On Mon, July 18, 2005 12:15 pm, Thomas said: > I was wondering if anybody has attempted to track a mobile phone through a > country. I know that this is usually more a case for the FBI . a friend of > mine is going on a 4 month bike tour and I would like to 'track' him for > locations. I thought of an sms receiving system, but if could do any other > way would be great. Having just a few months ago spent a great deal of time finding a cell phone that would just tell me my own long/lat where I was, without the for-fee fancy directions or my non-existent boss tracking me features, I ran into a fair amount of info in this topic, mostly by accident. I also wanted an SSH client so I could do emergency surgery on websites if needed. You'd be AMAZED how hard it is to get a cell phone company to tell you if it has these two features or not and on which models it actually worked... [I got the Nextel + Blackberry 7250 and it has them. YMMV] There are at least two distinct systems in different cell phones: 1. Cell Tower location 2. GPS location I'm not sure #1 can use multiple signals and triangulate or not. Even so, it ain't gonna be real reliable in the case that you want to know EXACTLY where somebody's cell phone is in case of an emergency... #2 works better the more GPS satellites it can find. I've seen results with 5 satellites and an error margin of 3 meters, as I recall. (Maybe that was 4 satellites? Definitely 3 meters, though) Some phones have both #1 and #2 and use #1 as fall-back. US Cell Phone companies were required by law to have 911 calls provide caller location by [some past date] to 911 operators. Every one of these companies filed for, and received, an extension of that deadline. All the filings had different extended deadlines, as they all filed the paperwork at varying times with varying reasons why they were not going to make deadline. So, in short, nobody knows when they'll actually get the damn things to work right for 911. The idea that you could arbitrarily track your friend's phone is, at best, a Privacy Nightmare... But let's assume your friend somehow can "sign off" or provide consent for you to receive the data you desire, or wants to take some action every day to tell you where they are, or even wants to program their phone to do it automatically... If he/she/it has a fancy enough cell phone with working GPS and/or Tower location system, and if that phone allows the installation of new applications, then, in theory, there could be an application "out there" that would automatically surf to some URL to report their location. Otherwise, you can just give them a form on a website to surf to and let them tell you where they are, or maybe they could use their cell phone as a PHONE and call you to tell you where they are or... Well, you get the picture. I don't think anybody has written that automated location notifier application yet, EXCEPT the guys who will charge your $40 a month to track your employees' cell phones, which allegedly *IS* an available service for some cell phones with some providers... Though I believe I heard at least one person state that this was still in the vaporware stage of development as far as the end user is concerned -- That there were still some bugs to work out and while they were "close" to having it work reliably, it wasn't "working" yet. If you did write such an application it would probably be in Java or Palm OS or ... Well, it almost for sure will *NOT* be in PHP, since, as far as I know, PHP is not installed on any commercially sold phones. Though I think there was a Linux-based Palm-like device that might maybe have had PHP working on it... This was all the state of things several months ago, far as I could tell, and I'm probably already horribly out of date. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
