Technology Made for Emergency Response Can Be Utilised for Tracking Smartphones. Cell tracking, mobile GPS and cell phone tracker tools are undoubtedly securing attention from individuals, mobile phone companies and program programmers. The current mobile phones feature GPS locator capabilities to track cellular phone location.
To conform to Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cellular phone companies have to be able to provide authorities with cell phone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation will not always meet this condition. For evaluation, commercially accessible GPS modules will be able to realize precision right down to 3-10m. This is dependent upon many factors, as GPS signals are often particularly weak and they are affected by numerous environmental factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider utilizes triangulation techniques to estimate the position of the smartphone, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is further impacted by the same issues as GPS in the sense of the interference affecting signal strength and the density of GSM towers to help in the triangulation effort. In rural areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.
GPS Hot Start describes when the GPS enabled handset keeps its last calculated location, the satellites that had been in view before, as well as the almanac data in memory, and attempts to find the same satellites and calculate a new location based upon the previous information. This is usually the quickest GPS lock but Hot Start only works if the phone is in the same general area as when the GPS was last turned off. GPS Warm Start describes whenever the GPS enabled device recalls its last known position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in view. It performs a reset and attempts to obtain satellite signals and computes a new position. The GPS receiver has a general idea of which satellites toseek because it saved its last known location and the almanac data helps determine which satellites are in range. The Warm Start will take more time than the Hot Start but not as long as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous information, and attempts to locate satellites and accomplish a GPS lock. This normally takes longer than other methods since there is no known reference data. The GPS enabled mobile phone receiver has to try to lock onto a satellite transmission from any accessible satellites.
As a way to have better GPS lock times cellphone manufacturers and telco operators created Assisted GPS technology. It downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the cell phone basic location. GPS Receivers can get a faster lock at the expense of a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, also referred to as A-GPS or AGPS, improves the performance of standard GPS in handsets connected to the cellular network. In the US Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use Assisted GPS. Which is a method of using the cell network to speed up acquisition of GPS satellites.
A-GPS assists location tracking functions of smartphones (along with other related devices) in a couple of ways:
One method will be assisting to acquire a faster “time to first fix” (TTFF). AGPS gets and stores data regarding satellite location via the cellular network and so the location details does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.
Another technique is by assisting position cell phones when GPS signals are weak or impeded. Because GPS satellite signals may be interfered with by tall buildings, and do not pass through building interiors well AGPS utilizes proximity to cellular towers to calculate location when GPS signals are not available.
When satellite signals are not accessible, or accuracy and precision is less important than life of the battery, applying Cell-ID is a good substitute to GPS mobile phone tracking. The position of the device can be calculated by the cellular network cell id, that determines the cell tower the smartphone is connected to. By having the location of this tower, you may know approximately where the mobile phone will be. Nonetheless, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a few hundred meters, in high populationdensity areas, to several miles in lower density regions. This is why location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless monitoring via CellID still offers quite a good alternative.
Another method of formulating cell phone position is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation uses signal analysis data to determine the time it takes signals traveling from your cellular phone to a minimum of 3 cell towers to calculate location.