He had GPS coords in photos turned off. He sent the photo before he got lost, then his phone died, then he realized his predicament. Yeah, hikers who know WTF they are doing generally don't end up in the news like this. This is distressingly common on the 10,000+ ft peaks near Los Angeles, like these folks: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/hikers-survival-san....
All to plant an American flag on the top of a mountain. I truly hope the hiker didn’t actually lose any fingers or toes but I do hope they were made to reimburse SAR cost and fined for littering.
A non-expert climber figures a tough hike is basically like any other hike they've been on, only a little harder. They don't recognize how large the gulf is between a tough hike up a mountain and a treacherous life-or-death situation.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/highlands/2014978/...
Edit: There are ~20 deaths per year on Scottish mountains
First, there are still many many areas in the US where your phone will only be able to get a reliable signal to one tower, and those areas also happen to correlate well with areas that people like to go for outdoor recreation.
Second, you have to have somebody involved that knows the right specific questions to ask, and you have to have a representative at the phone company that's not a fleshy automaton. Search and rescue efforts tend to be coordinated by local law enforcement (usually sheriffs or park services), and training varies a lot. So, for practical purposes, this information is often not available.
Third, the information you get back requires some interpretation. It's not like the phone company sends back a map with a nice circle on it; you get some values back from one or more radios at one or more locations (possibly with or without orientations for the radios, and possibly that information is current and reliable or not). Then you have to plot those values, and then you have to take into account fun little quirks of physics, like the part where canyons of some kinds of rock can bounce a signal really well and cause somebody to be closer to the tower than the data would suggest. Other formations act like big reflectors.
Zero of the searches that I have been on have included helpful information from cell towers.
The iPhone 12 utilizes the GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, and BeiDou constellations. Utilizing more satellites means determining location more quickly and returns better accuracy especially in marginal environments.
Not to be confused with other technologies such as skyhook [2], which was used in iPhone 1 and other older devices to fuse radio signal strength, known wifi hotspot locations, etc as a kind of pseudo-GPS. It was only relevant for a few years.
Wikipedia [1] has a nice short explanation.
The downside is that it can take much longer to acquire a fix.
From the TFA: "The hiker, 46-year-old Rene Compean, sent a photo to a friend before becoming lost"
iPhone GPS Location (4s and recent)
This document will give you a step by step procedure to retrieve the GPS location of a lost person using the “Compass” tool. In order to use this tool, the iPhone owner must enable some privacy settings which may be “on” by default. If you cannot get the GPS coordinates from Compass, go to the “Troubleshooting” section.
Asking for GPS Coordinates First ask the lost person to launch the compass application on their iPhone.
If the person does not know what it is, provide them the following instruction: Put a single finger in the middle of the phone’s screen and swipe down all in one move. This will bring out the “Spotlight Search” tool.
Ask them to type “Compass”. This will bring up the “Compass” tool into view as seen below: Ask them to select the “Compass” application in order to launch it
Once launched, if the word “Calibrate” appears on the screen (as seen below), the user has to initialize the application. Let him know he needs to move and rotate the phone until calibration is done.
Once calibrated, the user should see the coordinates at the bottom of the screen. If the coordinates are not there, go to the troubleshooting section and restart this process from step 1.
Troubleshooting Be aware that only iPhone 4s and more recent are equipped with a GPS chipset. All older iPhone will not be able to provide you with GPS coordinates.
In order for the “Compass” application to provide the GPS coordinate, it needs to be authorized to communicate with the GPS component of the phone. To ensure this authorization is set, follow these steps:
Ask the person to launch their iPhone settings
From the main “Setting” page, have them select “Privacy”
From the “Privacy” section select “Location Services”.
Under the “Location Services” section, the “Location Services” setting should be “on” (or green) and the “Compass” entry should report “While Using”.
Personally I would do it with Termux and Python, but non-coders would have trouble using that.
Hell on the latest version of Android I can't even read my battery percentage without typing in some code (the latest update removed the battery % from the status bar). Everything has gone downhill.
import termux
termux.API.location()(I've always thought the terminology was a little confusing/imprecise, since I wouldn't consider these apps to be "tests", but rather simply the UI of a GPS receiver. Then again, when I hear "GPS" I think of a receiver-only, i.e. a device that just tells you your current lat/lon/etc. position, whereas I guess what most people consider a "GPS app" would more precisely be termed a "GPS navigation/map".)
I really started noticing this since starting to use F-Droid, for a lot of simple apps in the Google Play Store, you can get the same functionality, with zero ads and a much smaller bundle size in F-Droid.
For example this app from F-Droid, which shows your GPS location & coordinates, weighs in at _48KiB_! https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.borneq.heregpslocation/ (disclaimer: I have not tried the app, it was just the first result that came up from a search).
It's pretty cool to see that yes, it's perfectly possible to build lightweight Android apps; and it's really a question of what you put in the bundle.
It wouldn’t work in the case when you have cell service but no data.
Better to have an app to do it locally, I think the odds are high that when you would need something like this you probably won't have an internet connection.
If you are a bit skeptical that a web page can work offline, just go ahead and try it.
There is an icon you can save on your screen and a 'Tips' button with more information.
Finally, it turns out that if you ever need to call for help with your cell phone there are some things you should know in order to have the best chance of reaching 911 or anyone else. After reading through a whole pile of documents on the FCC website I put my findings into 4 PDF reports. The end of each report has links to the other reports.
Open PDF: https://findmesar.com/p/pdf/smart_way_call_911_with_cell_pho...
As others have said, it's proprietary, and I don't want to see a private company becoming a gatekeeper to such an important function. Open standards are available. Google Maps provides Plus Codes, for example, and pretty much all Android users have that without having to install an additional app.
Now, this is only one anecdote, and maybe I just happened to get the one operator who had swallowed the what3words PR line- but at least some British emergency services are telling callers to use it.
(Not urgent enough to tie up a 999 operator, and it's faster to pull in somewhere and message, than ring and report via 101.)
They've been happy with location given by w3w.
I'm sure they would be. I'm not doubting that they'll be able to figure it out. Rather, I'm interested to know what they prefer.
If someone's coordinates don't come through automatically with the 911 call, the dispatcher or person running the search can walk them through finding their location if the person doesn't know how to do it.
It would actually be really interesting to see a list of which apps strip metadata early on the client side vs. which retain it on their server and merely strip data from what is shared to other users...
Of course I'm totally ready to accept that most of those companies just lie and hide some of the data they gather on their users.