Mobile Phone GPS Tracking Guide

Technology Made for Emergency Response Are Available for Keeping Track of Your Children. GPS tracking, mobile GPS and cell phone track tools are unquestionably drawing interest from consumers, cell phone businesses and software creators. The most current mobile phones feature GPS position functions to track mobile phone position.

To adhere to Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cellular phone companies have to be able to furnish authorities with smartphone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation will not always meet this condition. For comparison, commercially available GPS systems can achieve accuracy down to less than 10 meters. This varies according to a lot of factors, as GPS signals tend to be pretty weak and are disturbed by many variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider utilizes triangulation techniques to determine the position of the device, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is further affected by factors similar to 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 location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.

GPS Hot Start is the term for when the GPS enabled device recalls its last calculated position, the satellites that were in view before, as well as the almanac data in memory, and attempts to lock onto the same satellites and compute a fresh position 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 means when the GPS enabled mobile phone remembers its last calculated position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in range. It performs a reset and attempts to find satellite signals and computes a fresh position. The GPS receiver has a general idea of which satellites tolook for because it kept its last known position and also the almanac data helps determine which satellites are in range. The Warm Start will need more time than the Hot Start but not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous data, and attempts to locate satellites and obtain a GPS lock. This usually takes longer than other methods since there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled mobile phone receiver has to try to lock onto a satellite signal from any available satellites.

To be able to have better GPS lock times cellular manufacturers and system providers designed Assisted GPS technology. This downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the cell phone general position. GPS Receivers will get a quicker lock in return for a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, also known as A-GPS or AGPS, improves the performance of standard GPS in devices connected to the cell network. In the US Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use AGPS. Which is a method of utilizing the cellular network to speed up finding of GPS satellites.

A-GPS improves location tracking functions of mobile phones (along with other related devices) in a couple of ways:

One way will be assisting to secure a more rapid “time to first fix” (TTFF). AGPS acquires and archives data in relation to satellite location via the cellular network and so the location data does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.

The other technique is by assisting position devices when GPS signals are weak or blocked. Due to the fact GPS satellite signals may be interfered with by tall buildings, and do not penetrate building interiors well A-GPS utilizes distance to cellular towers to compute position when GPS signals are not readily available.

If satellite signals are not obtainable, or accuracy and precision is less important than battery life, utilizing Cell-ID is a viable substitute to GPS smartphone tracking. The position of the cell phone can be computed by the cell network cell id, that determines the cell tower the smartphone is connected to. By understanding the position of the tower, then you can know roughly the place that the device will be. Nonetheless, a tower can cover a huge area, from a few hundred meters, in high populationdensity zones, to several miles in lower density areas. For this reason location CellID precision is lower than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless location using CellID still gives you a very viable alternative.

Another method of formulating mobile phone location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation makes use of signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals to travel from the cell phone to a minimum of three cell towers to determine location.

Mobile Phone GPS Tracking Guide