Wireless signal tracking with GPS

Not really anything that I can think of. Any software that would have to be custom programmed for you...

 

Been there, done that, made These Maps

A friend on HoFo wrote a script with Perl to record the location from the GPS, and the signal report from a cell phone which was returned when an AT+CSQ? string was sent. No, I don't have it. He's still tweaking it, but in the meantime you can program one yourself with even the simplest scipt in VB, Perl or whatever. all you need to do is:

Open the COM port the GPS is on
Open the COM port the phone is on

Repeat this every x seconds:

{Send the AT+CSQ? command to the phone
Record the response from the phone
Insert comma
Record the next incoming string from the GPS
Insert line feed
Write line to file}

What you should wind up with is a comma delimited txt file containing the response from the AT+CSQ? request, and the coordinates the GPS sent at the time of the phones response.
Import this into Excel and trim away unneeded data until all you have left are the coordinates and the signal data (usually reported between 1 and 31)
It would look something like this
N,40.8116786074177,W,77.8261131413992,-77.8261131413992,,12,99,,1,A508,3FDF
(a sample from the raw data used to make one of the maps above)

The difficult part is finding a way to map this. I used ArcMap, which is Commercial GIS software, since that is my bag so it was pretty easy. I think MS MapPoint is able to process that as well, but can only seperate the signal into a maximum of 8 different levels.

Hope this helps.

Edit: just tried it with my VX4400 and it worked fine, I am able to get it to respond with the signal, the battery life, and the SID. There was a command which caused my S46 to respond with the Cell Site ID, but I forget what it was. It would be great if I could get the VX4400 to tell me what PN Offset it was using, and it would be ESPECIALLY great if I could get it to respond with the Ec/Io!

 

Rich,

Those are really neat.