GSM Location info on LTE E-Series

Well, I think I was wrong. I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to do cell tower location on LTE (SARA-R410M-02B), the E Series LTE and Boron LTE.

The problem is that the necessary info: MCC, MNC, BSIC, and cell ID can only be retrieved using mode 2 or mode 3 for AT+UCGED. The command reference says the SARA-R4 only supports modes 0 and 5 and indeed querying the device says that it’s true.

     8.125 AT send      12 "AT+UCGED=?\r\n"
     8.136 AT read  +   19 "\r\n+UCGED:  (0,5) \r\n"

Unfortunately, mode 5 only returns the P-CID (E-UTRAN cell Physical Cell ID), not the Lcellid (E-UTRAN CI cell identifier), so it can’t be used for geolocation. And mode 0 doesn’t return anything other than OK.

I could be missing something, but I can’t find a way to get the necessary cell IDs.

And you can’t do CellLocate on the SARA-R410M-02B either, so it’s kind of hard to figure out where it is without GPS, apparently. That’s unfortunate.