Network upgrades in Northern California?

[Life-Is-Good]

Originally posted by pbw
. . . I remember watching that happen during the world series, of course no believed me when I told them it had just happened. Man what a mess, overpass sandwitches, uppersections of bridges collapsing. Doesn't Loma Prieta have a big antenna farm ontop?

The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake was quite an experience to live through. There was much more widespread damage and death for hundreds of miles than was shown by the media. And it was pretty pathetic how badly the media distorted most of what they did show.

One of the first things the TV showed was the baseball player “rescuing” a child from the grandstands. Actually the child was his and his wife was handing the child down to him so that she could make a quick exit with him across the playing field.

The TV showed that one apartment building that collapsed and burned in the Marina District from dozens of different angles, making it look like dozens of buildings had collapsed and burned like that. If the media had done a little more work they could have shown spectacular footage of dozens of buildings that collapsed, but most of them didn’t burn.

When the earthquake hit I had friends sitting in front of the TV in the living room in my apartment in Chinatown San Francisco waiting for the World Series game to start. My apartment building was built on bedrock so it didn’t shake very hard and my building had no damage. But it shook for a l-o-n-g time, so we knew that the quake was a bad one. One of the first things that happened was the TV station dropped off the air (the station’s transmitter tower had fallen over) so that also indicated that the quake was a bad one.

The phone lines were all down, so I went outside to a pay phone to call my parents in Florida to tell them that I was OK. There were big clouds of dark grey dust like fog blowing up the streets because of all the building facades that had collapsed.

My friend in Palo Alto was in her living room when the shaking started. She grabbed her dog and ran out into her back yard just in time to see the water from her neighbor’s swimming pool jump over the fence into her back yard.

My home was untouched, but the office building where I worked was severely damaged and had to be torn down. Because of the damage I wasn’t allowed into my office for over 2 weeks and had to sign a release and wear a hard hat when they finally did allow me to enter for 15 minutes to collect what belongings I could find in the mess.

Yes, Loma Prieta is one of the many mountains around here that have antenna farms.

[Life-Is-Good]

Originally posted by chefofthefuture
. . . Oh -- by the way, I don't ever remember thinking that the kid the ballplayer grabbed was anyone other than his own.

Likewise, but both the TV news and the newspapers ran that picture with the caption “. . .player rescues child . . .”

[Life-Is-Good]

Originally posted by chefofthefuture
I've read that the geo-geeks theorize that the Loma Prieta quake was likely because that area wasn't having small quakes before the big one. Of course, no one knows the timeframe of when a quake will happen, but I guess they think a lack of small quakes somewhere along a fault makes it more likely for a big one to happen there. . .

I was a little disturbed when I learned recently that the original Mission in Santa Cruz was destroyed by an earthquake in 1857. Big quakes happen more often here than I thought.

Until 1989, the biggest quake I had ever been in was in PHILADELPHIA!!

The Hayward fault is one that is overdue for a bad quake.

But I’m not afraid. Quakes and high housing costs help keep too many more people from moving here and overcrowding our paradise.

My reaction to earthquakes is always “Yee-hawww, ride ‘em cowboy!!!” It’s awesome to be in a place where you can see the waves traveling along the ground.

[gregsmith59]

... I noticed last week that the Richmond-Petersburg side of Sprint SID 4982 (NID 00080) changed from the standard Motorola sequential numbering scheme of 4 to a variable one. Base_IDs stayed the same but the PNs are totally different. Also the lowest valued PN no longer corresponds to the lowest valued Base_ID. Most distressing for all of the mapping I had done. On the Norfolk side things are still the same and I notice that the Washington/Baltimore and Philadelphia networks remain unsegmented and using standard Lucense seperation schemes of 168 between PNs and 256 between Base_IDs.
...

Base_IDs on my Nokia are easy:

For example if the Nokia displays “427” as the Base_ID:
- convert “427” decimal to “1AB” Hex
- “1” says that this is an Alpha sector

- the Beta sector will be “2AB” hex or “683” decimal, which is what the Nokia will display for the Base_ID of the Beta sector.

- the Gamma sector will be “3AB” hex or “938” decimal, which is what the Nokia will display for the Base_ID of the Gamma sector.

To get the tower number:
- convert “AB” hex to “171” decimal.
“171” is the ID of the base station and the number that Verizon uses to refer to this tower in their databases (and for licensing?).

When talking to Verizon Tech Support, referring to the tower as “Tower 171” avoids the confusion of Verizon trying to determine which tower you are referring to by using your Zip Code and street address.

In northern California the towers are numbered sequentially as they are built.

There may be a scheme similar to this in your area, depending on how Verizon assigns Base_IDs in your area and how your phone displays them.

I thought I would bring this 6 year old thread up to date on Verizon Base IDs and PNs, for the SF and LA markets at least.

The above Verizon logic works in SID 40 (greater SF market), although Verizon has grown beyond the 255/256 cell sites per NID that this numbering scheme supports.

old
===
site 001 (0x001): BIDs 00257 (0x0101), 00513 (0x0202), 00769 (0x0301)
site 255 (0x0FF): BIDs 00511 (0x01FF), 00767 (0x02FF), 01023 (0x03FF)

new
===
site 256 (0x100): BIDs 04352 (0x1100), 04608 (0x1200), 04864 (0x1300)
site 511 (0x1FF): BIDs 04607 (0x11FF), 04863 (0x12FF), 05119 (0x13FF)
site 512 (0x200): BIDs 08448 (0x2100), 08704 (0x2200), 08960 (0x2300)
site 767 (0x2FF): BIDs 08703 (0x21FF), 08959 (0x22FF), 09215 (0x23FF)

Note that the numbering scheme extension puts the third hex digit (most significant) of the site number into the fourth hex digit of the BID, so that the sector can remain in the third digit.

Yesterday the highest BID I saw in the large NID 1 (Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties) was 8987 - for site 539, sector 3.

PN Offsets are still using the rule of 168, such that there are 168 possible different 3 sector combinations from 1/169/337 to 168/336/504.


I found completely different logic in SID 2 (greater LA market).

BIDs are sequential for a cell site, e.g. 24257/24258/24259. For this same cell site the PN Offsets are 484/488/492. All PN Offsets seem to be set at x*12 + 4/8/12, but not all BIDs are set at y*3 + 1/2/3 (some are set at y*3 + 0/1/2 or y*3 + 2/3/4). This PN Offset rule yields 42 different 3 sector combinations from 4/8/12 to 496/500/504.

I'm not sure how the BIDs are determined, because I haven't visited a SID 2 cell site to see the site number. It doesn't seem to be strictly sequential, because that would mean there are already almost 9,000 cell sites in SID 2.

It does seem that the BIDs are unique by SID (not just NID like in SF?).

There are at least 53 NIDs in the LA market, from 1 NE San Fernando Valley to 52 Burbank+ to 53 Santa Clarita (north to Grapevine). This contrasts with a handful of NIDs in the SF market.


TMI, I know, but hopefully of interest to some.