Mobile Phone Tracker – What Is Phone Tracking & How Can It Be Useful to You?
Now phone tracking is easily available to all members of the public. You can use it in a number of practical ways. You can locate your phone easily and quickly if it goes missing due to loss or theft. You can locate your loved ones with the click of a button without calling them and interrupting their activities.
The opportunities mobile phone trackers offers are many and different. You can readily take advantage of them. Find out how the entire process works so that you know exactly what to expect. In general, you should not deprive yourself of the benefits that the advancements in technology have to offer just because of lack of knowledge or misinformation.
Take the analogy of looking at the yellow pages. You can find out where someone lives (is located) easily. When you think about it, is not so much different from locating via a mobile phone, as most people spend a good deal of time in the same place.
Phone Tracking Explained: The technical stuff
Tip! Skip this part if you are not in to techy-talk.
In order to understand how the whole process works, you have to know how mobile phones work to enable communication via telephone calls. The phone works by emitting signals. These radio signals are emitted not only when a call is made. They are emitted all the time when the device is on.
The signals which the mobile telephone emits are picked up by radio towers which are part of the respective mobile network. These radio towers are typically referred to transmission towers or transmission masts. This is because they not only pick the signal. They enable the exchange of signals between two mobile phones during a call. Similarly, the signal emitted from a transmission tower can be picked up by another device such as a computer.
Any mobile phone communicates wirelessly with the nearest transmission mast at any time. As the location of each mast is fixed, the phone’s location can be identified with the use of the appropriate technology. This is what phone tracking is all about.
The phone tracker technology is quite complex, but it is fairly easy to get an idea of how it works. The technology measures the power level and antenna patterns of the mobile phone. Based on this data, the system can determine which transmission mast is closest to the device. As each mast has a sector in which it works, so the sector will show on the map.
The technology works to determine the distance from the respective transmission tower to the mobile phone. If the system uses interpolation of the signals from towers located close to one another, it can produce the phone’s exact location with a very small deviation. This is possible because all masts that are in a certain area will pick up the signal coming from the device. To them, the signal will come at different strengths, so with effective computation precise location is perfectly possible.
GPS mobile tracking
It is also possible to track a mobile phone with the use of GPS. All smartphones that use this technology can be traced. However, the technology described above and based on GSM works for virtually all mobile phones, old and new, irrespective of their model or manufacturer.
Ways to Track a Mobile Phone
There are two main types of technologies with which you can pinpoint the location of a mobile phone.
Network location phone tracking
Deviced-based location tracking (Android (Samsung), Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Phone)
They work differently and each one has its own specifics.
The phone tracker technologies based on network location work exactly as described above. They use the existing network of a telecommunications company to detect a radio signal and to obtain the data necessary for determining the precise location of the phone. This technology works without interfering with the actual device. There is no need for the user to make any physical changes or install any software.
The accuracy of network-based technologies depends on the number of transmission towers in an area and on how closely they are positioned to one another. The higher the density of the towers is the more accurate the location results are and vice versa. In general, the accuracy depends on the hardware and software the system uses for locating the devices as well.
Using device-based technology to track a mobile phone is also possible. In order for this type of tracking to work, the device must have a certain type of software program or a hardware chip installed. In this way, the handset itself can emit a signal which the technology can pick up and compute so that the exact location of the device is identified.
The problem with the device-based technology is that the software or hardware that has to be installed may not be compatible with the device itself. Besides, the changes made to the phone may lead to issues with its operation. The user may not be able to make or receive calls.
Mobile Phone Tracker Services/Software
You have certainly seen in movies how the police locate the phone of a missing person as part of an investigation. Now you can track a phone as well. There are specifically designed services available to the public. It should be pointed out that these services are completely legal and allow you to track only the phones of people who have given their express consent to be located by you. These services have many using including locating lost phones and children who have gone out playing, to name a few.
On MobilePhoneTracker.org.uk we will go through some of the GSM network-based tracker services as well as device-based tracking, usually in the form of apps using the GPS built in smartphones for the purpose of mobile tracking.