....and the client does not want to buy a blue tooth gps device :(
Then you are definately in a fix; as my final yr project (when GPS
enabled phones were rare) I had to build an electronic circuit board connecting a GPS serial device and a nokia phone also on serial connecting to same circuit board. To fetch coordinate data ; I had to flash the phone then this would trigger the circuit board to 'listen' to the GPS device; trigger an SMS on the phone and send it back to my computer from which I would decode and put the 'dot' on an offline map. <this in essence was a cheap way where you could do tracking quite independently> I had also done a bit of research with safcom (and a few car tracking companies) to see if there was an easier way to do this (to prove the validity of my project [?]) And i found that - the option to track your phone (without GPS) - the operator will have to allow you; and you may have to get info from the core-network from which you will use to calculate the phone's position using triangulation of about 3 BTS - which is also mighty inaccurate. Eg some BTS have very strong signals and will encroach on your 3 chosen low signal BTS where your phone is supposed to be attached - but the strong signal BTS pirates your signal and attaches your phone to itself - which will introduce errors to your triangulation computations such that they would put you in a radius of upto 1500m around your actual location (and errors of 1/2 a kilometer are just ridiculous) So - even if you get to access your phones position from the BTS information - they would never allow you to access such info. Try tracing your lost phone and see - first they will send you to Police Station and if you make your case, they forward you to CID HQ - The police will ask you how important or expensive your phone was (and this is a one time only trace application [?][?] )
