How does GPS in a mobile phone work exactly?

Question

I assume it doesn't connect to anything (other than the satelite I guess), is this right? Or it does and has some kind of charge?

Answer 1

There's 3 satellites at least that you must be able to receive from of the 24-32 out there, and they each broadcast a time from a synchronized atomic clock. The differences in those times that you receive at any one time tell you how long the broadcast took to reach you, and thus where you are in relation to the satellites. So, it sort of reads from something, but it doesn't connect to that thing. Note that this doesn't tell you your orientation, many GPSes fake that (and speed) by interpolating data points.

If you don't count the cost of the receiver, it's a free service. Apparently there's higher resolution services out there that are restricted to military use. Those are likely a fixed cost for a license to decrypt the signals along with a confidentiality agreement.

Now your device may support GPS tracking, in which case it might communicate, say via GPRS, to a database which will store the location the device has found itself to be at, so that multiple devices may be tracked. That would require some kind of connection. I heard that it's not too uncommon in a few industrialized Asian nations for spouses to call the phone company and act all worried about where oh where their spouse could be after being gone for 30 hours, and thereby get some information from the phone company about where their handset is... a motel perhaps.

Maps are either stored on the device or received over a connection. Navigation is computed based on those maps' databases. These likely are a licensed item with a cost associated, though if you use a service like Google Maps they have the license with NAVTEQ and others.

Answer 2

oh, ok... so it receives the signal but doesn't transmit anything... so it's complete free then?

Answer 3

GPS receiver is not connected to anything. A-GPS devices (commonly being used in cell phones) communicates with cell network infrastructure.

Answer 4

Note that, while a GPS typically doesn't need to connect to anything beyond the GPS satellites, the GPS function in mobile phones may need to connect to the Internet (or some other custom data service) in order to get information about your location. For example, if you're looking for a restaurant near you, the GPS will read your location but then call out to a separate service (say Google Maps) to find out the businesses in your immediate area. For that to work, you may very well need a working phone/data connection & plan, and there may indeed be additional charges. Check with your cell phone provider for details.

Answer 5

GPS, the Global Positioning System run by the United States Military, is free for civilian use, though the reality is that we're paying for it with tax dollars.

However, GPS on cell phones is a bit more murky. In general, it won't cost you anything to turn on the GPS in your cell phone, but when you get a location it usually involves the cell phone company in order to get it quickly with little signal, as well as get a location when the satellites aren't visible (since the gov't requires a fix even if the satellites aren't visible for emergency 911 purposes). It uses up some cellular bandwidth. This also means that for phones without a regular GPS receiver, you cannot use the GPS at all if you don't have cell phone service.

For this reason most cell phone companies have the GPS in the phone turned off except for emergency calls and for services they sell you (such as directions).

This particular kind of GPS is called assisted GPS (AGPS), and there are several levels of assistance used.

GPS

A normal GPS receiver listens to a particular frequency for radio signals. Satellites send time coded messages at this frequency. Each satellite has an atomic clock, and sends the current exact time as well.

The GPS receiver figures out which satellites it can hear, and then starts gathering those messages. The messages include time, current satellite positions, and a few other bits of information. The message stream is slow - this is to save power, and also because all the satellites transmit on the same frequency and they're easier to pick out if they go slow. Because of this, and the amount of information needed to operate well, it can take 30-60 seconds to get a location on a regular GPS.

When it knows the position and time code of at least 3 satellites, a GPS receiver can assume it's on the earth's surface and get a good reading. 4 satellites are needed if you aren't on the ground and you want altitude as well.

AGPS

As you saw above, it can take a long time to get a position fix with a normal GPS. There are ways to speed this up, but unless you're carrying an atomic clock with you all the time, or leave the GPS on all the time, then there's always going to be a delay of between 5-60 seconds before you get a location.

In order to save cost, most cell phones share the GPS receiver components with the cellular components, and you can't get a fix and talk at the same time. People don't like that (especially when there's an emergency) so the lowest form of GPS does the following:

1. Get some information from the cell phone company to feed to the GPS receiver - some of this is gross positioning information based on what cellular towers can 'hear' your phone, so by this time they already phone your location to within a city block or so.
2. Switch from cellular to GPS receiver for 0.1 second (or some small, practically unoticable period of time) and collect the raw GPS data (no processing on the phone).
3. Switch back to the phone mode, and send the raw data to the phone company
4. The phone company processes that data (acts as an offline GPS receiver) and send the location back to your phone.

This saves a lot of money on the phone design, but it has a heavy load on cellular bandwidth, and with a lot of requests coming it requires a lot of fast servers. Still, overall it can be cheaper and faster to implement. They are reluctant, however, to release GPS based features on these phones due to this load - so you won't see turn by turn navigation here.

More recent designs include a full GPS chip. They still get data from the phone company - such as current location based on tower positioning, and current satellite locations - this provides sub 1 second fix times. This information is only needed once, and the GPS can keep track of everything after that with very little power. If the cellular network is unavailable, then they can still get a fix after awhile. If the GPS satellites aren't visible to the receiver, then they can still get a rough fix from the cellular towers.

But to completely answer your question - it's as free as the phone company lets it be, and so far they do not charge for it at all. I doubt that's going to change in the future. In the higher end phones with a full GPS receiver you may even be able to load your own software and access it, such as with mologogo on a motorola iDen phone - the J2ME development kit is free, and the phone is only $40 (prepaid phone with $5 credit). Unlimited internet is about $10 a month, so for $40 to start and $10 a month you can get an internet tracking system. (Prices circa August 2008)

It's only going to get cheaper and more full featured from here on out...

-Adam Davis

Re: Google maps and such

Yes, Google maps and all other cell phone mapping systems require a data connection of some sort at varying times during usage. When you move far enough in one direction, for instance, it'll request new tiles from its server. Your average phone doesn't have enough storage to hold a map of the US, nor the processor power to render it nicely. iPhone would be able to if you wanted to use the storage space up with maps, but given that most iPhones have a full time unlimited data plan most users would rather use that space for other things.

Answer 6

What about locally installed applications? Does Google Maps require a connection to the internet at all times?

Answer 7

Google Maps does need an Internet connection, so you might incur data charges if you use that.

Answer 8

While not available in phones yet, as far as I'm aware, there's a newer alternative to traditional GPS and AGPS which uses a webserver for helping calculate locations.

The device captures raw GPS satellite signals and then connects to a webserver to assist with calculating the location, which helps minimize the power drain when calculating locations.

Answer 9

Alternatively there are some location services that don't use GPS at all, but get advertised as "GPS" for marketing reasons. They use a remote database of cellular towers (every cell tower as a unique, universal ID) and the MAC of WiFi hotspots found around the cell phone. The phone collects the cell tower IDs and the hotspot MACs and sends them to the remote location service, which has the coordinates for the cell towers and WiFi hotspots, and a rough approximation of the handset location is derived via triangulation. Google Maps makes use of such a service when there is no GPS available in the phone. It has very low precision compared to GPS but it's better than nothing.

Answer 10

There are two articles explaning how GPS work - including source code for windows mobile:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/WritingGPSApplications1.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/WritingGPSApplications2.aspx

Answer 11

Ok so you have the A-GPS in your phone, but can you set it not to receive cellular data, and just receive the GPS signal, and presumably you have all your needed maps loaded on your phone. And will it then work as a regular GPS receiver, or will it still need cellular data to work?

Answer 12

I just posted a similar article. Check it out.

"How a GPS Phone works"

Answer 13

all the sets will nt have inbuilt gps connectivity other than iphones and all....suppose we want to access use gps service in such sets what we should do?please Suggest some alternatives...

do we need to buy a receiver and embed it inside mobile phones..or we can just take GPRS connectivity for our cells and access gps service and google maps and if we do so do we need to take service providers permission?... Is it possible to programme?