Saturday, November 9, 2013

Do you really know just where your Mobile Workforce or Family are?

GPS tracking, mobile GPS and mobile phone GPS track software are getting a lot of curiosity from potential customers, cellphone businesses and software programmers. The most up-to-date mobile phones have GPS position features to track smartphone location.


 Tracking


To help abide by Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cell phone companies have to be able to provide authorities with handset latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation does not always meet this requirement. For evaluation, commercially available GPS systems can obtain precision down to 3-10m. This hinges on many factors, as GPS signals are often very weak and they are disturbed by numerous factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider utilizes triangulation algorithms to try to pinpoint 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 barriers impeding signal strength and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation calculation. In rural areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.


GPS Hot Start is the term for whenever the GPS enabled handset keeps its last known position, the satellites that were in range before, and also the almanac data in memory, and tries to connect to the same satellites and determine a new location based upon the previous data. This is generally 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 when the GPS enabled mobile phone remembers its last calculated location, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in range. It performs a reset and attempts to connect to satellite signals and computes a new location. The GPS receiver narrows the choice of which satellites toseek since it stored its last known position and also the almanac data helps determine which satellites are in range. The Warm Start will take more time than the Hot Start although not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device dumps all the previous data, and tries to find satellites and achieve a GPS lock. This takes the longest because there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled handset receiver has to try to lock onto a satellite signal from any available satellites.


To be able to get better GPS lock times cellular manufacturers and wireless operators created Assisted GPS technology. This downloads the ephemeris and helps triangulate the smartphone basic location. GPS Receivers will get a faster lock at the expense of a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, often known as A-GPS or AGPS, boosts the performance of normal GPS in devices connected to the cell network. In America Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use A-GPS. Which is a means of utilizing the cell network to accelerate acquisition of GPS satellites.


A-GPS improves location tracking functions of mobile phones (along with other connected devices) in two ways:


The first method will be helping to secure a more rapid “time to first fix” (TTFF). A-GPS acquires and stores data in relation to the location of satellites using the cell network so the coordinates data does not need to be downloaded via the satellite.


A subsequent technique is by assisting position handsets when GPS signals are weak or not available. Because GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall structures, and do not pass through building interiors well AGPS employs distance to cellular towers to compute location when GPS signals are not accessible.


In the event that satellite signals are not readily available, or precision is less important than life of the battery, making use of Cell-ID is a useful alternative to GPS smartphone location. The location of the mobile phone may be approximated by the cellular network cell id, that identifies the cell tower the cellphone is using. By understanding the location of this tower, then you can know roughly the location where the cell phone might be. However, a tower can cover a huge area, from a couple of hundred meters, in high populationdensity areas, to several miles in lower density regions. For this reason location CellID precision is lower than GPS accuracy. Even so monitoring from CellID still gives you a very helpful substitute.


Another way of formulating cell phone location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation uses signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals traveling from the cellular phone to no less than 3 cell towers to judge position.



Do you really know just where your Mobile Workforce or Family are?

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