Hello,
Just got our LTE beacons and am having a bit of a play around and just wanted to check to see if the performance i was getting was out of the ordinary at all.
I made a basic micro-app program to provide the position, ideally, every minute (naturally wouldn’t use this sort of frequency in the real world with the rate this would chew up the battery).
location.startUpdates((position) => {
print(lattitude=${position.lat} longitude=${position.long});
cloud.enqueue(‘position’, position);
sync.now();
},{minInterval: 60 /* s /, minDistance: 0 / m /, timeout: 0 / s */});
After work i placed the beacon in my leather satchel and took it home with me on the train. I’ve highlighted the trip in green in the provided image.
It seems as if I didn’t get a single response for the entirety of the trip which lasted a bit over 40 mins. It was only while i was waiting at the station and had arrived home that it provided a location.
You can see the large gap in the data below
Does it struggle to find a satellite while in a vehicle or is there a problem with my program?
I just plotted the the results using different a different program i got much better resolution, now it shows me walking from the train station. The original program doesn’t seem to like lat and long values down to 12 decimal places 
So it seems to be able to get the position while it’s sitting in a satchel, but there’s still the issue of getting the position while in a train
Sounds like a problem with line-of-sight to satellites. On your next trip, you could try putting it near a window to confirm.
For what it’s worth, when I was still a student regularly taking a train to my hometown, my iPhone also struggled with GPS while riding, and usually reverted to cellular-tower-based location. A big box of metal isn’t too friendly for electromagnetic waves at these frequencies.
So you’re saying these advertisements are slightly misleading then?
?
I wouldn’t know about our marketing materials 
At the end of the day, it’s all very dependent on the environment. Bluetooth signal should be able to penetrate metal, albeit with a big hit to the signal strength (= the energy of the electromagnetic wave). Cellular too. But of course, you can always build a metal cage “strong” enough to isolate the outside electromagnetic radiation completely—we use such boxes for our shipping & QA procedures, and they’re definitely very effective.
GPS is what I’m the least familiar with, but generally speaking, we use more-or-less the same GPS/GNSS that’s in your smartphone (or car navigation, if that’s still a thing :P), maybe with a bit different antenna.
Worst comes to worst, we can always add fall-back to cellular-tower-level resolution for outdoor asset tracking, just like iPhones and Androids do.
(Re: this being environment-dependent: I remember one of our engineers testing one of the early LTE Beacon prototypes by putting it in a backpack and riding a streetcar home, and then showing it to us on a Google Map during our internal demo-day—and it did work in that environment.)
