NCIS New Orleans
"If I had the sim card I could track the gps..." now... I'm fairly certain the phone gps is independent of the SIM card?

It's fairly trivial to be tracked based on how far away from different cell towers you are. Not only that, just put your phone into airplane mode, connect to a WiFi network and open Google Maps. Found you straight away, didn't it?

You can triangulate position based on signal strength to cell towers. This predates gps on phones. I think it has been around since forever

Yeah, I get the triangulation but they specifically said GPS if the sim was there 😂