What Is GPS Cell Phone Tracking?
filed in GPS Cell Phone Information on Sep.02, 2008
Cell phones are at least as common today, if not more so, as regular telephones. They are not even just for the western world anymore either - which is one of the main reasons for their hegemony in the world of communications. It is simply irreplaceable to be able to reach out and communicate with someone at great distances from anywhere in the world. You cannot do that with a old land line, but that can be your experience with a cell phone.
Because cell phones can reach out and touch someone from hundreds if not thousands of miles away they have become useful for a few other activities - namely GPS tracking. To understand just how GPS cell phone tracking works we must first take a look into the mechanics behind normal cell phones. By getting a strong foundation here we will be able to get a better understanding of how the GPS tracking component is introduced.
How Cell Phones Work
To start off I need to debunk the de facto myth that cell phones are some sort of powerful intercom ala Star Trek. They are not magical boxes that broadcast your voice into outer space that then gets beamed back to the earth, or at least most of them aren’t.
Instead, cell phones are simply radios. Certainly not simple radios - they are radios of a very sophisticated and advanced variety - but radios none the less. In most large cities, there are hundreds of cell phone towers that act as transmitters for the signals that originate in hundreds of thousands of cellphones that inhabit your major metropolitan area.
The hexagon grid is a great way to think about how cell phones work.
To get a better picture of how this works lets take a page from the old beehive, pictured to the left. As we all know, beehives display the beauty of the hexagon at work. Imagine that the entire beehive represents the city or county that you live in. If this is the case, then each hexagon represents a cell. At the center of each cell is one of our cell phone towers. This tower is responsible for collecting the signal from all the cell phones that are currently in use or are able to be used.
So as a bee travels from cell to cell they make use of a the cell phone tower for that particular cell. This has the benefit of keeping use levels on any one particular tower low and it opens up more channels to be used, increasing the amount of coverage a cell phone provider can give their customers.
These cell towers then contact a central process station - let’s call it the hive - where the towers communicate with each other. This is how on person in a cell all the way on the east side of the city can talk with a person on the west side of it. The power is simply amazing!
How GPS Cell Phone Tracking Works
Cell phones are just complex radios, but how does that allow people to turn them into GPS cell phone tracking systems? Like everything technological, it has a lot to do with math and geometry. It is all triangulation baby.
Because there are a lot of constants involved here - such as the cell tower’s position (or in the case of a truly GPS enabled cell phone, a satellite), the speed of the radio frequencies, and the cell phone’s ability to “ping” a cell tower for a signal - it just takes a few simple calculations and you can find out the exact position of any cell phone within range of a two towers. It is obviously better if there are more than two, but two will suffice for the calculations.