Distance to cell site from Thingy91?

[mikcatta]

I understand with LTE-M they are supposed to offer greater distances to the cell site, but how do we tell how far away we are from the cell? In the good ol' days, we could use the Timing Advance to estimate distance, but is there a modern equivalent?

[Martin Lesund]

Hi Mikcatta,
Great question.

Unfortunately, currently it does not seem like there is a good way to measure this.

As for now you could probably come up with a rough estimate based out of reading the RSRP values from the basestation.

---

Another suggestion is that you could do the processing on the cloud side.

Get the exact position of the nrf9160 via GPS, and send that information to your cloud solution.

Then also you could read out the Cell ID and send that information to your cloud.
From there you could check the position of that cell id with a third party service (maybe LocationAPI can help with this), then you can find out the exact distance between the two devices. (and e.g. send that information down to the nrf9160 again if that is needed for some computing).

However, the more processing you can do on the cloud side the better with regards to power consumption.

---

I would recommend you to reach out to your Regional Sales Manager, so you could either discuss if something like this is in the roadmap or make the point that this feature is needed.

(If you do not know the contact info for your RSM, please send me an direct message on Devzone)

Best regards,
Martin L.

[mikcatta]

Unfortunately LocationAPI doesn't provide anything remotely accurate. I've asked O2 if they can provide a rough estimate for the cell is question and if not, I might need to get in the car and drive around until I find it :)

Thank you for you excellent reply.