Status of GSM base station positioning services & clients

sam tygier samtygier at yahoo.co.uk
Mon May 3 19:53:26 CEST 2010


On 03/05/10 12:28, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote:
> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:18 PM, Risto H. Kurppa<risto at kurppa.fi>  wrote:
>> Hi there!
>>
>> does anyone know what's the current status of GSM base station -based
>> positioning services..
>> How do the different databases compare to each other nowadays?
>>
>> Are there clients to position the user based on the GSM base stations,
>> with on- or offline databases?
>> It'd be great to be able to detect the approximate location from GSM
>> signal and then hook up to GPS faster..
>
> You can get the approximate locations of the celltowers detected
> nearby with both the cellhunter and openbmap APIs (online). Averaging
> these and scaling by signal strength gets an alright accuracy
> (100-500m in some places). AFAIK there isn't an openmoko client for
> doing that.
>
> This accuracy would be better with WLAN essid locations like
> Google/Skyhook do... I notice openBmap now has "wifi data" being
> uploaded on their website so you might be asking at just the right
> time. There is a specification for wifi uploads (
> http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/myposition/index.php?title=Wifi_log_format
> ) that is used on Windows Mobile but the openmoko client hasn't been
> updated to publish this as far as I know. I would certainly be very
> excited to collect more data if it was updated :)
>
> There is a project called openbmap-locator that uses an offline
> version of the openbmap database to emulate a GPS interface via
> fso-ogpsd ( http://github.com/baruch/openbmap-locator ). It has a few
> compile time dependencies on SHR including vala which I had to
> download a tarball for and compile instead of using opkg (i'm sure if
> you have a desktop OE buildenv, it's much easier). The first time you
> run it, it downloads a testing sqlite database to
> ~/.openBmap/cellid.db
> It is supposed to be possible to download an updated SQL database
> using a URL like
> http://openbmap.org/latest/cellular/244_sqlite_zones.zip where 244 is
> the MCC for the country you want... but there isn't a file for finland
> and the file for australia (505) seems corrupted. Germany (262) works
> fine but that's not where I am and I don't know how to convert/import
> it to sqlite. So all in all, needs some more help to get it ready for
> normal users.

I have been uploading to openbmap for a while now. but not tried openbmap-locator.

it would be great if someone could put up a package for openbmap-locator, and maybe have it in SHR. could it be set up so that you just drop the data files into the right place and it works.

i am sure it would be especially useful for people in cities, where it can take quite a while to get a fix.

Sam




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