5G Gateway & 4G LTE CellSpot

Sorry you make me chuckle. That seems to be a common tale of woe. If you have the T-Mobile home internet application loaded on your phone it has a cellular locator. The application will ask you if you want to setup the gateway or will provide the locater option. The cellular locator option can help direct you to the proper direction at the time. It has some concentric magenta circles and a small arrow that points as you turn and direct the phone toward the guided location. Hold the phone flat and with the top  away from you and look for the little arrow. I find it best to do that outside for clarity. You can do it inside the house close to windows as well. This gives a general direction for starting to establish where you need to place your gateway.

There might be a couple of cellular towers in your area so you might need to also figure out which provides the stronger signal and which is more stable. The bars on the gateway are a general reference so use the T-Mobile home internet mobile application and the "MORE" option on the bottom bar to get to Advanced cellular metrics. You can see the cellular metrics (values) for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cellular signals. The cart below will help you translate the information so you can know a strong clean signal from a weak signal of lesser quality. 

With all that said you can ALSO navigate to cellMapper.net and use that as a way to locate cells in the area. It is not a 100% solution but it helps. It does take a bit to learn. Just accept that there are going to be adds or forget it as if you don't have a subscription you have to put up with the advertisements. Like I said you have to learn how to use it. You can filter for 4G or 5G towers, you can look for the towers in your area. Allow it to use your location or you will find it puts you who knows where but then you have to also figure out that every thing is close in and you are possibly in the middle of the ocean somewhere off the coast of Africa. So allow the location or provide the zip code if it offers. The newer version of cellmapper is not as intuitive as the prior version. It still is one of the best utilities that are free to find cell towers. They have an Android application you can load if you have an Android phone. The cells have what is referred to as a PCI physical cell identifier. Towers also have an identification number so those are helpful to know for finding the cell(s) be it 4G LTE or 5G NR.

OK so even if that has not made your head spin well, there could well be truth in the statement about working on the towers as they continue to bring up cells and change frequencies and the spread of the signals and so the upgrades and maintenance of the systems continues so expect some disruptions along the yellow brick road as it is a trip through the haunted forest at times.