On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 03:23:29 +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:

There is no way the phone can determine the location of the tower from
the signal,

Sure they can. The signal include Latitude and Longitude for the tower.

That's not the signal.

That's decoding the data on it, and reading it. Then finding via GPS the
exact location of the terminal, then calculating the direction of the tower.

This finding-where-the-tower is stuff is all new to me, but from what I've
been reading, it's impossible to do on an iPhone, and, the directional
pointer on OpenSignal is, at best, a wild-assed guess.

I'm still trying to figure all this out, but, it seems that OpenSignal is
likely a phony app that simply uses your cellular connection to *guess*
which cell tower you're connected to (based purely on your signal strength
and carrier).

The actual location of the tower is well known to be wrong, since it's
merely an average location of the *cell phones*!

Yup. They don't locate the tower.
They simply average the location of the cellphone locations!

Says so he
"In OpenSignal ... the tower locations reported are not the actual
antenna coordinates but the average of coordinates where cell phones were
when they connected to that antenna"
http://people.csail.mit.edu/bkph/cel...r_inside.shtml

Here's a classic result of the OpenSignal inaccurate averaging algorithm:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/bkph/ima...1130072559.png