Status of the Location Service (GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo) ?

adorsaz

Hello,

I used to use LineageOS on my Fairphone 4 without Google Play Services or the alternative MicroG.

I don't recall all the details, but the location service worked really well with the Fairphone 4 in this setup. If I remember correctly, the first location fix took some time, but after that it was very quick every time I opened the GPS application (first OrganicMap, then CoMap), and accurate enough to guide me while driving.

As I did not install Play Services, I think the Fairphone 4's hardware works well, and we should be able to leverage this to improve the location experience with Ubuntu Touch.

However, my experience with Ubuntu Touch today is that it's not reliable enough. I opened CoMap in Waydroid, stopping the Location Service in Ubuntu Touch to avoid conflicts. Then, after driving my car for about seven minutes and four kilometres, I finally got a location fix. Speed data became available much later, by which time I was already on the motorway. The location was not precise enough to guide me correctly at a crossroads.

I've checked the specifications of the location hardware again, and the Fairphone 4 seems to have all of these services available: GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo.

Does the Ubuntu Touch location service use all of these or only GPS? Do you think support for Galileo, for example, could improve the experience?

gpatel-fr

@adorsaz

I have tried it on a FP5 and got absolutely nowhere - nothing at all. Got sidetracked by other problems.

I have seen in one Gitlab issue that for some configuration (did not take any bookmark) someone got a resolution speed that could be compared to Android. So it seems that something good is possible when stars are aligned.
Also, from what I understand, A-GPS is something fundamentally different from other Gps services; these services rely on different satellite networks, while A-GPS is software Gps, using existing servers that have Gps coordinates to complete the localization, allowing it to get a result faster still.
I remember having seen on another Gitlab post that some work had started on A-GPS; as I have not seen any announce (that I could have missed of course), I tend to think it's not yet a thing.

Vlad Nirky

@gpatel-fr
If Waydroid is installed, you can use AGPS from the Android app (as Satstat) to get GPS fixed in less than 50 seconds. Then UT will be fixed too.

ikoz

@gpatel-fr Actually all that A-GPS does is significantly (normal GPS is 50b/s) speed up downloading the satellite orbital data (almanac and ephimeris) through cell towers. It can also help with the triangulation as the phone knows it's near to the cell tower.

gpatel-fr

@Vlad-Nirky

thanks for the tip, I have SatStat running since half an hour now on the phone, alas it don't find me any latitude nor longitude. Displays lots of small red bars and says Satellites 0/30, from the few I understand it's not very good :-). Either I missed something in the config options, or the problem with FP5 Gps is too basic for SatStat to solve.

Running Waydroid for the first time on the UT phone is a bit disturbing experience but diving into that would be off-topic here.

gpatel-fr

said in Status of the Location Service (GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo) ?:

Either I missed something in the config options

actually I missed something even more basic and it is that Gps signal is a lot weaker than phone, so I only tried in 2 parts of my home and I got nothing, but when I got out in the air, the phone eventually found a signal. Thanks to @Vlad-Nirky for helping to correct my foolishness. I have marked as solved the topic I created about that.

adorsaz

@Vlad-Nirky thanks for this hint, this is way better with such applications. I used GPSTest which shows a sky map with available satellites and their type.

It showed me lot of GPS and GLONASS sattelites in my area and only one Galileo (I'm located in Europe that surprised me).

When the location has been fixed, it used only GPS ones. I tested only 5 minutes that can be just a coincidence.

As these applocations can leverage the A-GPS system, could it be possible to do the same in Ubuntu Touch applications and/or system ?

Moem

@adorsaz said in Status of the Location Service (GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo) ?:

As these applocations can leverage the A-GPS system, could it be possible to do the same in Ubuntu Touch applications and/or system ?

Waydroid applications probably get their A-GPS from Google; if that's the case, that's a privacy issue which we want to avoid in UT. But I've heard that a Googlefree version of A-GPS is being worked on.