RF Signal Tracker

Ken Hunt

About this app

RF Signal Tracker is an engineering application for doing impromptu hand-held drive-tests with your Android phone. You can monitor the RF and WiFi signal strength as seen by the device as well as WiFi hotspots, describe a cell site's zone of coverage, identify changes in technology and handover points, and save and playback that data. Site locations can be loaded into a database via a CSV file or by long-pressing the map on a location to manually insert the site to the database. While many of the phone stats in the app can be displayed on the phone already (go to Settings -> About -> Status to see them). The advantage of this app is you can then map, record, analyze, and share that data in a meaningful way.

App features:
- Monitor data traffic bytes.
- XY Chart of RF and WiFi signal strength over time.
- Voice notification of signal strength & technology changes, handovers, open hotspots, and more!
- Insert notes into the RF data collected. Notes can be viewed & edited in Big Picture
- 'Drive Mode' screen showing just RSSI, Cell ID, and technology to view while driving
- Localized for French, Spanish (thank you Augusto!), Portuguese, and German.
- Map and record your color-coded RF signal strength as you travel.
- Wardriving. Collect WiFi access points and list mobile location at the strongest signal.
- Users can redefine site locations on the map.
- Playback, pause, jump to any part of recorded data.
- Share collected data and Maps with Twitter, Facebook, whatever you can share with.
- Sector coverage zones describing sector orientation and beamwidth.
- Sound and Vibration notification on handover.
- User-defined sites can be exported or imported for later use.
- A limited number of serving cells can be located through Google, OpenCellID.
- All sites located through Google or OpenCellID saved to a local database.
- Export recorded data to XML, KML (Google Earth), or CSV files.
- Import older recorded data for playback.
- Roaming and data states, data activity, CGI.
- WiFi MAC address, BSSID, supplicant state.
- WiFi network access points identified.
- EIRP/ERP and Free Space Loss calculators
- Big picture of entire drive test or site survey
- Auto-shutoff at minimum battery level set by the user
- Adjust GPS power settings
- App to SD card

*** Please keep those bug reports coming! If you crash and are given the option, please send in the report. I read them all. Or you can email directly at [e-mail]

Known Issues:
- If a site appears off the coast of Africa it means that you are using Google's location service or OpenCellID and they cannot determine that cell's location (so it returns the location 0 deg Lat, 0 deg Lon). A new feature for version 2.2.9 is the ability to define your own site locations (add, move or remove) by pressing a spot on the map or a site icon. Users can do their own site surveys as they travel. This is a workaround for those who do not have access to site location data -- unless you are an engineer for a carrier, you won't have access to this data since site locations are generally considered proprietary.

- Background recording, where you exit the app after you start recording, will not register signal strength changes if the phone is in sleep mode (screen is blank). This is a "bug" in Android not the app. If the phone is not allowed to sleep, background recording is possible.

- BER, EVDO, SNR & Ec/Io may display -1. This is the number the Android OS is sending, sorry.

- The app is optimized for GSM service. CDMA devices are not completely supported. This is due to the lack of a CDMA phone (and contract) on my part, not anything specific to the technology. So if you have a CDMA phone be aware it has not been tested by me.

- Please remember you are using a phone, not a laptop. If you try to record hours worth of data, and/or play it back, unexpected things may happen.

Ratings and reviews

Worked well for about a minute, then crashed and would not re-open. Would just crash after about 1-3 seconds. May be caused by me not allowing it access to "make calls" or access to "location". But a warning that this may cause instability would go a long way to prevent the app from becoming so unusable that I had to uninstall it.

Wanted access to parts of the phone it in my opinion didn't need, it froze for ages and then showed no data, told me it was recording wireless access points, all in all this app failed on many levels, it's not for me. Ymmv.

It used to work great, but for the past year i haven't been able to get it to load without crashing after a few seconds. So I'm uninstalling. It's unfortunate because it was the best app for this application. Literally nothing else comes close.

What's new

- Added privacy policy link to the app's "About" page.