Coverage measurement techniques for cellular systems

Early mobile radio propagation measurements at 800 MHz employed sophisticated and complex techniques. The economics of commercial cellular operations, however, demand simpler techniques and more convenient instrumentation for measuring the coverage achieved in an operating cellular system. Such methods are now in use and the procedures represent a small fraction of the effort applied in earlier exploratory programs to characterize coverage and signal distribution in a cellular service area. This paper describes some of the practical methods that have been used successfully in this area; it also includes discussion of factors that make the results acceptable to the engineer and convincing to the operator.