locating via GSM, revisited

[Werner Almesberger]

joerg at openmoko.org wrote:
> For many countries there are ageold databases created by hobbyists doing 
> antenna-spotting. In Germany, carrier O2 sends quite exact Gauss-Krueger 
> coordinates on CBC 221 for each of his stations.

Okay, that's good. So we can have a comprehensive geographical database
we can put our "GSM n-space" in relation to. (Although no motivation
was ever stated, I'm assuming here that the goal of the whole exercise
is to avoid using GPS. Thus we can't correlate vectors we measure in
GSM n-space to 2D or 3D real-world vectors we measure with GPS.)

Is there something like openstreetmap with these antenna locations or
does one have to hunt and gather from scattered repositories ?

> Too sophisticated for me to understand. 

What I meant was that, if you have no geographical information, you can
still tell whether you're approaching a set of base stations and how
quickly. If you approach A faster than B, but you know that your
destination is very close to B, the system could tell you to make a
turn. If this makes you approach B even more slowly, then it could tell
you to turn the other way, etc.

- Werner