Author Topic: Rrescue for missing persons  (Read 4401 times)

cusna

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Rrescue for missing persons
« on: February 24, 2018, 05:10:29 AM »
Hello everyone, I'm in the first tests with bladerf and yate, or rather I have not yet understood well the whole system sorry if I write things not right :)
Very often, during rescue operations, we are looking for missing people, in many different scenarios, many of these missing have their cell phone with them, but maybe they can not use it because they fainted or due to other problems due perhaps to an accident in the mountains.
I would like to understand from you if it is possible, with the bladerf and yate system, to be able to identify the telephone of the person to be rescued, possibly with directional antennas and therefore triangulations.
Thanks in advance

psilvao

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Re: Rrescue for missing persons
« Reply #1 on: May 31, 2018, 07:53:31 AM »
Hello everyone, I'm in the first tests with bladerf and yate, or rather I have not yet understood well the whole system sorry if I write things not right :)
Very often, during rescue operations, we are looking for missing people, in many different scenarios, many of these missing have their cell phone with them, but maybe they can not use it because they fainted or due to other problems due perhaps to an accident in the mountains.
I would like to understand from you if it is possible, with the bladerf and yate system, to be able to identify the telephone of the person to be rescued, possibly with directional antennas and therefore triangulations.
Thanks in advance

I understand your query, a company called movistar has that service at the level of sim M2M, where you can see the latitude and longitude of the last coupling of the cell to a tower.

If you need to locate a cell phone, you must triangulate its position, there is an article that mentions it:

The police rely on triangulation services to track the phone (and, presumably, its owner). Because the nature of the network allows the telephone to communicate with a number of nearby cell towers, and for each cell to evaluate the strength of the telephone signal, the network analysis software can estimate the distance of the telephone from each tower. If the telephone communicates with three or more towers, the triangulation software can use the signal strength of each to estimate the geographical position of the telephone in a three-dimensional plane. Triangulation is not an exact science, however, and software programs can only estimate the position of the phone, not pinpoint its exact location. Even so, triangulation allows the police to position cell phones (and, presumably, the user) in nearby neighborhoods, in real time or in recent history.

If we consider that yatesbts is a "tower" and bladerf is an "antenna", we would have two elements to play.

The source code of yatesbts would allow you to know who is connecting, but you should investigate if there is information about the strength of the cell signal. On the other hand if bladerf does the work of "antenna" and has the possibility of informing who is emitting and receiving it could help him to deduce his location, but if or if, by geometry he needs three points to evaluate the power of the signal, unless that you program an app and use your GPS, which would not be very good since generally users to save battery turn off the GPS.

Regards,
Pablo