4G / LTE signal strength around the seasons

Hi,
Looking at my statistics I can see that RSRP has slowly reduced from -79dB to -84dB over the four months that I've had the service installed. The kit is in my loft space so a bit fiddly to access, so before I do that I thought it worth asking if you'd expect to see any seasonal variation in signal strength. For example is it affected by temperature, day length, or anything?

Thanks, Tony S

If there are deciduous trees between you and the mast it is quite possibly the effect of leaves.

Mine has shifted the other direction in the same period.

https://toop.microsign.co.uk/fud/lte/localdomain/loc...

And it varies every 24 hour period, the SINR is better overnight, presumably because there are just less active devices or other interferance.

https://toop.microsign.co.uk/fud/lte/localdomain/loc...

Thanks. It's only RSRP that's reduced over the period for some reason. SINR and RSRQ have stayed around the same level, varying but not showing any trend of that time. I need to check out the tree question. My first thought is that it wouldn't apply, but since the ground rises to the N of our property maybe the trees there might be high enough to intrude into the line of sight.

The reason for better SINR at night is because the large yellow looking broad spectrum white noise generator that is visible in the sky when there are no clouds is being shielded by the earth.

As for the original poster, lofts are brutal environments for electronics. On a sunny summer day the temperature can easily exceed more than 50°C and the added thermal noise in the electronics is likely to lower the SNIR. I would go for something mounted outside myself.

Over the last week of so the signal strength has climbed back up, currently varying between -80 and -81dB.

Out of curiosity, would you mind telling which service do you use to measure and graph the signal strength, please?

I'm using Munin, running on the Linux box that serves as my home router (Munin uses the vernable MRTG library for the actual graphing).

http://munin-monitoring.org/

I then wrote a quick Munin plugin (just a short bit of bash shell script) to pull in the SXT's stats using SNMP.

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title LTE SXT signal"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel RSRP / SINR"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "rsrp.label RSRP"
echo "rsrp.type GAUGE"
echo "rsrp.draw LINE1"
echo "sinr.label SINR"
echo "sinr.type GAUGE"
echo "sinr.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of LTE SXT signal"
exit 0;;
esac

DOWNLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.4.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`
UPLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.7.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`

echo "rsrp.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "sinr.value $UPLOAD"

I also wrote another plugin for speedtest.net pings:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Ping"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel ping"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "down.label ping"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "down.max 1000"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Ping"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Ping | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"

and the speed itself:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Speedtest"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel DL / UL"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "down.label DL"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "up.label UL"
echo "up.type GAUGE"
echo "up.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Speed"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Download | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`
UPLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Upload | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "up.value $UPLOAD"

And I have a crontab entry that runs the speedtest-cli command output to /tmp/speedtest.out every 15 minutes.