Where are the cell phone towers?

I found many cell tower locations by googling the words - cell tower locations

I could also find rest areas by looking at a road atlas but I would rather have a POI file.

It really depends on where you are. And the fact that the cell towers change all the time. It might be like trying to track all blue cars. Around here (south Jersey) there are LOTS. And even more in north Jersey. One big job and one big file!

I have an air card and an RV, and just this weekend, in Pennsylvania near Reading, I was in a campground, way down in a hole, and neither my air card or cell phone (different carrier) would work more than intermittently. The campground did have access, but I was so far away from their transmitter I got little more than 100k.

BTW, how good are the directionals and how much do they cost.

Hate to tell you, but as someone who works in the cell phone industry, tower locations are not something they widely disseminate in the manner you want - I believe companies consider it proprietary business information.

There are FCC databases that are publicly available that could be data-mined if one were inclined to seek out the data, and figure out how to make use of it.

And, of the top 5 cell phone companies, you're talking thousands upon thousands of sites...too big of a project.

You are right, Keith. It would be a big project unless it was narrowed down to a particular carrier and location. But the tower locations are readily available at http://www.cellreception.com/ right down to their lat/lon and satellite views.

But someone recently created a POI file for Interstate rest areas and there were almost 1800 of those.

So, you want someone to gather it all for you? Isn't that what POI file creators do?

We all use rest areas. Who is going to tackle a mammoth cell tower poi project when you may be the only one interested in it on this forum. It sounds to me like a project for your RV buddies.

The folks over at http://www.evdoforums.com are also interested in cell tower locations. It is not just me and my RV buddies. But, hey, I didn't realize there would be such an enthusiastic response.

I'll do Wyoming, gymkey can do Texas, and maybe Keith will do California. I'll get my RV buddies to do the other states and we can have this done in no time.

JFSJr,

If you want to build your own antenna, go here:

http://273k.net/gsm/designing-and-building-a-gsm-antenna/yag...

To buy one, try this site:

http://www.alternativewireless.com/cellular-antennas/wilson-...

Would the POI files likely be broken down by carrier or a laundry list of all carriers?

Thanks, Comdac... Don't think I'm up to building my own, and the price on ready made isn't too bad. Will give it some thought.

As others have already pointed out, this would be a monumental task unless someone had access to existing databases. After I started this thread, I discovered that there were 126,000 towers throughout the country. As gymkep said, the number of users of this POI file is too small to justify an effort of this magnitude.

Also, although this website,

http://www.cellreception.com

lists cell tower locations, it does not identify which carriers use a particular tower. That would be information that I would find necessary.

But, if I were doing something like this, I would have a separate file for each carrier within a state -- a lot of POI files.

Something else to consider is the direction the tower is pointed. They all don't use a 360-degree approach. I have a tower I can see the lights on at night, but it's pointed toward town and I get weak signal at best. I live on the dark side deep in the country around here. HeHe

I did see a query on Google showing cell towers but I do not remember where.

Here's a website that might be of some help, but just because a tower is owned by one company doesn't mean another company doesn't have an agreement with the owner to use it also.

http://www.cellreception.com/