by madrabbitt » Sun Sep 28, 2008 9:58 pm
And, this came up when discussing if an external antenna will help GPS location or not, so I figured it be a good addition here:
The external antenna port is strictly for reception on the radio (voice, walkie, data) and not for the gps at all.
However, you have to understand how the assisted GPS works.
When the radio communicates with a tower, it knows how strong or weak the signal from the primary tower is, as well as any other tower in range (Cell sites overlap, but your phone communicates only with the strongest one) Since the towers are in fixed locations, the radio basically knows where it is, generally. In turn, the gps system uses that to pinpoint where it generally is, before it calculates range from the sat's that it can see. This allows the GPS to calculate its location much faster, and with fewer signals from the sat's, which in turn gives you a faster location, a more accurate location, and better battery life since the gps doesnt have to be in active recieve as long.
So, adding an external antenna helps assisted GPS, because it not only allows the phone to communicate better with the primary tower, it also could potentially communicate faster with additional towers, letting it triangulate its general location more accurately before the GPS system even goes into active recieve.
And, this came up when discussing if an external antenna will help GPS location or not, so I figured it be a good addition here:
The external antenna port is strictly for reception on the radio (voice, walkie, data) and not for the gps at all.
However, you have to understand how the assisted GPS works.
When the radio communicates with a tower, it knows how strong or weak the signal from the primary tower is, as well as any other tower in range (Cell sites overlap, but your phone communicates only with the strongest one) Since the towers are in fixed locations, the radio basically knows where it is, generally. In turn, the gps system uses that to pinpoint where it generally is, before it calculates range from the sat's that it can see. This allows the GPS to calculate its location much faster, and with fewer signals from the sat's, which in turn gives you a faster location, a more accurate location, and better battery life since the gps doesnt have to be in active recieve as long.
So, adding an external antenna helps assisted GPS, because it not only allows the phone to communicate better with the primary tower, it also could potentially communicate faster with additional towers, letting it triangulate its general location more accurately before the GPS system even goes into active recieve.