Tool Cat-M1 coverage estimator
Cellular site survey.
Will Cat-M1 cellular reach your site? Check before you buy. Enter an address or GPS coordinates and see the predicted signal from every tower we can find nearby, with the hills and valleys in between.
Free. Runs in your browser. No sign-up.
01 How it works
Three steps to a coverage estimate.
- STEP 1Find your site
Search a site address or GPS coordinates, use your location, or click anywhere on the map. Searching again, or clicking outside the circle, moves the survey.
- STEP 2Describe the install
Choose a search radius (10 to 50 km), the carrier, the surroundings, where the device sits, its antenna, and how fine the map detail should be.
- STEP 3Run the survey
See the signal at the site, the towers ranked best first, and a coverage map. Click any spot for an estimate with its terrain profile, then share the result.
02 What it models
A real link budget, not a coverage map guess.
The tool models the link budget for a Quectel BG95-class modem, the radio inside D6 Labs cellular products, against every tower it can find within your search radius, and accounts for the terrain in between using public elevation data.
- Path loss. Free-space loss or the Okumura-Hata / COST-231 loss for your environment, plus Deygout knife-edge terrain diffraction over a 4/3-earth profile, plus the clutter, enclosure and fade margin you select.
- Narrowband signal. RSSI is the power in the 1.4 MHz Cat-M1 channel, the figure a BG95 reports. Coverage-enhancement modes A/B extend the usable floor below the modem’s rated sensitivity.
- Uplink check. The return path is checked against the 3GPP Cat-M1 maximum coupling loss of 155.7 dB.
- US Cat-M1 bands. Bands 12, 13, 71, 5, 2 and 4, with editable assumptions (tower power, antenna heights, noise figure, fade margin) and a reset to BG95 defaults.
- In your browser. Terrain tiles are downloaded and every path-loss calculation runs in a background worker, on a 3D map with satellite, topo and street views.
03 The radio
Why Cat-M1 reaches where phones don’t.
Our monitors use LTE Cat-M1 (LTE-M), the low-power cellular standard built for machines. It listens to a 1.4 MHz slice of the carrier’s LTE signal instead of the full 10 to 20 MHz a phone uses, so the modem’s noise floor is far lower.
It also repeats every transmission up to 2048 times when the signal is weak (coverage enhancement), trading speed for range. The result is roughly 15 to 20 dB more link margin than a phone, which in open country can be 3 to 4 times the usable distance from the same tower.
04 Reading the result
How to read the result.
- Strong / Good: Install anywhere. A standard paddle antenna inside a plastic enclosure is fine.
- OK: Reliable with an outdoor or enclosure-top antenna. Avoid metal cabinets or basements.
- Weak: The modem will attach using coverage enhancement, but data is slow and dropouts are possible. Use a directional antenna aimed at the best tower, mounted as high as practical.
- Not usable: Consider a higher antenna mast, a different carrier, or our LoRa and licensed-radio options for reaching a location that does have coverage.
This is an estimate.
Tower positions come from crowd-sourced observations and public registrations, antenna heights and sector power are assumed where unknown, and buildings and trees are not modelled individually. Real signal commonly varies ±10 dB from any prediction. For a guaranteed answer, ask us for a loaner survey unit: we ship a live Cat-M1 monitor you plug in at the site, and Whisker.io reports the actual signal.
Data: OpenCelliD (CC BY-SA 4.0), FCC ASR, OpenStreetMap, AWS Terrain Tiles, USGS.
Check your site
Will Cat-M1 reach your site?
Check before you buy.