Tracking down Verizon towers (specially B2/4/13)

[LoveMeSomeCALTE]

First, some background to why I am trying to do this: https://wirelessjoint.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1467

Now, I signed up with a Verizon MVNO last week and am suffering from extremely poor reception. I cant get better than -110 dBm from my house.

What I need your help with:

If you think of my house as the middle of a compass, Cellmapper used to show the closest Verizon tower (let's call it T1), as a few hundred feet south east of me. Maybe there used to be a Verizon tower two yeas ago, but it's all flat land now. NO towers.

Driving around with my phone and Cellmapper moved that tower now to the north west of me - less than half a mile away from me but when I go there, my reception barely improves and I dont see a tower.

My LTE download speeds remain in the 1Mbps max range.

The second closest Verizon tower according to Cellmapper (let's call it T2) is around 3 miles away - my reception goes full 5 of 5 bars and my LTE upload/download speeds jump the 30Mbps range and I do see a tower.

The thing is, when I drive away from T2, upto about 2 miles away from it (or a mile away from home), my phone transitions over to T1 as you would expect, but when I attempt to drive around T1, it looks like I'm chasing a ghost - no tower in sight and extremely poor reception.

Since I am rural, there are no buildings around, except 1 story houses that are atleast an acre apart (so no dense housing)

There are a lot of tall trees and my home, particularly is a few feet below the average height (the roof of my home is level with the road we drive on to).

Before I can proceed thinking about antennas etc, I think I should first, locate where the closest Verizon tower - T1 really is?

Two questions:

1. Is it possible the tower location that Cellmapper has is incorrect? It's a red dot.
2. If so, how do I actually locate the tower location the my phone is connecting to?

I do have a bunch of LTE capable Android phones, a LTE modem and a RTL-SDR if either of those can help.

I have gone to the FCC site in an attempt to locate towers and antennas in my area and it does not even show the ones from Tmobile and ATT that I know are in my area.

I am attempting to compile this information in case it helps me set up my antenna (and in part, motivated by this post: https://wirelessjoint.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1167#p7646).

Any help?

PS: I discovered opencellid thanks to this site. When I go on the website, it too showed me the old tower location. I then started the app and after that too showed me the old tower location, it suddenly jumped its location to a place two miles north west of the current point of the latest the tower location that Cellmapper has. Before I start driving there, I wanted to check if there's something better I can do

[BillA]

In my experience those online mapping sites/apps are often inaccurate due to their crowd sourced data.
Cellphone signals work differently in the real world, greatly affected by bouncing/multipath, attenuation, and dynamic carrier management. There's nothing better than getting a high gain flat panel antenna, mounting is as high as possible, and rotating it 360 degrees at 10 degree increments till you find the best signal. And that's it, there's nothing more that can be done other than switching carriers.

[LoveMeSomeCALTE]

There's nothing better than getting a high gain flat panel antenna, mounting is as high as possible, and rotating it 360 degrees at 10 degree increments till you find the best signal

about how much those antennae typically cost and what additional hardware like a metal mast, cabling and their associated cost etc is needed to support those antennae so they can actually be used?

[BillA]

about how much those antennae typically cost and what additional hardware like a metal mast, cabling and their associated cost etc is needed to support those antennae so they can actually be used?

Take a looks here > https://thewirelesshaven.com/product-category/ant ... -antennas/
This hobby ain't cheap, but you can definitely improve your signal/speeds with the right equipment.