Cell Phone GPS Concepts

Tactics for Cellular Telephone Tracking – GPS Technological Details In order to comply with Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cellular phone companies have to be in a position to deliver authorities with device latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation fails to always meet this requirement. By way of evaluation, commercially accessible GPS modules are able to get precision down to less than 10 meters. This hinges on many factors, as GPS signals tend to be particularly weak and are disturbed by numerous variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider uses triangulation algorithms to calculate the location of the smartphone, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is further impacted by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the interference impeding signal quality 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 receivers, no matter whether inside a smart phone, or simply a specific Portable gps tracking device, determine position through accurately timing the signals transferred by GPS satellites. This critical information consists of the time the message was transmitted, highly accurate orbital data (technically called the ephemeris), along with the basic system status and rough orbits of all GPS satellites (technically referenced as the almanac). GPS receivers often take a long time to become ready to navigate after being turned on because it must acquire some basic information in addition to capturing GPS satellite signals. This delay is sometimes caused when the GPS device has been turned off for days or weeks, or has been transported a significant distance while turned off. The GPS must update its almanac and ephemeris data and store it in memory. The GPS almanac is a set of data that every GPS satellite transmits. When a GPS receiver has current almanac data in memory, it can acquire signals and calculate initial location faster.

Cell Phone GPS Concepts