Approximate distance to the nearest mobile mast

Question

I came across a site that apparently allows users to figure out how far it is to the nearest mast of mobile phones. Is there a way to develop this distance, hard-coded in android? (Or does anyone have suggestions on how to do this?)

Answer 1

After further research, I finally came to the following conclusion:

In the UK, you can now download a dataset provided by Ofcom Sitefinder Website containing information about more than 140,000 UK mobile masts that can be used to search for mobile phone masts.

This means not answering the question of whether it is possible programmatically in Android, but at least providing another possible option for developers working on similar projects in the UK.

Answer 2

One solution might be to turn off GPS positioning and only enable cell positioning . I doubt that there will be triangulation of positioning in this case, and the geo fix device will be one of the nearest masts. After that, you use GPS and get the real position and calculate the distance using the distances of the eulers .

Answer 3

In GSM, the distance from the mobile station to the active cell tower is one of the main connection parameters. It is called Timing> (TA).

Please note: the active mast is usually the closest, but not always.

The TA value is usually from 0 to 63, with each step being a step forward for one bit period (approximately 3.69 μs). For radio waves traveling at a speed of about 300,000,000 meters per second (i.e., 300 meters per microsecond), one TA step then represents a change in the round-trip distance (twice the propagation range) of about 1,100 meters. This means that the TA value changes for each change of 550 meters in the range between the mobile and base stations.

That is, the distance to the current tower is always known to the mobile station with an accuracy of 550 meters.

This option should be easily accessible through the standard Android API.

Answer 4

This is an old question, but the latest developments in the cell tower database containing this information can be found on Wikipedia , including a long list of public or free cell tower databases around the world.