Airport and GPS

Question

Level 1

9 points

Airport and GPS

If the iPhone tries to get your current location from whatever WiFi network it is connected to before turning on the GPS radio why is there no place to put in GPS coordinates to the Airport Extreme? Or am I missing something?

IMac & 3GiPhone, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on May 3, 2009 3:52 PM

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Answer 1

michaelswan Author

Level 1

9 points

May 6, 2009 11:13 PM in response to Tesserax

@Tesserax Exactly, that is why I want a way to manually input the GPS location. Then when I am home I can use location aware apps faster (I don't get great GPS in my house, not having a clear view of the sky and all).
@DaddyPaycheck Some Wifi routers must have a way of telling the phone it's location, seems silly to put a GPS receiver into something that will hardly if ever move, therefore some routers must have a manual input method, why not Apple routers?

Message was edited by: michaelswan

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Answer 2

Duane

Level 10

124,293 points

May 7, 2009 9:20 AM in response to michaelswan

Although I am sure that some routers have that ability, I have not seen any (Linksys, Belkin, Apple, etc.) that offer this ability.

I "believe" that the location when connected to a wireless network is based on one of two pieces of information:

(1) If the Wifi network is a known access point in a tracking service the location is known and reported.

(2) The public IP address is used to geographically locate the connection.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

158,280 points

May 3, 2009 4:00 PM in response to michaelswan

The AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBS) is a wireless router with a built-in Ethernet switch. It does NOT have a built-in GPS receiver, thus it has no way to communicate with GPS satellites.

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Answer 4

May 4, 2009 1:47 AM in response to michaelswan

That system works only if the WiFi network is in a known location. Otherwise, the GPS will use either satellite GPS or cell phone signals to triangulate your position.

Luck-

-DP

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