Hey,
We had some challenging connectivity on AT&T in a rural town in the US. We’ve installed a repeater, but I haven’t seen any improvement in signal strength. Is this because the modem is still locked onto the old tower? How do I force the Electron to latch onto the repeater? Is there a way to force the unit to drop it’s current known towers and latch onto the one with the strongest signal strength (namely the repeater 15 metres away?).
Any advice gladly received!
Hi @mblackler - the best way to verify whether or not the device is locked on to the repeater is by gathering Cloud Debug logs (Releases · particle-iot/cloud-debug · GitHub) from the device and auditing the results. This is where I’d start, to be honest, making sure that the repeater is indeed working as expected.
The modem is programmed, by default, to latch on to the tower with the strongest signal strength (though there are some minor exceptions to this in practice). It is quite difficult to force a device to latch onto a specific tower and/or repeater in Device OS without using some very specific AT command language in application firmware.
Thanks Marek. We’ll make absolutely sure the repeater is working as expected. It may be that we need to issue some AT commands to get it to lock specifically - but, yes, we’ll chase down any potential repeater issues first.
Thanks!