Measuring "real" phone signal strength on a mobile phone
- by Serafeim
I want to programmatically measure the phone signal strength in a mobile phone. I don't actually care about the mobile phone or the programming environment: It can be based on android or windows mobile or even J2ME and can be from any manufacturer (please no iPhone). However, it needs to be a real, commercial mobile phone and not a special measurement device.
This problem is not as easy as it seems with a first look. I am aware that there already exist a number of methods that claim to return the phone signal strength. Some of these
are:
SystemState.PhoneSignalStrength for WM6
RIL_GetCellTowerInfo for WinCe (dwRxLevel member of returned RILCELLTOWERINFO struct)
android.telephony.NeighboringCellInfo.getRssi() for android
The problem with the above is that they only return a few (under 10) discrete values, meaning that, for instance, the return values of SystemState.PhoneSignalStrength can only be translated to (for instance) -100 dbm, -90 dbm, -80 dbm, -70 dbm and -60 dbm, something that is not useful for my application, since I'd like to have as much precision as possible.
It doesn't matter if there is an undocumented solution that only works on only one phone, if you can tell me a way I'd be grateful.
Thanks in advance
