Do you know how to ping a cell phone? Your guess is as good as mine, if you knew you won’t be scrolling through this page right?. OK let’s break it down. When we talk about pinging a cell phone, we simply mean tracking the location of a phone by identifying the cell tower of the last signal the phone received.
Pinging is a technique used by people to track their phone in the event of theft or loss. This will help you easily locate and know where your phone is if you lost it or it was stolen from you.
Currently, there are more than one medium of Pinging a phone and we will listing some of those processes here for you to note if you have any need for it.
However, you have to understand that you can’t directly ping a cellphone number unless you have access to the carrier’s system. This means that it is limited to the carrier and within the limits of the law enforcement. On the other hand, the civilian equivalent is installing a phone-tracker app that reports the phone’s location to whoever installs and administers the app.
How Pinging a Phone Works
We will be explaining how the pinging technology works. Here is what happens when you ping a phone. The pinging technology works with your device’s GPS location system which is installed and activated in it. The GPS location system work in collaboration with tracking software as well as other tools to help in locating the device’s position with precision.
Why Ping A Phone
Pinging a phone will help you locate it if it gets lost. This technique also comes in handy in tracking live locations of people with criminal records.
On the other hand, parents also use phone pinging in keeping tabs on their kids’ last location for safety purposes.
Pinging a device also helps you find the location out of unknown callers or harassers who make prank calls.
Understand that tracking someone else phone is illegal. But if you have been given the full rights by the person to do so, you can proceed with pinging his/her phone.
How to Ping a Cell Phone
Via Software
Most people now easily use the modern way of locating a lost phone via the software that comes with most smartphones. You can decide to use either Find My Phone on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Location History.
Via App
Most apps have been designed to track the location of smartphones. Some examples of these apps includes – My Friends for iOS or WhereAreYou on any smartphone.
Ping to Cell Tower
A cell phone can also be pinged with the use of the traditional method of requesting your cell phone provider to ping to cell tower and triangulate the phone’s location. However, this is available to government and law enforcement, but generally not something ordinary citizens can do.
Pinging Your Cell Phone Which Has Been Powered Off
The clear-cut answer here is that you cannot ping a device which has been switched off. It would be technically impossible to track it down since it’s signals has stopped interacting with the nearby GPS towers. Once the device has been switched off, it stops giving out its location. When this happens, the only location that can be traced is the one where they were last active.
However, there are some exceptions. In war zones, the signals of phones that have been powered off can also be traced with the aid of NASA’s technologies. Even though the details of such operations are not known, according to a report, NASA helped trace the locations of people in the past. Apart from that, there are no known methods of pinging a powered-off mobile device.