Feature request: Offline cell tower positioning

[markpayneatwork]

Hi,

I am a big fan of the cell tower location feature in GPSlogger. However, when I travel with my mobile in Europe, I generally turn the data feature off to avoid the horrendous roaming costs. This unfortunattely makes it impossible to use GPSlogger's cell location feature. I would therefore like to propose a feature that logs the cell-tower ID but doesn't convert it to a lat-long. The post-processing of the cell tower ids to gett long-lat coordinates could then be instigated at a later time by the user once they have an affordable data connection..

Cheers,

Mark

[E3V3A]

+1

In addition it would be a great feature to be able to add your own tags by dragging tag drop to any location of interest. It is not clear from the documentation if this is possible.

[runfalk]

I would really like this feature. My suggestion would be to optionally log both WiFi networks with signal strength and cell towers to a separate XML (or similar) file. That way one could use a service such as MLS to fill in gaps in the GPS retroactively, or contribute to the database.

[lenucksi]

Maybe the UnifiedNlp providers with the Mozilla backend could help you here, they would then not require any changes to GpsLogger. See here: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.google.android.gms

[runfalk]

Great suggestion! It would help for my use case, though I would prefer to have the data for later analysis and comparison between providers. It also seems to require me to run a custom ROM or root my phone, which I would rather not have to do.

[dragetd]

Yes, GPSLogger is using the positioning-API of Google. Scanning for Cell-Tower and keeping your own database requires some storage and significant more code to what GPSLogger is doing right now.

But as mentioned before, there is a solution! The @lenucksi linked the UnifiledNLP packages… these are an alternative backend to provide the location. Since this is a backend, any app can use it!

But you ROM must support UnifiedNLP. For example microG + Linage comes with it. Or there is also an XPosed module to add it to other ROMs.

There are module for location via wifi or cell tower, including offline-database support. But this is all out of scope of GPSLogger.

[alex9099]

Is this on the list of "things to be implemented"? would be nice to see this implemented

[runfalk]

I don't think there is such a list. As far as I understand the project is not in active development. From the README:

Note: Development has paused, and the app is not available from the Play Store, see this note. The app is now on F-Droid.

[mendhak]

Yes sorry about this - these days I'm just doing some minor housekeeping here and there on the app. I've updated F-Droid a few times and updated the SDK recently to accommodate for increasing location restrictions on newer Android versions.

I could have a read through some documentation anyway if someone could point me at what API calls can be used to get Cell Tower Info, I did a verrryyy brief search and there seem to be various deprecated APIs?

Also if there are any sample files, or examples of expected output, that I could look at, that would be useful in understanding this. And how do you process those files, to convert it to a set of locations? Custom scripts?

[khimaros]

does the FDroid release use location data from UnifiedNlp or is that disabled due to the Google Location Services bits being removed thus the request never reaches microG or its backends?

[khimaros]

filed a separate issue for UnifiedNlp support in the FDroid release here: https://github.com/mendhak/gpslogger/issues/1045