Subject: [NEXTEL-1] MIKE WENDLAND: Tech sleuth tracks cell phone outages

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 12:03:36 -0500

MIKE WENDLAND: Tech sleuth tracks cell phone outages
February 9, 2004

BY MIKE WENDLAND
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Ken Tanner is the real-life version of the guy in the Verizon commercials who
wanders around saying, "Can you hear me now?"
Except in the case of Tanner, a systems performance engineer for Verizon
Wireless -- Michigan's largest wireless provider -- the territory is so large he
needs an SUV to cover it.

From an unmarked white Ford Explorer with a backseat loaded with high-tech gear,
Tanner, 41, cruises from Ohio to Muskegon identifying and locating sources of
interference that disrupt cell phone communications.

He's one of 10 such engineers in the Michigan region, part geek and part
detective, tasked with making sure that the company's 1 million Michigan
customers can hear and be heard as they whiz past cell towers and move through a
maze of coverage areas.
I rode along with him the other day as he sniffed out the source of an
interfering signal in Livonia. Our first stop was the 110-foot tower at 6 Mile
and Middlebelt.

Inside a windowless room at the base of the tower that is jammed with racks of
electronic gear and banks of charging batteries ready to be used for emergency
power, Tanner attached a laptop computer to the antenna array amplifiers at the
top of the tower.
There are three antennas, each covering a segment of a 360-degree radius.

The first two showed a flat line of squiggly little hash marks that represented
the radio spectrum. But on the third, facing the northwest, a sharp little spike
jumped from the line and held steady.
"That's it," he said. "That's the source."

We got back in the car and headed north on Middlebelt. Tanner drove. I held a
small machine called a spectrum analyzer on my lap. Connected to the spectrum
analyzer was a white Fiberglas antenna attached to a window of the Explorer.
A half-dozen blocks from the cell tower, the interference spiked sharply. Tanner
turned west on a side street. The spike continued rising and then, a
quarter-mile or so down the street, began to fall again. He turned around and
retraced the route until the signal again peaked. Then he pulled to the curb.

It was a typical subdivision street, with homes on both sides.

From the backseat, Tanner pulled out a 4-foot-long direction-finding radio
antenna that he exchanged with the Fiberglas stick antenna. Standing in the
street outside the Explorer, he pointed the antenna south. The signal vanished.
Then he pointed north, where the signal popped up. Slowly, he swept it down the
block until, pointed directly at a yellow and black tri-level house, the signal
maxxed out.

Bingo.

No one was home that day, but Tanner later determined the source of the
interference. It was one of those amplified rabbit-ears-style TV antennas that
attach to the back of a TV set. Something wrong in the circuitry was emitting a
very low-powered signal that fell onto one of several mobile telephone
frequencies at 827.86801 Mhz.

The antennas on the cell tower back at 6 Mile and Middlebelt picked up that
interfering signal, which tied up that particular mobile frequency for the 3 or
4 miles covered by the tower.
Tanner has seen lots of similar problems.

The company typically works out a deal with the owner of the offending device,
often repairing or replacing it.
When we pick up our cell phones, it means somebody really can hear us now.
Contact MIKE WENDLAND at [email-masked].

http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend9_20040209.htm

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