George wrote:
> On 4/23/2011 7:45 PM, Nancy Young wrote:
>> Dan Abel wrote:

>>> Plus, most people don't just want to make calls on their cell
>>> phones, they want to be able to receive calls. So, as soon as you
>>> turn on your cell phone, it does a scan for the most powerful
>>> (closest) signal. Once it finds it, it sends out your phone id to
>>> that tower, and it is entered into a database, so when somebody
>>> calls you, that call can be routed to the tower that your phone is
>>> now listening to.
>>
>> Of course, it makes perfect sense when you put it that way. What
>> I know I picked up from watch true crime stuff and got the idea you
>> just needed your phone turned on for them to find out whereabouts
>> you were.

> The actual mechanism is called "autonomous registration". As Dan
> described your phone registers itself when you first turn it on and
> then periodically "re-registers" itself whenever it is on so the
> system can pass a call to your handset or even know if you are
> roaming on another system so it knows who to hand off the call to.
> That location information is nowhere near like you see on the CSI
> shows where they declare "OK, pick him up, he is on 59th st halfway
> between 5th and 6th Avenue."

(laugh) Although with some of these smart phones/whatever, it
might not be that farfetched.

> Basically cellsites are sectorized into
> 3, 120 degree sectors so it knows roughly where you are in a sector.

I'm just happy when it proves some killer wasn't home with his phone
like he said he was.

On the other side of the coin, the cell phone company wouldn't
cooperate in a couple of cases in time for it to help, when they
could have done good. For instance that poor family that got
lost in Oregon could have been found in time if the police and
the phone companies had released the info.

nancy