A method and apparatus for locating a remote unit (or node) is provided herein. During operation, location-finding equipment (106) will determine a gross location of non-located nodes (104) by determining distances of the nodes (104) to reference nodes (105). Additionally an error estimate in the location for each node is determined. A first subset of nodes having relatively lower error estimates are "promoted" to reference nodes, and a second subset of nodes having higher error estimates are again located based on a distance to the newly-promoted reference nodes.