gps mobile phones connectivity - gps

all the sets will not have inbuilt gps connectivity....for example mine is sony Ericsson z550i in this i dont have inbuilt gps service. suppose i want to use gps service in such sets what i should do? please Suggest some alternatives...
And also suggest is it mandatory to have a gprs connection for my handset if i want to avail gps service?

GPS does not require any cellular connection like GPRS, it relies purely on a GPS antenna on the phone picking signals from orbiting GPS satellites.
If a phone doesn't have a GPS system, then there might be other APIs available to obtain an approximate position from cell tower information, but generally speaking I think you're out of luck.

Related

Send other types of data with the free GPS service?

Is it possible to use the free GPS service to send other types of data such as plain text/XML/HTML??
E.G. systems for taxi companies - each car has in it a box which receives and sends information to and from the controller/ dispatch, back in the office. The driver can view all bookings and accept them, as well as tell the controller when the customer has been picked up and when they have been dropped off.
Is this all possible via the free GPS service? Or would the system's manufacturer have to pay to to rent a private satellite? Or would the system be using something similar to a mobile phone network? I would think it would be one of the first to options, as constant reliable signal is vital.
I know the question above is pretty open, and it's not what I'm too desperate to have answered...I just want to know if it is possible for me to build a device with a GPS receiver and have it send text and XML via the free GPS service?? (I want an admin to operate a team of employees from a browser, like with a taxi fleet management system).
No, GPS is a chip with an antenna that can receive only Location data.
It is not possible to send data via GPS.
All that devices that drivers, taxies, busses, tolling system use, send their data via mobile phone network.
So a device needs such a communication chip and a sim card.
Then you can send what you want.

Using GPS data for vehicle tracking where there are no cellular services

I am working on a project that deals with GPS based tracking of vehicles. I want to know if we can use GPS data for real time tracking of vehicles in areas where there are no cellular services.
Yes you can, GPS works everywhere in the world, when you have free view to sky.
It does not work in tunnels, underground and indoors.
Without cellular service the phone needs some seconds more to get the first valid GPS position after enabling it.

GPS modem that can send data to our server

We are planning for vehicle tracking system. We would like to relay on GPS Tracking System and view position report via Google Maps.
For hardware requirement we are thinking of GPS modem that can transmit data to our system.
Which GPD Modem is suitable for my project?
Use a smartphone. Haha.
On a more serious note, since it's for vehicular application only, there are a lot of companies that manufacture GPS modules (u-blox is one of them). Just google and you'll find thousands of companies manufacturing them. But before you choose a GPS module, make sure you check the regulations of your target country. If the module works on the Iridium satellite network, countries like India & China won't allow it as Iridium frequency is close to their military frequencies. In Europe you'll be better off with the Inmarsat network. So, do your homework & you should be good.
Also, if you're developing your own map interface, you might wanna ask the manufacturer if they have any existing mapping interface you can hook into or disable. You mag be charged for either.
All the best!
Are mobile networks (like GSM/GPRS/UMTS) available where you are?
if so check-out the tracking products from this site or this site (Google keywords: GPS GPRS)
If not, you should consider a custom solution, maybe someone like this company can help...
I have worked on a project that involved sending data over GSM/CDMA network. It used a simple GSM/CDMA modem connected to an embedded linux device and was a stationary piece of hardware. Attach a GPS device and it may very well be a tracking system. The problem is when the network drops or the device moves out of the network coverage area. I am not sure if there any GSM/CDMA modem available with GPS added to them as we didn't have this facility in our hardware and it was very much desirable. We needed to use a separate GPS device, mostly iPhone, separately to determine the lat long of our device.
You can use any GSM/GPRS modem equipped with GPS device. The modem will forward the GPS data to your central server through GPRS and at the server side you just need to process rcvd data and display it on google maps.

send GPS coordinates from OEM GPS module to server

I am looking for information on sending GPS coordinates from a GPS module to a server. How would I go about doing this?
I have done countless google searches on the subject and all searches fail to reveal any information on how the data generated from the GPS unit might be actually sent from the gps module to a server.
There are obvious ways to do this using a GSM deivce, but I can't find any information on low cost data plans, networks, etc
All I would need to do is occasionally send the GPS coordinates from the module to a server. This would be done several times a day. One device would probably have bandwidth of a couple KB per month, that's it. What options are out there?
you need:
A GSM modem that support whatever frequencies / technology your intended cellular provider uses. Bunch of examples here: http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/66 Make sure the module manages the TCP/IP aspects and has an easy interface (AT commands).
A data only account with that cell provider for each device. 200MB a month is like $15-20 from most carriers in the US
The GPS Module. Examples here: http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/4
A microcontroller to manage the GPS and the cell modem. Arduino is probably the easiest one to get started with.
All GPS receiver modules output serial NMEA data. Which is fairly simple to parse, and from there you can do whatever you like with it, store it send it, plot it, etc.

Online map locator api like GPS

Google maps, ip location etc. working good.
But none of the services are locating a computer exactly where it is on a map.
Anyone know any api which can locate a computer on a map without user inputs.
I am tired of ip location, it is not at all exact and my client is not happy. :(
Thanks
Gobi
What you're trying to do is not possible without specialized hardware. Google maps on cell phones without GPS uses cell tower station information. Most other phones use actual GPS receivers. With neither of those, the only way for your network-attached computer to tell where it is is by looking at who owns its IP address, which is what the IP location stuff does. Unfortunately, that database has pretty low geographical resolution. If you really want accurate and precise location information, you have to have a GPS receiver.
This cant be done unless you have some GPS device connected to the computer. But I guess it is forbidden in the licence to use real time tracking in Google Maps, but I might be wrong.
There's one more way, but I don't know how practical it is: visible wifi networks. If your PC has wifi hardware then you can often correlate the list of networks that you can see to an approximate location based on databases of networks and position. This is how e.g. iPod touches can locate themselves, and iPhones when there's poor GPS reception in built-up areas.
But even if your end-user has wifi hardware and you can somehow read the network list from it then I'm not sure if there are public datasets for this though.
The W3C Geolocation API allows websites to request the user's best available location from the browser. In some cases this will use IP geolocation which you've already seen to be inaccurate, but it can sometimes do better.
The API is agnostic to the device and the method used to obtain location; on an iPhone, the Geolocation API may use cell tower triangulation, available WiFi network lookup or GPS satellite geolocation, or some combination. On Firefox or Chrome on the laptop, Google uses WiFi networks and IP address to give a location which is often much, much better than IP geolocation alone.
If you had a GPS attached to your computer, it's possible that your browser could take advantage of that too -- it's expected that future versions of Internet Explorer will support the W3C Geolocation API using the Windows 7 Location Platform, which can accept location from an attached GPS or manual entry or some other plugin.