Desafíos and Pruebas with 5G Tester Equipment & RF Drive Test Tools
RF Drive testing is a method of measuring and assessing the coverage, capacity, and Quality of Service (QoS) of a mobile radio network and its purpose is to determine your skill not the vehicle’s technology when it comes to operate a motor vehicle in most road situations to assess your abilities. Drive testing is an important part of wireless network buildout, optimization, and service quality monitoring. However, it’s possible to collect some data through network simulation. So, now let us see the Challenges in RF Drive Testing along with Accurate 5g tester, 5G test equipment, 5g network tester tools and Accurate 4G Testing RF drive test software, Cellular LTE RF drive test tools & equipment in detail.
RF drive testing can broadly be categorized into three distinct topics Network benchmarking, service quality monitoring, optimization, and troubleshooting. The data set collected during drive testing field measurements includes Signal levels, Signal quality, Interference, dropped calls, Blocked calls, Anomalous events, Call statistics, Service level statistics, QoS information, Neighbouring cell information, Handover information, GPS location coordinates.
Like all wireless field work, the RF drive test presents specific challenges that are as follows:
Lack of Test Signals: It is usual to encounter areas that lack test signals while performing drive tests. Drive tests are useful to locate the ideal site for a new cellular tower, but such type of challenges will come. So, to solve such an issue, the technician must place a transmitter to simulate their test signals, then perform tests in half the time with the help of a dual-band transmitter and receiver to simulate their test signals.
Equipment: The typical drive-testing setup includes a laptop running drive-testing software, a GPS device, a frequency scanner, a security dongle, and one or more cell phones. Though each component has a physical connection to the laptop, in any case any of the connections or components fail, it could invalidate the test results. Further, interference could affect the test results if the antennas are not kept at least 12 inches apart and the technician doesn’t maintain a minimum distance between cell phones.
Fuel & Maintenance Costs: Drive testing can be performed anywhere, be it an isolated rural area or a downtown metropolitan city, but the cost of fuel and maintaining the test vehicles is a significant factor that will cost you more especially in fleet operations. Another context is if a vehicle running out of gas or breaking down in the middle of a test, taking readings for multiple signal bands and keeping re-testing to a least fuel costs.
Labor or Manpower: Drive testing is usually performed with two people; one person drives the vehicle and the other one watches the test equipment to make sure it performs well. It is recommended to begin the test before starting the drive but then if the driver is occupied, a problem may occur. The major problem is that they (labor or manpower) must repeat the entire test if the data is not collected or is invalid.
Conclusion
A drive Test is conducted to check the coverage criteria of a cell site with an RF drive test tool to collect the data and for this, several drive test log files (important to check any RF-related issues such as Call drop/Low throughput and other NW issue) are analyzed to evaluate various RF parameters of the network. The Drive Test Parameters (separated into 5 categories: download speed, upload speed, latency, packet loss, and jitter) are designed to help you understand how your wireless network performs in a real-world situation.
When it comes to challenges in traditional driving tests, non-traditional ways of doing drive testing such as RantCell are one of the best ways to choose. RantCell is a less data-intensive, highly scalable solution, that leverages staff movements by automatically collecting data by deploying solutions on technical and non-technical staff smartphones when compared to leading drive test tools.
