Wireless Coverage Issues and Reports - 2019 Season

[Mikayla Norris]

I have a Verizon jetpack and use 2 external antennas and had almost no problems this year. I chased all over TX, a lot of OK, and even some AR and LA. My chase parter has AT&T on his phone, and the biggest hole was in Concho Valley (San Angelo) and Big Country (Abilene) even in towns. That was intereating given that is some of the first areas in the country to get cell phone coverage given the old GTE R&D presence in San Angelo. I suspect it has to do with that area being dominated by a local carrier West Central Net.

I live here in San Angelo, and everyone I know with AT&T complains about issues. I have VZW and have no issues in town. I also had hardly any problems up between here and Sweetwater, and even north of I20 when chasing on the 20 May. My biggest issues have been along 87 and 83 between San Angelo and Junction, then along the I10 corridor between there and San Antonio. All of which was pretty accurately shown by the map @Quincy Vagell made

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

For me, this year has some dramatic problems with throughput, making my Verizon connections almost useless at times. The actual cellular connections were usually quite strong (I use an amp), but in areas of chaser convergence the effective data transmission speeds were so slow as to make it impossible to even pull radar grabs at times. This feels like either a backhaul issue or just a straight up lack of bandwidth on the LTE frequencies.

I’ve been with Verizon for a long time now, hopefully the 5G rollout will fix these issues.

 

[Bill Hark]

I had issues with Verizon in parts of northeastern Colorado and northwestern Oklahoma/northeastern Texas Panhandle last May 2019. I used a JetPack. When the data went out, I just used Mobile ThreatNet and had no difficulty since it's satellite based.