I did some research and it looks like there is NO way to get the relative signal strengths of all GSM cell towers in the area. Each provider, if they have something at all, support a system property (System.getProperty(...)) with the ID of the cell the phone would want to talk to if a call were to come in. This would make it not nearly as good for locating services as getting the full list.
Damn. Sun, get on this! On Nov 28, 10:04 am, Reinier Zwitserloot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yes, some do. I guess in the U.S. the phone companies are more willing > to sell access to this info than in Europe. > > There's a guy who biked around the entirety of inner Amsterdam (The > Netherlands), with 5 cell phones running a custom j2me program > bluetoothing data to a notebook in his backpack, along with a GPS > receiver doing the same. I'm going to offer him a beer and and ask for > the database, and see if I can build a 'heuristic locator' that uses > relative signal strengths of -every- cell tower in range (regardless > of its owner) to match this against a database to figure out where you > are most likely located. That's the kind of community effort I'm > talking about. > > Heck, even the iPhone 3G's GPS sucks so badly, especially in the urban > jungle where, if this system is going to work at all, it's going to > work very very well. You can leave GPS for strolls through the actual > jungle or when out in the middle of nowhere. > > On Nov 27, 12:08 pm, BoD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Excellent info, thanks! > > > About the cell locations, I may be mistaken, but don't the phone > > companies sell these databases? If not, how would Google maps and other > > services that use the cells to get a location work? > > > BoD > > > Reinier Zwitserloot wrote: > > > Correction for the posse: --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
