CellTrack’ing Between Colchester And London

I’ve been looking at CellTrack program for series 60 phones recently.

This is a native series 60 Symbian application that can record details of the current mobile phone cell your phone is using. It also lets you annotate each cell if you want.

Celltrack is something I downloaded for my Nokia 7610 a while ago, and have just installed on the Nokia 6630.

Screenshot of CellTrack running on a Nokia 6630

On Monday, while the train was running slow, I had it running and started to annotate stations so I could tell where I was in the evening when it’s dark outside. CellTrack has a feature that allows you to log used cells to a flat tab seperated file. In my case, as I have the software installed on the 6630’s MMC card, the file can be found in the directory E:NokiaOthersCellTrack and copied off using the Nokia PC Suite.

Here’s the journey I took on Tuesday morning by train. I turned on CellTrack at Marks Tey station and had it running to just before the train pulled into Stratford station in East London.

Time Cell ID LAC Cell Name Description
07:26:08 12972 629 XXBC97 B Marks tey station
07:27:15 12973 629 XXBC97 C Approaching marks tey
07:27:35 8812 629 XXB881 B Approaching kelvedon
07:28:03 4340 629 XXB434 A no info
07:29:01 4339 629 XXB433 X Kelvedon station
07:29:25 4341 629 XXB434 A Approaching kelvedon
07:31:40 16772 629 XXBG77 B Between witham and kelvedon
07:32:10 16774 629 XXBG77 X Between kelvedon and witham
07:32:43 2084 629 XXB208 X Approaching witham
07:34:09 2086 629 XXB208 F Witham station
07:36:34 382 629 XXB038 B Approaching witham
07:37:15 2086 629 XXB208 F Witham station
07:37:55 7249 629 XXB724 X Hatfield Peveral station
07:38:33 7251 629 XXB725 A Approaching hatfield peveral
07:39:30 13877 629 XXBD87 G Approaching hatfield peveral
07:39:40 13878 629 XXBD87 X Between hatfield peveral and chelmsford
07:39:52 13879 629 XXBD87 X Between hatfield peveral and chelmsford
07:41:17 3910 629 XXB391 A Approaching chelmsford
07:41:37 3912 629 XXB391 B Approaching chelmsford
07:42:07 16055 629 XXBG05 E Chelmsford station
07:43:01 3877 629 XXB387 G Chelmsford station
07:43:52 16057 629 XXBG05 G Approaching chelmsford
07:44:10 3879 629 XXB387 X Approaching chelmsford
07:44:24 5282 629 XXB528 B Approaching chelmsford
07:44:46 16779 629 XXBG77 X Between chelmsford and ingatestone
07:44:58 16778 629 XXBG77 X Approaching chelmsford
07:45:08 16779 629 XXBG77 X Between chelmsford and ingatestone
07:45:31 16780 629 XXBG78 A no info
07:45:49 2073 629 XXB207 C Between chelmsford and ingatestone
07:46:01 367 629 XXB036 G Between chelmsford and ingatestone
07:46:11 12354 629 XXBC35 X Between ingatestone and chelmsford
07:46:25 12355 629 XXBC35 E Between ingatestone and chelmsford
07:47:03 2073 629 XXB207 C Between chelmsford and ingatestone
07:47:21 369 629 XXB036 X Approaching ingatestone
07:47:32 11240 105 XXBB24 A Approaching ingatestone
07:48:14 11242 105 XXBB24 B Ingatestone station
07:48:34 3755 105 XXB375 E Ingatestone station
07:49:14 3756 105 XXB375 F Between ingatestone and shenfield
07:49:30 11239 105 XXBB23 X Between shenfield and ingatestone
07:50:09 16872 105 XXBG87 B Approaching shenfield
07:50:35 16875 105 XXBG87 E Approaching shenfield
07:50:49 3661 105 XXB366 A Approaching shenfield
07:51:42 3662 105 XXB366 B Shenfield station
07:51:54 3663 105 XXB366 C Shenfield station
07:55:03 531957 0 XXB-76 X ?:no info
07:55:25 531957 65535 XXB-76 X ?:no info
07:55:59 0 0 XXB000 A ?:no info
07:56:50 7240 105 XXB724 A no info
07:57:26 3788 105 XXB378 X no info
07:57:52 3789 105 XXB378 X Approaching gidea park
07:58:09 2068 105 XXB206 X no info
07:58:19 16035 105 XXBG03 E Gidea park station
07:59:31 19568 105 XXBJ56 X no info
07:59:45 5057 105 XXB505 G no info
08:00:16 197140 3008 XXB-12 F *:Gidea park station
08:01:09 10925 105 XXBA92 E no info
08:01:26 5058 105 XXB505 X Approaching gidea park
08:01:59 6249 700 XXB624 X Approaching gidea park
08:02:18 1381 700 XXB138 A no info
08:02:30 197214 3009 XXB-69 A no info
08:03:19 4829 700 XXB482 X no info
08:03:23 8611 600 XXB861 A Seven kings station
08:03:49 7748 600 XXB774 X no info
08:04:49 11170 700 XXBB17 A Approaching ilford
08:05:17 9724 600 XXB972 X Manor park station
08:05:39 3325 600 XXB332 E Approaching manor park
08:06:02 9726 600 XXB972 F Manor park station
08:06:16 17536 600 XXBH53 F Approaching forest gate
08:06:44 17535 600 XXBH53 E Forest gate station
08:07:55 1335 600 XXB133 E no info
08:08:19 14197 600 XXBE19 G no info
08:08:38 10334 700 XXBA33 X Maryland station

So what do some of the columns mean? Well Cell ID is the ID taken from the actual cell. LAC means the location area code of the cell. I’m not sure what Cell Name actually is, the CellTrack site says it comes from the cell broadcast as I have a service number set. The description is the text I entered to give a rough location to the cell.

As I said before, the log file has the data in tab seperated format. The data is recorded in the following order…

  1. Date
  2. Time
  3. Cell ID
  4. LAC
  5. Country
  6. Net
  7. Signal
  8. Signal dBm
  9. Cell Name
  10. Description

This makes it very easy for us to write a data extractor using Perl. Here’s the code I used to generate the table above.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
## Perl script to parse the CellTrack trace.log file, and split selected
## contents into an HTML table.
## Robert Price - rob@robertprice.co.uk - March 2005
## start the table, and print out a table header.
print "<table>n";
print " <tr><th>Time</th><th>Cell ID</th><th>LAC</th><th>Cell Name</th><th>Description</th></tr>n";
## iterate over each line, placing the contents in $line.
while (my $line = <>) {
## clean up the data a bit.
chomp($line); # loose trailing linefeeds.
$line =~ s/r//g; # loose any rogue carriage returns.
$line =~ s/t */t/g; # remove preceeding spaces from data.
## split the data in $line into variables.
my ($date,$time,$cellid,$lac,$country,$net,$strength,$dBm,$cellname,$description) = split(/t/,$line);
## create a copy of $time, and format it so it has colons between hours and minutes.
my $nicetime = $time;
$nicetime =~ s/(d{2})(d{2})(d{2})/$1:$2:$3/g;
## print out the data we're interested in.
print " <tr><td><a link="$time" />$nicetime</td><td>$cellid</td><td>$lac</td><td>$cellname</td><td>$description</td></tr>n";
}
## close the table.
print "</table>n";

You may have noticed I didn’t bother to print the country or network used. Well that’s because it’s always the same for me. The country is 234 (UK) and the network is 33 (Orange). This may be more interesting when travelling abroad and using roaming.