cellhunter - openbmap - opencellid revisited... (was Re: CellHunter is moving to a new server)

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 8:49 PM, Risto H. Kurppa<risto at kurppa.fi> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir<maxious at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I looked at "common api to submit cells" and found that the openmoko
>> OBM logger app was missing *one* field (arfcn) that cellhunter api
>> wanted. Both being opensource, here's my hackish solution to patch the
>> OBM logger to write that field and a python script to submit records
>> produced by that patched OBM to cellhunter. You have to run this after
>> collecting the logs but before you move them to the Processed Logs
>> folder in OBM. So I do it before I do Upload in the OBM logger app.
>> YMMV, hopefully the real logger app developers can work something out
>> between themselves.
>
> Nice hack!
>
> Do you have any idea what's arfcn - how do you generate it? If you can
> generate it after the data's collected, couldn't it be created
> server-side (to me it sound's redundant information if it's generated
> from other data).
"ARFCN (Absolute Radio Frequency Channel Number) specifies a pair of
physical radio carriers and channels used for transmission and
reception on the Um Interface in GSM cellular networks, one for the
uplink signal and one for the downlink signal."
So it's data to be collected from the cell station rather than
something that could be generated/assumed/estimated. Without seeing
the cellhunter location algorithm, I don't know how it helps location
calculation either... but if the other two DB don't store it, then it
can't be that important, right? ;)

>
> And I don't support the idea of one client uploading to several
> databases, the databases should do the syncing..
Well I was having to run the loggers in parallel anyway but it's
easier to get one working consistently rather than two... and I prefer
the way the OBM logger is designed anyway :)
DB sync is where it should be though. I've uploaded different areas to
either cellhunter or OBM so it would be good to get them combined
efficently.