and performance are in no way guaranteed. In fact, the values that are read can depend heavily on the antenna design of the mobile phone, the orientation in which it is held and the version of baseband firmware that is loaded on the phone. It's also not able to give a snapshot of "all band" and "all mode" performance without a lot of hoops being jumped through (i.e. manually disabling all the bands and enabling one at a time).

While it seems obvious to use the unit in coverage verification tasks (e.g. to address consumer complaints or check a new base station is achieving coverage improvements as expected), having one of these units, depending on its capabilities, should allow for the identification of long term signal trends as well. This is especially important as illegal "dumb" coverage extenders can spew noise into the bands at certain times of the day or oscillate in runaway feedback and reduce quality of service for all. Likewise, changing conditions (traffic, trees blowing in the wind, base station outages) can affect the signals as well.

Looking at the specs from Siretta, the bands supported are:

LTE / 4G Network support

• B1 – 2100 MHz

• B3 – 1800 MHz

• B7 – 2600 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

• B20 – 800 MHz

UMTS / 3G Network support

• B1 – 2100 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

GSM / 2G Network support

• B3 – 1800 MHz

• B8 – 900 MHz

This matches fairly well with the bands used in Australia - bolded. It does miss out LTE Bands 5, 28 and 40 and UMTS 850Mhz which are also still used in Australia which is a little unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Unfortunately for the US players, this band plan doesn't work at all, with the US using none of the supported frequencies as far as I can tell. 2G networks have all been switched off in Australia.

Definitely an interesting unit and one I'll be keeping an eye on when (and if) a RoadTest occurs.

- Gough