Patent ID: 8406784

Claim:
A method of improving the performance of a mobile communications network, the method comprising steps of: operating a plurality of mobile stations over time to take a plurality of measurements of one or more operational characteristics of the mobile communications network; storing the measurements of one or more operational characteristics of the mobile communications network and location information related to where the measurements were taken in memories of the respective mobile stations, wherein the stored measurements include an event code, a first best per antenna (PN), a first best energy per chip (Ec) over received power (Io) per antenna (PN Ec/Io), a second best PN, and a second best PN Ec/Io, wherein a received power and the Ec/Io measures are used to calculate Ec per PN, and wherein the event code is defined as an event such as a lost call, ineffective, attempt, or periodic measurement; communicating, from at least some of the plurality of mobile stations, the stored measurements and location information to a network element of the wireless communications network; processing the measurements and location information by the network element; and generating by a network element, in response to the processing, a recommendation for a change to one or more network elements to improve the performance of the mobile communications network including generating a coverage map of a certain geographic region and/or for an individual mobile station of the plurality of mobile stations using the measurements based on the associated location information, wherein the step of processing the measurements comprises calculating the energy per chip for an antenna of the mobile communications network.