Cell tracking, cell phone GPS and mobile phone tracking software programs are undoubtedly attracting attention from consumers, mobile phone companies and application designers. The up-to-date mobiles contain GPS position capabilities to track cellular phone location.
To help abide by Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cellular phone companies are required to be able to supply authorities with device latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation isn’t going to always meet this condition. For evaluation, commercially available GPS modules will be able to get precision right down to 3-10m. This is dependent upon numerous factors, as GPS signals are often rather weak and they are influenced by many factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider uses triangulation techniques to estimate the position of the cell phone, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is also affected by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the interference impeding signal strength and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation effort. In remote areas position accuracy may be off as much as a mile.
GPS Hot Start means when the GPS enabled handset keeps its last known location, the satellites that were in range before, and also the almanac information in memory, and attempts to lock onto the same satellites and compute a fresh position based upon the previous data. This is almost always the quickest GPS lock but Hot Start only works if the phone is generally in the same location as when the GPS was last turned off. GPS Warm Start is the term for when the GPS enabled handset keeps its last known location, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in range. It resets and makes an attempt to lock onto satellite signals and computes a fresh position. The GPS receiver has a general idea of which satellites toseek since it kept its last known location and also the almanac data helps determine which satellites are in range. The Warm Start is going to take longer compared to Hot Start but not as long as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous information, and tries to locate satellites and complete a GPS lock. This usually takes the longest since there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled smartphone receiver must attempt to lock onto a satellite signal from any available satellites.
In order to get improved GPS lock times cell phone manufacturers and network operators introduced Assisted GPS technology. It downloads the ephemeris and helps triangulate the mobile phone general location. GPS Receivers will get a faster lock at the expense of a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, generally known as A-GPS or AGPS, increases the performance of standard GPS in smartphones connected to the cellular network. In the US Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use Assisted GPS. This is a method of using the cellular network to speed up finding of GPS satellites.
A-GPS improves location tracking functions of mobile phones (along with other connected devices) in two ways:
The first way will be helping to obtain a faster “time to first fix” (TTFF). AGPS acquires and stores data about satellite location via the cellular network and so the coordinates data does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.
The other method is by assisting locate cell phones when GPS signals are weak or not available. Due to the fact GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall structures, and do not penetrate building interiors well A-GPS utilizes proximity to cellular towers to approximate position when GPS signals are not obtainable.
In the event that satellite signals are not available, or precision is less important than life of the battery, applying Cell-ID is a good substitute to GPS mobile phone tracking. The location of the handset may be calculated by the cellular network cell id, which determines the cell tower the mobile phone is connected to. By understanding the location of this tower, you’ll be able to know roughly the place that the smartphone might be. But, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a few hundred meters, in higher populationdensity zones, to several kilometers in lower density areas. For this reason location CellID accuracy is less than than GPS accuracy. Even so tracking from CellID still supplies a very handy alternative.
Another way of calculating mobile phone location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to compute the time it takes signals traveling from the mobile phone to no less than three cell towers to judge location.