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Cell Spotting

I’ve been playing with a neat little app on my N95. It’s called Cell Spotting. The idea is to collect the IDs and locations of Mobile phone cell towers. On each network you can assign a name to an area (collection) of towers. You can name each Tower, and describe some information about it such as nearby useful stuff.

I love the idea, I love user driven data. However there are a few issues I’ve found. This morning I named a tower Hammersmith Station. Today I connect to it on the way home when I was in South Ealing. For those that don’t know that 2-3 miles. Quite a long way really, especially in London.

What I’d like to see is something like this project that uses the internal GPS on my N95 or an external GPS to create bounding boxes around cells. In other words if I know my location when I enter the cell and I know my location when I exit then I can create a line across the cell. That marks two points on the circumference of coverage. If you had just two people take two vectors through a cell you could map it. This of course assumes cell coverage is elliptical, but I’m not a network engineer so I’m not really qualified to say that’s a safe assumption.

Since the Cell Spotting app just launches a web page passing the network, area and cell IDs it shouldn’t be hard to make a new version of the application using PyS60 and the GPS library. I might have a crack if I get chance. But then I always say that.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Cell Spotting”

  1. Carl Ferner Says:
    June 20th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Hi, I noticed that you probaly found a glitch in the CellSpotting application, The hammersmith Station cell is probably the result of temporary bad coverage, the cell numbers are all zeros. However it could later contact the service.
    I will try to detect bad coverage better!! /Thanks!
    On the gps’s; GPS is in the plan for integration, however, as a gps user for many years I have found that the gps is useless when I want it, in the restaurant, in the metro, in shopping malls. Thats why I find that cellid’s complements very good. They have the same precicion as when some one calles me and asks “where are you?” the precision is high in urban areas and lower in suburban areas.
    /Carl at CellSpotting.

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