A base station can maintain a transmission beam toward a user device, even in changing conditions, by realtime incremental feedback in 5G and 6G. The incremental feedback is a compact one-of-three request, from the user device, indicating a higher, keep-same, or lower adjustment of a transmission parameter such as the power or beam angle. The base station then adds or subtracts a predetermined increment to that transmission parameter, thereby improving reception with each downlink message. Such incremental adjustment continues with each message to the user device, until the optimum value is reached, at which time the user device selects the keep-same choice. For efficient optimization, the base station can vary the increment size, for example escalating to larger sizes upon repeated same-sign requests, and then de-escalating to smaller increments for fine-tuning and beam optimization. Many other aspects are disclosed.