Scan network cells and signal strengths (MC7455)

IoT Modules MC/EM Series
1

The MC7455 has GNSS, but its signal is very often too weak in buildings to enable localization at all with any accuracy. Mozilla and Google (and many more, these are just examples) have location services though that I can use exactly in such cases. By submitting a scan of neighboring WiFi and/or 3GPP cells, they can provide me GPS coordinates with reasonable accuracy. For this I need the cell ID and the measured signal strength of neighboring cells.

Getting the cell IDs out of the modem is easy, and I can get the signal strength for the cell I am connected to currently. But how do I get the signal strength of neighboring cells?

  • Is there a vendor-specific AT-command I can use to get this information? (Some kind of special scan command?)
  • If not, is there a way I can force connection to a specific cell? If so I would execute an algorithm to connect to each cell in range one-by-one and get their receive strengths.

Thank you,
Karoly

2

at!lteinfo can be used to display some information, but unfortunateley I have not found another command which could do this.

3

This command also onl ydisplays information for the current connection.

What about the the other way? Is it possible to force the modem to connect to a specific cell? I don’t care if no communication is then possible, I just want to get the rx strength after that.

4

You get some info about neighboring cells with at!lteinfo, the IntraFreq part. unfortunately it is not really that helpfull.