Cell Phone GPS Tracking Guide

GPS tracking, cell phone GPS and mobile phone tracking tools are securing attention from consumers, cellular phone companies and software programmers. The most popular mobile phones feature GPS position features to track mobile phone position.

To abide by Federal Communications Commission rules, cell phone companies must be able to provide authorities with smartphone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation does not always meet this requirement. By way of comparison, commercially available GPS systems are able to obtain precision down to 3-10m. This is dependent upon many factors, as GPS signals tend to be particularly weak and they are affected by many variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider utilizes triangulation techniques to try to pinpoint the position of the cell phone, 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 affecting signal strength 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 means whenever the GPS enabled cell phone keeps its last known location, the satellites that had been in range before, together with the almanac data in memory, and makes an attempt to lock onto the same satellites and determine a new location based upon the previous information. This is almost always 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 is the term for whenever the GPS enabled mobile phone keeps its last calculated position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in view. It resets and attempts to connect to satellite signals and calculates a brand new position. The GPS receiver narrows the choice of which satellites toseek because it saved its last known location and also the almanac data helps identify which satellites are in range. The Warm Start will take longer compared to Hot Start although not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous inf

ormation, and tries to locate satellites and obtain a GPS lock. This normally takes more time since there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled mobile phone receiver has to attempt to lock onto a satellite signal from any accessible satellites.

In order to get better GPS lock times cellphone manufacturers and network providers designed Assisted GPS technology. It downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the mobile phone basic position. GPS Receivers will get a quicker lock in return for a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, also referred to as A-GPS or AGPS, helps the performance of standard GPS in cell phones connected to the cell network. In the United States Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use A-GPS. Which is a means of utilizing the cell network to accelerate finding of GPS satellites.

A-GPS assists location tracking functions of smartphones (and other connected devices) in two ways:

One method is by helping to obtain a faster “time to first fix” (TTFF). Assisted GPS acquires and archives data about the location of satellites using the cell network and so the location details does not need to be downloaded via the satellite.

The other approach is by assisting locate smartphones when GPS signals are weak or impeded. Since GPS satellite signals may be interfered with by tall structures, and do not pass through building interiors well A-GPS utilizes distance to cellular towers to estimate location when GPS signals are not available.

In the event that satellite signals are not available, or precision is less important than battery life, making use of Cell-ID is a viable substitute to GPS cell phone tracking. The position of the device may be determined by the cell network cell id, that pinpoints the cell tower the phone is using. By knowing the position of the tower, then you can know roughly the spot where the cell phone is. However, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a couple of hundred meters, in higher populationdensity zones, to several kilometers in lower density zones. This is why location CellID precision is lower than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless monitoring via CellID still gives you a really viable substitute.

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

Cell Phone GPS Tracking Guide