10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
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It looks to me to be a general description of how cell phones connect to towers in a certain area. LE would probably know approximately where BM was when he used his phone to text his daughters and to call the neighbor.
What I would be interested in is all the locations where there is no service, or whether or not the phone was turned off at a particular time or in a certain area. Can the location still be determined if there is no service? Did the truck have GPS? In what way did the GPS data not match Barry's story? Could that have been related to the time Barry mentioned that he was fixing something on his bobcat? Or whatever it was that he said.
Anyway, what I think might be important is where he was and what he was doing whenever he was "off grid," or in the areas where there was no phone service.
Imo
Short answer: Yes, GPS can find you where there is no cell service. To be really accurate, someone explained in an earlier thread that the GPS needs to be unobstructed to more than one satellite. It's rare to be entirely without GPS in the mountains, which is what PLB's are based on.
All Androids and Apple phones have onboard GPS that works when the phone is powered on, whether or not there's cell service. Most google apps send that information to the cloud as the phone travels (to Google servers).
So, BM would need to keep turning his phone on and off (in between texts and phone calls) to evade GPS detection (I hate giving instructions for these kinds of things). But that behavior would be so suspicious in and of itself as to constitute some good evidence against BM. Most people would know not to do that. So, I believe BM's phone will show him heading up toward Denver early in the morning (but whether it shows him at any particular place that could be a work place is another matter). Then, it will show him getting texts, making phone calls prior to 6 pm.
Does the phone show any stops along the way? Is there enough data in the phone to show that? If no cell service, perhaps hard to know.
It's been interesting to me that LE closed the road heading away from Denver (from the Morphew residence) to conduct an approximately day long search. What made them do that? Did BM do some driving around more locally before heading to Denver? Did he perhaps leave for Denver much later than 5 am?
Did he really go to Denver? I can say that if I were AM and had heard from CSI that BM's story about his whereabouts didn't add up, that would be enough for me personally to be extremely upset with BM.
At any rate, my guess is that GPS will be key in this case. There's an interesting podcast about a murder in California that hinged on GPS: To Live and Die in LA. Wherein, the murderer didn't realize just how much GPS could show...and where it is stored.