[time-nuts] Cell timing error

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Sun Dec 16 18:20:17 UTC 2012


On 12/16/2012 05:40 PM, Graham / KE9H wrote:
> In addition to knowing where the GSM cell site is, you time stamp the
> time of arrival of a
> specific feature in the cellphone signalling system. If the cellphone is
> heard by three
> (or more) cell sites, then you can calculate the location of the
> cellphone within the
> cell site using the time-of-arrival and speed-of-light calculations.

Since GSM is a TDM system, the arrival time of the TDM slot is the 
typical feature to measure. The active base station already does this, 
and send trimming values to steer the hand-set to stay within it's 
time-slot. This way you have a range measure, but it isn't enough for 
triangulation, so you would need to have another station measuring it 
too, but GSM will not usually do that, so you need to have a secondary 
receiver, tuned to the neighbour frequency in that direction.

> The CDMA systems inherently depend on knowing time to sub microseconds
> in order
> to function. You can extract similar information from the signalling
> systems in CDMA.

You inherently have the same knowledge in GSM, it's just that you don't 
care about absolute time, but relative timing between the hand-set and 
the base station is being measured and steered.

GSM stations being phase-aligned have better hand-over properties, and 
thus releases the channel in the cell the phone is leaving quicker, and 
thus increases the capacity... and allows new customers in and thus more 
money. So, well-timed base-stations is good for GSM too.

Cheers,
Magnus



More information about the time-nuts mailing list