On Sun, 19 Feb 2017 02:31:01 -0000 (UTC), Lewis wrote:

I haven never cared to check. If I unplug the t-mbile cellspot, my
signal in the basement drops significantly and I lose calls.

You are perfectly correct in that simply unplugging a single micro tower
will likely cause the signal strength to "fluctuate".

The signal strength, however, can easily be similar since it fluctuates
normally anyway, e.g., all my neighbors also have micro towers (basically
everyone has them out here).

Worse, when I unplug my booster, it takes about fifteen minutes for the
cell signal to set itself up, and, even then, it seems that the booster
simply "passes through" the cell tower ID it is boosting (I need to
research that further though). So, unplugging it in order to figure out if
I'm connected to it, is problematic.

However far worse than that, when I unplug my router-connected micro tower,
it takes multiple hours for the thing to set itself up. T-Mobile says that
it can take up to two hours, but I found out that it takes even longer than
that, as last night I literally fell asleep before the thing started taking
on my cell phone.

I had to look at the log file in the morning.

BTW, for Jeff Liebermann, I found another app that logs the connections,
so, that's three apps which log all the towers connected to, only one of
which (NetMonitor) allows you to modify how that log appears (which is a
nice feature) to the user in real time.

Some logs save as text, others as CSV, so I'll write up separately for you
and others to benefit, which apps were best for logging the cell tower IDs.

I don't care which tower or micro tower I am connected to.

Most people don't care which tower they're connected to; however, if they
were debugging their connection, they'd start to care.

In my case, T-Mobile only allows one device, which is what I found out when
the second device tried to use the same 911 address as the first device,
so, they "may" ask for one of the devices back (I had asked for a third
device, but that is currently out of the question).

If I have to give one device back, it is helpful to know which device
worked best, and for that, waiting two or more hours between tests is crazy
when I can just look at the unique cell id of the router-based device to
tell if that's what I'm connecting to.

So just having a decibel reading doesn't tell me *which* tower I'm
connected to (since there are at least three or more to choose from).

So? Who cares?

If my good signal strength is actually due to my neighbor's micro tower,
how would I know?

If I have to send back one device to T-Mobile, which device would I send
back?

The good news is that my decibel readings are now in the -50dBm to -60dBm
range (instead of the minus 90 to minus 100 decibel range as they were
before I hooked up the micro towers!).

That's all that matters.

Not really. If T-Mobile wants one of their devices back, which one do I
give them?