Cell Phone Location Principals

Technology Developed for Emergency Response Are Available for Tracking Your Teenagers. Cell tracking, mobile GPS and cell phone track programs are drawing particular attention from potential customers, cellphone companies and software programmers. The most up to date mobile phones contain GPS location functionality to track mobile phone position.

To help abide by Federal Communications Commission rules, cell phone companies are required to be in a position to supply authorities with smartphone latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation doesn’t always satisfy this requirement. For evaluation, commercially accessible GPS systems are able to achieve precision right down to less than 10 meters. This varies according to many factors, as GPS signals tend to be quite weak and they are impacted by numerous environmental factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider uses triangulation techniques to compute the location of the handset, its accuracy is proven to be less than than that of GPS. MLS is further affected by the same issues as GPS in the sense of the barriers impeding signal quality and the density of GSM towers to help in the triangulation calculation. In remote areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.

GPS Hot Start refers to whenever the GPS enabled mobile phone keeps its last identified position, the satellites that had been in view before, together with the almanac data in memory, and makes an attempt to find the same satellites and compute a brand 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 means whenever the GPS enabled device keeps its last calculated position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in range. It performs a reset and tries to find satellite signals and computes a whole new position. The GPS receiver narrows the choice of which satellites toseek since it stored its last known position and also the almanac data helps identify which satellites are visible in the sky. The Warm Start will need longer than the Hot Start although not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous information, and attempts to find satellites and attain a GPS lock. This will take longer than other methods because there is no known reference data. The GPS enabled mobile phone receiver has to try to lock onto a satellite signal from any available satellites.

To be able to get improved GPS lock times cellular phone manufacturers and telco operators designed Assisted GPS technology. This downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the handset general location. GPS Receivers can get a quicker lock at the expense of a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, often known as A-GPS or AGPS, improves the performance of standard GPS in mobile phones connected to the cellular network. In the United States Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use AGPS. Which is a means of utilizing the cellular network to accelerate finding of GPS satellites.

A-GPS assists location tracking performance of cell phones (and also other connected devices) in a couple of ways:

The first method is by helping to obtain a more rapid “time to first fix” (TTFF). Assisted GPS gets and stores information in relation to satellite position using the cellular network and so the position information does not need to be downloaded via the satellite.

Another method is by helping locate handsets when GPS signals are weak or blocked. Because GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall structures, and do not penetrate building interiors well A-GPS employs proximity to cellular towers to calculate location when GPS signals are not readily available.

When satellite signals are not available, or accuracy and precision is less important than life of the battery, making use of Cell-ID is a good substitute to GPS mobile phone tracking. The position of the handset may be computed by the cellular network cell id, which pinpoints the cell tower the smartphone is connected to. By understanding the location of this tower, you may know roughly the place that the handset is. But, a tower can cover a huge area, from a couple of hundred meters, in higher populationdensity locations, to a few miles in lower density zones. This is why location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless location via CellID still provides a really helpful substitute.

Another method of calculating mobile phone location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to determine the time it takes signals traveling from your phone to at least three cell towers to determine position.

Cell Phone Location Principals