RAC locates you via your mobile?

It's for emergency calls & it was being implemented by adding a GPS reciever. I don't remember anything about a standby mode other than on some "The black helicopters are coming to get us!" sites

My ageing Motorola A835 has GPS hardware built-in - but it's designed to work in conjunction with 3 network service which provides the user interface.

Darren

Just to let you all know, I understand from good authority that the Police are the only emergency service to locate / tracing a mobile by " Pinging ". No other company, organisation is allowed to do this and this includes the AA and RAC. The Police work in close contact with the mobile telephone companies and with BT.

Clearly people can do it with consent - there are websites allowing you to do so[1]. If you call the RAC from your cellphone, they can assume such consent - you're not calling for a nice chat...

[1]

Although not very accurately "You therefore acknowledge that the Maximum Location Error will be less than one cell radius for 50% of the cells and that the Average Location Error will be less than the cell radius for 90% of the cells. THIS MAY MEAN THAT LOCATION IN SOME CENTRAL CITY AREAS COULD BE ACCURATE TO WITHIN

80/100M WHILST, WHILST IN VERY RURAL AREAS ACCURACY MAY ONLY BE WITHIN 10 TO 15KM. If you require further explanation please contact us at Followus in accordance with the contact details provided in the current Followus website. CLEARLY, WHERE THERE IS NO MOBILE PHONE MAST COVERAGE, THEN LOCATION CANNOT BE DETERMINED BY THE FOLLOWUS SERVER."

Also much less precise in rural areas; you can only be located to within a few kilometers out in the countryside.

Nothing like that good unless your phone has GPS. Accuracy is a few kilometers at best in rural areas with current systems.

If there's only a couple of roads in that few kilometres, then surely that's helpful for finding someone who is lost...

Certainly better than any other way of guessing, unless of course it's a walking route etc.

In article , Jam R writes

It relies on receiving or communicating with three base stations. Course having a handset, and the limited capability of that, means that this is going to be very inaccurate at the best of times, and not too good in the open motorway. We tried

but these not anywhere near what I'd call accurate, with the best we had being around 1000 metres in urban areas!.

It appears that the politicians in the US decided to require that mobiles could be located accurately, but forgot to allow for the fact that it wasn't possible to reach that level of accuracy.

So instead of telling the politicians not to be so bloody stupid, the mobile companies started adding stuff like GPS to pinpoint positions. And for what?

I reckon that mobile phones should have a weather forecast on their displays, so you have at least 12 hours notice of a rain shower. Let's get that into the legislation.

And all mobiles should have built-in defibrillators. Just in case.

To make 911 calls easier.

In what way "easier"?

All it will do is to identify the location of the caller more accurately.

Chances are that to the nearest 200 metres would be easily good enough, and that would have been vastly easier to implement.

The message from snipped-for-privacy@despammed.com contains these words:

Perhaps it's so they can make sure their friendly fire is cost effective. Wouldn't go blasting away at empty desert - far better to hit at least /someone/.

Not in the USA, the GPS isn't that expensive anyway.

What "not in the USA"? 200 metres not good enough in such a low population country? Get real!

GPS not that expensive? It adds at least £10 (more like £30) to include a GPS chipset, never mind the processing need to make that into a location.

A complete nonsense.

You won't achieve 200m in a low population area though, unless you can logon to three base stations you can't triangulate.

Under a tenner & the processing isn't a challenge for anything that can cope with GSM.

Really? Show me a GPS unit available for sale at under £50, then.

The processing is an additional overhead on top of GSM, and has to be staggeringly low-noise because of the incredibly low field strength of GPS signal.

It would be a challenge for a mobile phone.

Face facts: a GPS in a mobile would be a good selling point if it only put the cost up by a tenner. I know I'd buy one, and I bet lots of other people would too. So why are there none on the market?

there are quite a few in the US. But from what I've read they use capabilities provided centrally to do navigation, via comms back to a central point, rather than being a self-contained GPS device that is also a phone.Its one thing to work out where you are, another to contain all the maps and intelligence to do routing.