OpenCellId for Windows Mobile (.NET 2.0)

About This Page

This page is about a program OpenCellId able to collect cell site information and their positions
i.e. latitude and longitude.

The program is a OpenCellId client, The idea is to collected information should be feed into the OpenCellId database.

• Installation and Download
• Source Code

The Program

The program is a windows application. The application require .NET 2.0 to be installed. It has been developed and tested on Windows Mobile V6.1

The program require a an internal or external (bluetooth) GPS device. The program will access the GPS information through the windows intermidate GPS driver.

If you think the style and coloring is not state of the art, you are absolutely right! I'm “plumber” doing wiring and infrastructure, GUI is not really my cup of tea. When growing up I spent a considerable time in front of VT100 terminals and IBM PCs. I personally think the black and green coloring is retro and cool. Yes, my favorite operating system is (still) TOPS-20 (yes, I have worked for DEC and I have a TOPS-20 (Panda) running).

The best mentioning that there is three "external" modules:

• GPS routines, basically the GPS sample being part of the Windows Mobile 6 SDK kit.
• RTL wrapper, wrapping the windows Radio Interface Layer. The code is written and provided by Dale Lane, for more information vist the blog.
• KML creator code written by Ian John Grech for more information visit CodeProject.

The basic program functionality is

• Track cell sites and mark the sites with lat/long position information
• Show current GPS information (lat,long, altitude, heading,speed etc)
• Save tracked cell sites to file on the mobile device
• Map current position, current cellid or previously capture cellid siste to a map (i.e. Google Map)
• Enable tracking of your movement. The tracking information is saved to file. The program has an built in function for converting a tracker log to a Google kml file that could be projected in Google Earth.

CellId Information

The Cell Information window shows current cell site to which the phone is connected and the position information for the site.

• CellId, shows the cell id currently being used by the mobile
• Lac, displays the Location Area Code current being used.
• Mnc, displays the Mobile Network Code being used.
• Mcc, displays the Mobile Country Code beings used.
• Samples, displays the number of position samples collect for this partitular cell site. For a cell site there may be multiple position samples. In case the current position for a cell site is more than 50 m away from last captured position for the cell site an addition position sample is captured.
• Cell Sites, shows the total number of cell sites captured and initially loaded cells from file "(n)" i.e. cells saved from a previous program sessions.
• Total Positions, show total positions collected and initially loaded positions from file "(n)" i.e. positions captured in previous sessions.
• Lat, current latitude
• Long, current longitude
• Altitude, sea level altitude
• Speed, current speed in km/h.

GPS Information

The GPS Information displays current GPS data. In the windows it is also possible to enable / disable tracking of positions i.e. route.

• Latitude, current latitude
• Longitude, current longitude
• Altitude, sea level altitude and ellipsoid altitude.
• Speed, current speed in km/h.
• Heading, currend heading in degrees
• Saterlittes, number of saterlittes tracked and in view.

• Logfile, name of the file to which position entries tracked will be written. The program will only save NMEA GPGGA sentences. The file is normally written to the SDCard (if being present) in the directory <SDcard>/WygtyaData/
• Log Samples, number of samples written to the log file.
• Log Interval, how frequenty position entries will be captured and written to the logfile.
• Logging ON/OFF enabled disabled the logging. If the same file is given data is appended to an already existing file.

MAP

From the CellId List, GPS Information windows it is possible to map current position
or a previously captured CellId position to a map i.e. Google Map. In the Map window you can zoom in or out.

When being in the map window it's possible to save the map on to the device. The file is saved to the SD card (if being present) in the directory <SDcard>/WygtyaData/

When bein in the "map window" you can

• zoom in
• zoom out
• save map to file.

Uploading Information

The main objective with this program is to collect cell site information and upload it to the OpenCellId database. The way to upload information is to to save cells. When saving cells in the application file opencellid.cvs will be create primararly on the SD card if such exists otherwise on the phone memory. The file is created in a directory opencellid and is named opencellid.cvs.

The file should be copied to a PC where it can be uploaded to opencellid database from the WEB page http://www.opencellid.org/measure/upload

Note, in order to be able to upload cell information you would need a OpenCellId API key, such key can be obtained here

Installation and Download

An installation CAB file is available. You can download it from here.

Copy the CAB to your device, click on it and it will install itself.

Source

I have made the source code available for the Mobile Client.
The code for the client can be found here