Hi, everyone. I know nothing really current has been posted on this thread, but I just got some information last night I thought might be of interest, and this looked like the logical place to put it. I hope it's okay to post this ... if not, please correct me. I didn't see anything like this previously posted, sorry if I missed it.
My boyfriend works for a cell phone tower company, and I was asking him last night about how this all works. A phone will ping if it's just on, even if no call is made. He's fairly certain a phone will not ping if it's turned off (no power to send any signal). The pings are just the phone's way of checking for the nearest signal, signal strength, etc.
A tower has a working radius of about 3 miles - but that's 3 miles as the crow flies, and terrain, buildings, etc. can limit that radius. But in theory, with no obstructions, you can be up to about 3 miles in any direction from a tower and it can still register your phone signal.
Towers have capacity limits, so in densely populated areas you will have far more than one tower per 3 miles, simply for capacity purposes. If you had a cluster of towers in an area, that'd be 3 miles out from every tower on the outer perimeter that might have picked up your signal - a decently sized chunk of land a person could be on for one ping (or a series of pings in a general area).
Of course, I'm sure the cops know all this - but it goes back to something someone else said - it sounds like they'd have to have more evidence than "just" cell phone pings to warrant the intense search efforts in certain areas. JMO, of course.
My boyfriend also had an interesting thought - if you purposely wanted to mislead someone as to your location by using your cell phone, it would be far more effective to have that person actually make a call - maybe to an automated system like a bank, etc., where they didn't actually have to speak - as that would show up as a definite call made from that particular phone, rather than relying on pings. That makes sense if you assume the average person isn't all that knowledgeable about pings - I know I wasn't, until I started following this case. I would never have thought about my phone just going around randomly recording my location merely because it was on. (But then, I haven't been trying to mislead people as to my location either ... ).
But for what it's worth, assuming TH only had average knowledge about how cell phones work, that would lead me to believe that she didn't just hand her phone off to someone else to drive around with it for the purpose of misdirection - I think if that had been the plan, she'd have made sure of it by doing something like that (having a call made). JMO, I think it's more likely she actually was wherever these pings were coming from - in the general area, anyway.
Don't know is that's anything new or useful, but wanted to toss what I learned into the general knowledge pool.
