how can i measure the signal power that my cellphone is receiving.?

Question

how can i measure the signal power that my cellphone is receiving.

Answer 1

typically, one would look at the little display on the cell phone screen that indicates the signal power that the cell phone is receiving

because it is often displayed as a little bar graph, people often refer to the strength of the signal by the number of little bars showing on the little graph

right now, my phone is showing 3 bars, thats pretty good

Answer 2

Depends how technically inclined you are. If you're up for it, you need to connect the phone to a computer via whatever kind of data cable it comes with. Then, identify what COM port has been assigned. Windows usually gets a new "Modem" installed and if you look at its properties in the Windows device manager, you can find out the com port.

Then track down the little used built-in application, Hyperterminal. You need to run that program and configure it to connect to the new com port.

Then, if your lucky, you can type so-called "AT commands" to the phone.

If you type AT and hit enter, the phone should reply with "OK". If it does, you're good to go.

Finally, to get the signal power, type "AT+CSQ?" The phone should reply with two numbers. The second one is a representation of the signal strength, the first is a representation of the signal quality.

To understand these numbers you need to refer to the lookup table which comes from a pretty detailed document at the link below.

Other than that, you would need to find the phone manufacturers engineering screens usually activated by some hidden code. Maybe google your phone model + engineering screens.
Good luck

Answer 3

By how many bars you have. Actuallly, Nokia used to have a mode that actually gave you a db readout if you typed in a certain command. I don't recall what it was though.