Surveyor Details

Yes. Surveyor's great feature set and price make it an excellent value, but how? There are three ingredients:

• great engineering
• selling directly to our customers without any middlemen
• word of mouth and minimal sales staff

Great engineering, hardware and software, reduces our production costs.

We sell directly to our customers. Some competing devices (e.g. Lima Cell Monitor) involve multiple companies before reaching the end customer. That's one product with multiple middlemen between the manufacturer and customer. Middlemen don't work for free. Every Surveyor is sold directly from Cellular Labs to a police department, DA's office, or other investigative agency or investigator.

We rely primarily on word-of-mouth for new sales. That only works when customers are satisfied, so we work hard to satisfy every customer. Our low cost of sales contributes to our low prices.

How can Surveyor perform so much better and cost so much less? In part, it’s because the other device uses "overly mature technology." That’s a polite way of saying it is old and outdated. For example, once upon a time it was common to use pen drives for moving files around. The other device still uses them. Surveyor sends survey result files, automatically, over-the-air to custom servers, or delivers them to any e-mail address. Take a look at the Surveyor Firsts (include a link) section to see the many features only available with Surveyor.

What about battery life? Old technology is power hungry. Surveyor will run for at least 10 hour on its rechargeable battery, and you can bring along a second battery if you wish.

New features rarely arrive for obsolete equipment. The other device is so old it is almost frozen and new features are introduced rarely. Surveyor was designed, from scratch, using state-of-the art hardware and the most modern software architecture. This allows us to develop, test and roll out new features easily, quickly and automatically. Do you have an idea for a new feature, or even an entirely new kind of survey? We’re all ears. We listen, we act quickly, and we never charge for updates or new features.

With their antiquated hardware and software, how long will it be before they tell you their current device will be discontinued and replaced by a new, more modern one? And do you think they’ll just give you the new device, or will they sell it to you for another $70,000.

That will never happen when you choose Surveyor. It can’t happen because you don’t buy or own the equipment. We own it and we upgrade it, as needed, and at no additional cost to you. And, one day, when its electronics need to be replaced because technology has moved ahead, we will design new electronics and update your device at no additional cost. You pay a flat, annual fee and never a penny more.

You would laugh if someone tried to sell you a brand iPhone 7 (introduced in 2016) for a premium price, so why would you buy an outdated surveying device for the price of a luxury car.

We would never do that. The Surveyor backpack is custom-designed to ensure Surveyor maintains the required distance between it and its operator.

Here is a partial list of features only available in Surveyor:

Drone Ready

Only Surveyor has a built in barometric altimeter and supports full, remote control. This makesSurveyor the only device well-suited for drone-based surveying.

Remote Monitoring

With Surveyor's unique Remote Monitoring, an experienced investigator can create a survey plan and then a less experience investigator can go out into the field. The more experienced investigator can monitor the survey in real-time from the office and provide suggestions, as needed, as the survey plan is executed. This reduces the time-demands of the experienced investigatar and provides guided experience to the less experiened investigator.

Cell Mapping & Timing Advance

You don’t need to wait until you return to your office to see survey results, because Surveyor displays a map and adds cells in real-time—as you watch—during the survey.

All Surveyor customers receive a user account and unlimited access to the custom-servers we've developed at Cellular Labs. Using our servers, you can easily upload your NDCAC (National Domestic Communication Assistance Center) data to your account and then have it automatically downloaded to your Surveyor which easily handles all 9 million cells in the NDCAC registry for the US (Alaska, American Samoa, Continental, Guam, Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, US Virgin Islands, etc.).

The NDCAC registry data allows Surveyor to show you every single cell in any region of any size. It also alows Surveyor to calculate the straight-line distance to any cell for comparison against Timing Advance (TA) step values it automatically collects. Thus Surveyor—and only Surveyor—is able to detect when TA-inferred distances are overestimating or understating actual distance (usually due to reflected signals). Only Surveyor has such a deep understanding of Timing Advance and how expert, American investigators use it.

Remember, $200,000 scanners can't capture Timing Advance at all, and all other SIM-based devices either don't capture TA or require manual intervention to capture an occassional TA value. Only Surveyor was specifically designed to automatically capture and evaluate TA data.

Discover and Verify

Even the most expensive, $200,000 scanners cannot verify any cells, because they are just fancy receivers, without transmitters or SIM cards, so they cannot interact with any cell under any circumstance.

Other SIM-based devices use an antiquated surveying technique called "Server/Neighbor." Surveyor can operate in legacy mode and perform Server/Neighbor if desired, but most investigators prefer the modern Discover and Verify technique that we invented at Cellular Labs and that is only available in Surveyor.

Server/Neighbor does only half the job. It discovers cells but doesn’t actually register with them and verify data can be transferred. Discover and Verify does the whole job. As cells are discovered, multiple attempts are made to register with the cell and transfer data to determine whether it is actually possible (or not) to use that cell.

The Server/Neighbor technique goes on, erroneously, to conclude the cell selected (and serving) the the device would necessarily be the serving cell for all devices and that other discovered cells (neighbors) would not be selected. It's nonsense, and not borne out by actual field testing.

Discover and Verify determines exactly which cells can possibly be serving cells and which are simply not accessible at the location of the survyey. If you want to Discover and Verify, Surveyor is your only choice.

Indoor GPS

Every other surveying device relies entirely on its own GPS receiver for location information. Of course, Surveyor includes multiple GPS receivers, but it can also use the GPS system in the phone that’s controlling Surveyor. How does that help? While outdoors, with an unobstructed view of the sky the GPS receiver in the device doesn’t need any help. But what about when conducting an indoor survey? Ordinary GPS receivers typically cannot work indoors. Phones, however, perform a variety of tricks to get GPS readings even while indoors (e.g. using Wi-Fi).

Only Surveyor can display, simultaneously, the GPS status of its internal GPS receiver and also the status of the phone’s GPS receiver, and it will automatically use whichever one is best at that moment, switching back and forth as needed. That’s another Surveyor-only feature.

Band/Cell Locking

Some SIM-based devices attempt to check a cell of interest's availablity by locking to the band the cell of interest is using. At Cellular Labs, we think that's a mistake. Locking to a band may hide the cell of interest behind a different, stronger signal on the same band from another cell. Locking directly to the cell of interest, rather than locking to the band the cell of interest is using, prevents the cell from being hidden behind a cell on the same band with a stronger signal.

Surveyor can do band-locking if you wish, but users generally prefer to lock on cells.

safety

We Design for Safety There are two important safety concerns when conducting RF surveys:

• going unnoticed
• Radio frequency radiation

Some other surveying devices are controlled by tablets. Surveyor uses an ordinary cell phone. It’s hard to go unnoticed standing around with a large, ruggedized tablet in hand. Holding a phone draws far less attention.

SIM-based surveying devices include transmitters, one for each modem in the device. It's common to carry the device in a backpack as it is convenient and draws less attention. The FCC filing for the cellular modems typically used in SIM-based devices requires a certain, safe separation between the device and a human body.

At Cellular Labs we designed a backpack that ensures Surveyor is kept at a safe distance from the person wearing the backpack.

At least one vendor of a SIM-based surveying device provides a backpack that does not appear to include structures or compartments designed to maintain the separation distance specified in the FCC filing for its cellular modems.

Service

When you need service for Surveyor, have an idea for a new feature, or just have a few questions, you can pick up the phone and talk directly with the engineers and software developers who know every last thing about Surveyor and are eager to listen and help.

If you purchase surveying equipment produced by a company in another country, getting help may present a challenge. Keep in mind, too, that RF surveying equipment produced in a different country may focus on the investigative practices and needs in that country. Surveyor is designed to meet the needs of US investigators.

Most Secure

Only Surveyor can automatically fetch software updates and send collected survey data, automatically, to a server or e-mail address using secure communication and encrypted files.

Interoperability

We are happy to work with all vendors of software for analyzing and presenting investigative data. We will do whatever it takes to integrate Surveyor with any such software system. The only way we will ever fail to successfully integrate Surveyor with any software systems is if the software company simply won’t provide necessary technical information.