You are on page 1of 8

Drive Test Lesson

By Oka Handiman
Introduction
The Purpose of drive test activity is to capture
actual data of the current CDMA Network.
Drive test data (log file) show the condition of the
RF environment. They are the primary gauges
used to guide CDMA optimization and
troubleshooting.

2
Performance Indicator
• FER
• Mobile Receive Power
• Ec/Io
• Mobile Transmit Power

3
FER
FER stand for Frame Erasure Rate
FER is an excellent call quality “summary” statistic
FER is the end-result of the whole transmission
link
• if FER is good, then any other problems aren’t
having much effect
• if FER is bad, that’s not the problem - it is just
the end-result of the problem
– we must investigate other indicators to get a
clue what is going on
• FER Value (%)

4
Mobile Receive Power
Mobile Receive Power expressed in dbm.
Measured all signal receive power at handset side.
Receive power is important,
- too little receive signal (-100 or weaker) would
leave to much noise in the signal , bad FER and
other problems.
- too much received signal (-35 dbm or higher)
could drive the phone’s sensitive first amplifier
into overload, causing intermod and code
distortion on received CDMA signals

RX Level

5
Ec/Io
• Ec is the energy of a single sector’s Pilot
• Io is the power sum of all the signals reaching
the mobile.
• Ec/Io is the important indicator for network
performance
• Bad Ec/Io can indicate problems like pilot
pollution, forward link interference (indicate
neighbour list problems.
• Ec/Io also indicate traffic load at the sector.

6
Mobile Transmit Power
Mobile Transmit Power the actual RF power output
of the handset transmitter
Maximum handset transmit power is 23 dbm.
Mobile Transmit Power is indicator for Reverse link
interference. If only this parameter is bad, it
means there is external reverse link interference.

Typical Tx power
- +23 dbm in a coverage hole
- 0 dbm near middle cell
- -50 dbm up close to BTS

7
Conclusions
• Mobile Receive Power and Mobile
Transmit power are the indicator for
coverage signal.
• If these two indicators show weak
value it is show that the coverage at
that area is weak.
• Ec/Io and FER are the indicator for
call performance.
• Weak Ec/Io will be followed with
8
weak FER. It means there is problem

You might also like