Where am I? (How to find where you are from your mobile phone without GPS?)

Is there a way of finding your location (city, town and/or world coordinate) within your Symbian application written for your mobile phone?

Is there any service on mobile networks that will return the coordinate of the nearest base station?

Samuel

Reply to
Samuel Lopez
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Sending a blank SMS to 1715678 used to give you the Lat/Long co-ords of the nearest mobile tower, although I've heard the service is experimental and keeps changing. Only worked for Telstra though. Not sure of its status these days, or a similar service for other networks.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Not generally. The GSM network obviously knows your location by the cell you're booked into. If they put their mind to it, they can pinpoint it down to a couple of meters in optimal conditions, using signal strengths at neighboring towers and some triangulation. Look up "LAC" or "CellID" for details.

The tricky question is whether or not they'll allow you, the subscriber, access to that information. Several network providers want to exploit this themselves, by offering various "location-based services" for extra fees, e.g. via WAP, so they're not particularly likely to let any odd application running on the phone access this data.

Then there's the question of whether the GSM client device in question will let software access these data at all, and whether a Symbian application written by some random persion is allowed to access it.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Broeker

Here in Croatia, CellID feature is free if you use VIP provider. The name of street where antenna is is displayed on the phone. Also, I heard that one of British operators will (or maybe already is) use CellID in combination with GSM phones with AGPS (assisted GPS). GPS "cold start" is much faster with approximate location. Less annoying, less current consumption, etc. etc....

Precise triangulation in "urban canyon" is nearly meaningless.

Reply to
Aleksandar Kovacevic

Eh ? what ? What country is the original poster in ?

Here in the UK, there are several services for tracking handsets (to the nearest basestation), but the trackee has to consent to having their location transmitted (by SMS).

There was a company called "RouteCall" which would provide location info on any UK mobile handset on demand and without the trackee knowing. This was actually a test program, but it was left as an active web page until various people noticed it.

Richard [in PE12]

Reply to
Jet Morgan

UK police got a successful murder prosecution after using a warrant to get hold of historic cell system data and track a person's movement through the cell phone network. (Sorry, I haven't got the citation on hand - search BBC and you'd find it).

Ken

Reply to
Ken Taylor

See also

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Reply to
Anna Aicehy

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