Abstract
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the current leading data transfer technology in the cellular industry and is used daily by people nationwide on multiple carriers to access their on-line services and networked applications. However, the service quality and access to this technology differ among cellular service providers due to the distance from the cellular towers and the number of users on the network at any given point in time. While it may be easy for a consumer to find the service provider with the best coverage nationwide, it is not as easy to find which has the strongest cellular signal in their favorite and frequented areas. To provide the residents of a city or town with an accurate representation of the cellular service coverage for different carriers in their area, the authors set out to test a number of cost-effective, open-source based Software Defined Radio (SDR) drive test systems, select one and calibrate it against an industry-standard LTE coverage survey instrument for a number of LTE frequency bands. This paper describes a cost-effective software defined radio (SDR) drive test system (to be known in this paper as LTESub) that we developed and adopted in conducting Radio Frequency (RF) drive tests around a specific geographical area in their school town. To provide both an accurate representation as well as a consumer-friendly way to test for LTE signal strength, the authors selected the RTL-2832U NESDR Nano USB, Delmore Earthmate LT-20 GPS USB dongles and RTL-SDR Scanner Software. They calibrated the newly created LTESub drive test system against the Anritsu LinkMaster ML87110A Drive Test multi-band receiver. The use of the LTESub system led to the successful development of a set of highly accurate heat maps at the 866.3 MHz and 751 MHz bands that can be used by potential cellular service subscribers to select the right frequency bands for their area and to map the same to the cellular service provider by consulting publicly available online tools.
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