On Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:06:23 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

So, you're stuck with only hearing what your smartphone is programmed
to hear, which I think means your cellular providers mode
(GSM,UMTS,CDMA, etc) and possibly filtered to limit reception to your
cellular vendors SID and NID numbers. I gotta play with Netmonitor
later to see if my Verizon phone will "see" Sprint sites. Verizon
roams onto Sprint when desperate. Both are CDMA, but on different RF
sub-bands. So far, I'm only seeing Verizon, but that might be because
I'm in a lousy location.

Thanks Jeff for that detailed explanation of why I seem to only see the one
tower's cell id that I'm currently connected to.

My problem set is that I installed two different types of local microtowers
and I just wanted to know which ones I'm connected to, and at what
strength.

I have both iOS and Android devices, so it doesn't matter to me which I use
(the iOS devices have far larger screens, so they're preferable).

After running the various programs since last night, I can say that there
are two ways, overall, to get a "survey" of local towers.

1. The real-time apps, such as Network Signal Info, will constantly change
their cellid as they move from tower to tower, so, with screenshots, I can
capture that information for later use. (The tower changes seem to happen
more when I have lousy signal strength than when I have stronger signal
strength.)

2. The logging apps, such as Netmonitor & MyProfiles, seem to log the
various celltower IDs so that we can see a history over time of the cell
towers we have connected to.

Since they only show towers as numbers, it's hard at the moment to
correlate these logs to the two microtowers I have installed. So I'm going
to have to run a few surveys, near home (with and without the microtowers
powered up) and away from home (to remove from the logs the towers that
aren't within 1,000 feet or so of the house).

Over time, I should be able to figure out what the unique cellid of the
microtowers is (which may be a function of their MAC address or serial
numbers for all I know).