How To Cell Phone Tracking

GPS tracking, cell phone GPS and mobile phone GPS track software packages are drawing particular attention from potential customers, cellular phone businesses and software designers. The hottest mobile phones provide GPS location attributes to track cellular phone location.

In order to comply with Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cell phone companies are required to be in a position to give authorities with smartphone latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation fails to always meet this condition. For evaluation, commercially accessible GPS systems can certainly get accuracy down to less than 10 meters. This depends upon numerous factors, as GPS signals are often rather weak and are disturbed by numerous factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider utilizes triangulation algorithms to determine the position of the mobile phone, 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 impeding signal quality and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation calculation. In remote areas position accuracy may be off as much as a mile.

GPS Hot Start is the term for when the GPS enabled device keeps its last identified position, the satellites that were in range before, together with the almanac information in memory, and makes an attempt to connect to the same satellites and compute a fresh position based upon the previous information. 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 switched off. GPS Warm Start means whenever the GPS enabled mobile phone keeps its last calculated location, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in view. It performs a reset and makes an attempt to connect to satellite signals and computes the latest location. The GPS receiver has a general idea of which satellites tolook for because it kept its last known location and also the almanac data helps identify which satellites are within view. The Warm Start will need more time compared to Hot Start but not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous data, and tries to locate satellites and accomplish a GPS lock. This takes longer than other methods because there is no known reference data. The GPS enabled cell phone receiver has to try to lock onto a satellite transmission from any accessible satellites.

In order to get improved GPS lock times mobile phone manufacturers and wireless providers designed 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, boosts the performance of standard GPS in mobile phones connected to the cellular network. In America Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use AGPS. Which is a means of using the cellular network to accelerate finding of GPS satellites.

A-GPS assists location tracking performance of mobile phones (as well as other related devices) in a couple of ways:

The first method is by helping to acquire a faster “time to first fix” (TTFF). AGPS gets and archives information in relation to the location of satellites using the cell network so the position information does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.

The other approach is by assisting position cell phones when GPS signals are weak or not available. Since GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall structures, and do not pass through building interiors well AGPS makes use of proximity to cellular towers to estimate position when GPS signals are not obtainable.

In the event that satellite signals are not accessible, or accuracy and precision is less important than life of the battery, making use of Cell-ID is a good alternative to GPS cell phone tracking. The position of the device can be determined by the cell network cell id, that pinpoints 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 mobile phone will be. But, a tower can cover a massive area, from a couple of hundred meters, in high populationdensity regions, to several miles in lower density regions. This is the reason location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Even so location via CellID still gives you a very handy substitute.

Another way of calculating mobile phone position is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to determine the time it takes signals to travel from your cell phone to no less than three cell towers to calculate location.

How To Cell Phone Tracking