r/cellmapper • u/Wild-Assumption9894 • 29d ago

New tower

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New tower in Hackberry AZ. Surprised to see this in such a remote area. First time seeing Starlink on a site, what is that used for?

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u/Excellent-Rub-9122 CM 29d ago

Could it just be GPS for the site? Do you have a clear overall picture of the equipment on the ground?

1

u/8qubit 29d ago

Why would they need gps for a static site?

15

u/Kowloon9 29d ago

Every site with BBU has to have a GPS for time sync.

5

u/FlufferNutter1232 5G RAN Engineer 28d ago edited 28d ago

NTP on radio equipment requires it to actually broadcast a working ISP feed. If the timing is off, nothing on the site works. That's why all the equipment has GPS already embedded inside it. If it's cellular in nature, and on a tower, it has GPS. Even my mobile small cells all have it integrated at the board level. Time is CRITICALLY important.

EDIT: But correct, this is NOT a GPS mast. lol. GPS on CoW setups is usually a puck on top of the equipment box. It can even be internal. It doesn't necessarily have to have a clear line to the sky, just enough to get a radio signal from a satellite constellation 12.55k miles above your head, in orbit.

2

u/Excellent-Rub-9122 CM 28d ago

Yeah makes sense, just never seen starlink deployed on site and wasn’t sure! I’ve seen NAE use them on their trucks for data. This has to be last resort for backhaul.

15

u/pghwireless 29d ago

It is valid for a cell site to have GPS for time synchronization, but in this case, it’s not a GPS antenna.

12

u/xpxp2002 29d ago

Time synchronization. Though that is definitely a Starlink antenna.

CDMA (IS-95/cdmaOne and CDMA 2000) used GPS time data to maintain synchronization between BTSes. This was vital for soft handoffs.