Frederic Marx is discussing this same thing on closed group Theo Discussion page.
“With the time difference of arrival (TDoA) technique, the mobile sends a signal to the antenna stations; the nearest one sends back the signal. It is the time elapsed between the emission and the reception of the signal (the round-trip delay time) which allows an external calculator to determine the location of the portable. So, on a map, you could draw a circle and identify where was Theo mobile in a range of 60 degrees with a relative precise distance. Google is not required here.”
“There are two methods of tracking mobile with cell towers. Active or passive tracking.
Passive tracking uses triangulation to determine the approximate localization of the mobile in the cell so the antennas can route the calls to the right direction. It uses information from one up to three different cell towers and indeed this method is less accurate due to the environment and uses old technologies.
Now more and more cell towers uses active tracking. With this in place, localization and coordinates are sent by each mobile within small messages to the cell towers. It allows to determine the exact localization of the mobile at any time and is very useful for GSM providers as you can imagine. Do you know whether active tracking infrastructure is available in Byron Bay?“
“It should not affect the speed of the signal but the strength. So the computed distance to any mobile will be the same regardless of the environment.”
“Sheri D'Rosario By any chance have you seen those imprecise signals logged in the antennas? Do you confirm the signals are inacurate knowing your exact location?”
“I think there is a misunderstanding when they mentionned the ping responses. Usually ping response is related to network services like Intranet or Internet access and is a small packet on the network that is transmitted to verify whether you are reachable or not.
A mobile that does not have an affected channel is defined as being in idle mode. While in idle mode it is important that the mobile is both able to access and be reached by the system. The mobile receives parameters from the relays and all controlling parameters are transmitted on a broadcast carrier in each cell. Moreover to be able to access the system from anywhere in the network, regardless of wether the mobile is on/off, it has to be able to select a specific GSM station, tune to its frequency and listen to the system information messages transmitted in that cell. It must also be able to register its current location to the network so that the network knows where to route the incoming calls.
And because of that I can’t explain the reason why they can’t identify the location of the mobile unless they are looking into the provider logfiles (ping response) instead of looking closely to the GSM base stations logfiles.”
General Discussion