Recently, I switched over to a Blackberry Tour. My good friend told me about this signal location app, and I have been hooked ever since. Basically, this app looks at what site or tower your phone is connected to, grabs the GPS location from the site, and plots it on a map. This takes all the work out of how I used to do it. (however, it still relies on sometimes incorrect location data from the sites. Some sprint sites have their location totally wrong, and those with no location are put somewhere over the atlantic ocean.) I have some sites located in Lansing, MI, Buffalo, NY, and many from the Long Island-Queens-Brooklyn area. I will try to update this file as I go on. Enjoy!
Great program, I leave it running and log all the sites. Definitely interesting when you load them into google earth.
I've tried it with GSM networks in Europe, and the "tower location" is almost always wrong. The app requests location info from Google Maps. It does point to a position somewhere in the general area, but could be several miles/kilometers from the actual site. Good for geolocation purposes, but not an actual "site database". For CDMA it does the tower lookup differently. I've never worked on a CDMA network, but I do know that the network is synchronus based on GPS timing, and that each tower has a GPS located on it for this purpose. So since CDMA has GPS built into it, to get the actual coordinates of the tower should be possible without any "inside" access to the network. ....I read the author of SignalLoc wrote Verizon disables the tower location part. Is that right? Has anyone using Verizon got a display on the "Loc" (<-Tower location) display? ...so having said all this, I'd say: -Sprint and other CDMA networks should show the site location very accurately, most of the time -Verizon, and other CDMA operators who like to disable things will show no site location -GSM/UMTS operators will usually show a point somewhere in the general area, but not necessarily of the actual tower. ...unless some networks give Google their actual site databases, in which case the site location will be correct. But since nobody knows how Google gets this info it's all speculation (ie: do they get info directly from the operators, or do they just drive around and plot tower locations themselves, or..?)
I believe all your info is correct. Usually when I roam on verizon, I do not get any network info from them. However, I do actually have one Alltel and one Verizon CDMA site with the correct GPS info on my map. I'm not sure why these 2 sites gave out their GPS location, but it is correct on my map. Weird.
