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New GPS Standard Published
jeffy124 writes: "The Dept of Defense has released a new standard for GPS. The new standard will go into become available for use starting in 2003 when the first satellites are launched. Full completion is estimated to 2014. The new standard allows for greater horizontal accuracy of 36 meters instead of 100 meters, and also sets a new baseline for transmission protocols that circumvent ionic interference."
the GPS does not line up with genwich so are all the maps wrong in the world (excempting US which contain the error)
or is GPS wrong
(-;
standards
regards
john jones
NOW, obviously for military usages. "The new standard allows for greater horizontal accuracy of 36 meters instead of 100 meters, and also sets a new baseline for transmission protocols that circumvent ionic interference" -- now this all wrong, SlashDot editors READ YOUR STORY, it clearly says - "DoD, as operator of the GPS, now provides civil users a horizontal positioning accuracy of 36 meters, compared to 100-meter accuracy in the previous edition of the standard, which was published in 1995. ". NOW, not in the NEW standard.
The new performance standard codifies a change announced last year to discontinue DoD's ability to decrease GPS accuracy. See http://www.ostp.gov/html/0053_2.html
This announcement just when the ground war in Afghanistan is starting. Didn't they originally decrease the accuracy specifically for military reasons?
"circumvent ionic interface"...
In other news, GPS have been announced as circumvention devices under the DMCA, due to the fact that some copyright protection method has been annouced to use ionic iterference...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Hey, but won't the ionosphere sue them for DMCA infringment?
I've never used a civilian set, and now I never want to. How the hell can anyone tolerate 100 meter accuracy? I can do better than that by looking at a map. Now it'll someday get down to 36 meters? Damn, I get pissed off when I can only get it down to 10 meters.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
It sounds like this was already done last year, they are just documenting it now. Although it was planned for 2006, the intentional degradation was turned off early. So there really isn't anything new here.
A civilian differential GPS reciever always was able to do better than what selective availabilty should have allowed. These units gave (and still give) accuracies within 15 meters or so. Given a Loran compensation reciever (used to pick up posititioning signals meant for boats), one can improve on this accuracy by using additional known transmitters located at ground-based reference points.
If you want "new" GPS units that were recently releaesd in the past year or so, look for units with the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). Implemented alongside with the FAA, these units rely on two additional satilite signals for an average accuracy of three meters.
Obligatory manufactuers links: Garmin's GPS description page and Magellan, another GPS supplier.
Does this standard include backdoors in it?
I read over a few of the links but not the full spec. Will this be backwards compatiable or will the current generation of GPS devices just use the old satellite constellation until it dies?
I can just see it now...All the new GPS applications being developed needing to be tossed.
Anyone have some details on this?
Also, as GPS becomes more and more important to the world in general, who is paying the bill? And what price do other countries "pay" if they rely heavily on GPS that is US controlled?
I don't mind the US being "humanitarian" but it's troubling to think that we will basically be custodians of what could eventually be the primary method of navigation for lots of things.
Suddenly sanctions against country X means that planes there can't fly, lost puppies can't be found, and GPS tied 911 type services fail.
A long term friend of mine makes his living as a solo gold miner. Despite these artificial limitation posed by the the US and Australian DoD, apparently everyone who's wanted to has been able to get accuracy to within fifteen meters for quite some time now.
Unfortunately, I'm not too sure on the specifics whic hallow this. Do the sattellites give bad readings which can be easily re-set to their true value, is some kind of interpretarion of multiple results possible (a kind of triangulation)? Either way, this has been the case for over five years.
In 2016, as part of the new anti-terror bills flying through congress, every American must have a gps tracking device implanted "for security purposes".
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
gps is cool. is my ip unbanned yet?
Get a Beowulf cluster made out of the freshest hot grits you can find. You should be able to feel the stirrings as you get hard. Then, take a turkey baster and gently brush over your groin. Soon, you shall be masturbating with ease.
Tnx
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But back to he point, those cranes are accurate to 5 metres/15 feet. See how GPS works more information. This page only leaves out on thing. They state you need 3 satelites to make out your position. They don't mention that it's posibble to make calculations with more than 3 satelites. In that case you end up with several position with which the actually position is interpollated. This works quite well because on most places on earth you receive signals from 4 or 5 satelites which means you don't get 1 position but 2 or even 3.
"Forty seconds to deep-fry a buffalo? But I want it NOW!"
-Homer Simpson
It works!!! It works!!! Thank you, AC!!!!
:o)
Yes, I do. I bet it looks really nice.
But I am not a homosexual. I just want a simple woody war with him.
This is what happens when you allow changes into production on a Friday. NEVER change systems on Fridays, except bug fixes. Sheesh, learn some Q/A
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
On this side of the ocean, we are working on our very own satellite positioning system, Galileo, which will be accurate down to 3 meters (last time I looked). It will be all civilian, with several QoS levels - so hikers can get one level of reliability and airplanes another. Unlike GPS, the Galileo consortium will guarantee a certain level of accuracy, which should help in critical areas of operation such as airplane navigation. If there is an accident due to Galileo malfunction, the consortium will accept liability.
Also, since it's civilian, the military will not have a "Selective Availability" feature.
Score:-1, Wrong
Anybody else use their GPS units for Geocaching? (Sort of a treasure hunt using GPS). In practice, the 100 metre figure is a 'guaranteed' level of accuracy, as i have never been anything like that far off. As it is a long weekend here, some friends and I have been using an old Garmin 45 to find all the geocaches within an hours drive of where we live. All caches so far have been within 10 metres of the waypoint, and the three we found today (one in the dark!) were within 3 metres of where the unit said the waypoint was. It is also quite common for match racing yachts to have centimetre accuracy units (often one in the bow _and_ stern), although the expense of these units (~$25000) makes for a very steep price/performance curve.
Oh, good, so now it's easier to use GPS on devices with ion engines?
Were going to spend billions putting new satalites in orbit, and no one bothered to let the DOD know what the comercial market really needed out of GPS.
I've done allot of tracking software, for sporting events etc. We've always wanted a GPS system taht would let us put a simple unit on the back of an athlete and just report back his GPS position. Unfortunatly GPS has never been acturate enough to actually use for that.
But 36 meter's still doesn't solve bigger issues. Like useing it for car navigation systems, or tracking city bound objects (like children, convicts, laptops, cellphones, weapons etc). Im not proposing some orwelian oversight system, but something that would allow us to take GPS and use it as a system for tracking day to day issues. Not quite "Where did I loose my keys?" but "Where did I lose my laptop?" High res systems could also be used for created EXTREAMLY quick and acturate maps, and even building up 3D models of real world enviroments.
I know high resolution (down to 1 meter or less) is VERRY difficult, but with the kind of money that goes into satalites is it really imposible??
I would rather be ashes than dust!
model no. PAT2GP1V's manual states that along horizontal plane the accuracy is 3.1m average, 10m maximum, and NO ACCURACY DEGRATION under U.S. DOD-imposed Selective Avaliability Program.
Geez, and they think such an 'upgrade' for GPS is NEWS.
This is the funniest signature I could ever think of.
All I can say for the military GPS signal is that it's already pretty damn accurate, and I think the civilian signal is fairly accurate as well.
When I was in the Army, we had a Magellan GPS receiver, a PLGR (military GPS), and the system our surveyors use for position and azimuth, (not sure if it's classified, so won't say much about it,) and all three of them were giving the same grid location. Of course, the Magellan GPS had to be put in Average mode with a couple minutes of sampling, but it got the same grid location.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
One of the facts being overlooked is that any thing designed for "military" application is usually done by the lowest bidder.
As a former military person (USN, if ya'll care) this was evident in many pieces of equipment I had to deal with in the service.
Don't get me wrong, the equipment was functional, as it should be, but sometimes a lot of stuff was meant to be "sailor proof"...one step beyond "idiot proof", because any devices 'intended' use will invariably be expanded unintended uses.
So if you take into account the specs of any equipment, there is always a tolerance for these devices...not only the physical abuse of changing hands many times, transporting, shipping, and varied levels of (in)competancy.
You have to realize that for better or worse, that the armed forces (I have to laugh, this is me to a 'T') personel are both the best and worst case scenarios.
Now that I am on the periphery of GIS (admin for a GIS training lab...man what a lot of data just for one state) I've gotten to play with the "toys" and for those out in the field, 30 to 100 meters ain't that big a deal, it is acceptable.
You would think it would not be, but consider:
A satellite has already imaged the area, and sometimes it has been surveyed from the ground and always surveyed from a aircraft plus the final check is to drive/walk the surveyed area with a GPS unit to do a final "triple check".
It seems more or less an integrity check.
Even the GPS is subjected to a test or two, where a building, area, large parking lot is measured with GPS points assigned and then checked against previous data.
It must be within an acceptable range (in civilian use, mind you) because I have not heard any complaints. The device was actually kind of neat (was the usual "military yellow" gear color) and had a palm pilot like interface, 6 tabs on the display, about 8 buttons to navigate and mark and save/recall points.
In the end, if it is 3meters, 30'ish meters or 100, I hate to sound cliche, but close enough for government work, perchance?
I don't know, but as long as the device does not say I'm in the artic circle when standing in the AZ desert, its gotta be doing something right.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
this is nothing new at all. You're being a bit vague when you say it's a "new standard." Think of it more like a report on the current state of GPS for civil users; the DoD is simply saying that their old estimates of average performance were off and they're correcting themselves. The numbers in that report only reflect what can be done right now with GPS (in terms of a stand-alone receiver, no differential GPS).
The next real improvement in GPS accuracy will come with the launching of the next few blocks of satellites (IIR, IIF, III). The Block III satellites aren't slated to be deployed until at least 2010 and will include the new M code for more accuracy. Even sooner, the Block IIF satellites will support the new L5 channel for civil users which will give the public sector a big improvement in their accuracy. The C/A code (for public users) will be turned on L2 in the release of the IIR satellites starting in a couple of years. Up to now, the L2 channel was only for P(Y) code which public GPS users didn't have access to (P(Y) is the military PPS code (precise positioning service) and is heavily encrypted). And more improvements will be made as the OCS (operational control segment - the Air Force group that monitors and controls the GPS constellation) that will make GPS even more accurate and reliable.
But don't expect any more significant improvements in GPS accuracy until these new blocks of satellites are launched. Of course, these improvements exclude things like WAAS and other differential GPS solutions which will give a much more precise position solution than any single receiver can accomplish.
Here's a good page describing some basic GPS terms I used. Also, for a good summary of the lastest GPS modernization efforts, read this article.
t.
The clock signal for civilian use is less precise than the military one and 'selective availability' degraded it in a kind of random but non-gaussian manner. Early on clever folks found that they could increase the accuracy in spite of that by placing a second receiver in a known location and either post processing the data or broadcasting the signal from the fixed location. This Differential GPS could have sub-cm accuracy. Other clever folks used other aspects of the signal such as phase difference to boost the accuracy. Others made receivers that could use the Russian and US GPS at the same time. In other words Selective Availability was cracked about 10 years ago but the Military refused to kill it. I think that it was for political reasons - not wanting to hear that a rogue missile directed against us used our own GPS for navigation , for instance. It is possible to mount antennae on the wingtips, nose, and tail of an aircraft and use differential GPS to determine the attitude to a 1/100th of a degree or less. This can be combined with new, cheap, Inertial Navigation systems that allow you to point an IR camera from an aircraft and drape the image over a digital terrain model or map in real time. I think that the Garmin site, http://www.garmin.com, claims less than a meter horizontal accuracy with WAAS for the Garmin V. Nate
Nate
I heard something in the last year that talked of a planned European GPS. Does anybody know anything about it? I think it was supposed to be deployed before the new US one, and offer more features then the current US one. I wonder if it renders the built-in inaccuracy of the US one a moot point?
The new GPS network will also incorporate Digital Rights Management Technology by Microsoft(tm) to insure people don't get too used to free positioning. So, remember folks: when you go down to the woods today, be sure to bring your credit card, else your be lost forever...
Now availible!!! the new MS GPS-MP3 player!! yes, now you can listen to your favourite tracks _and_ know your position to within 1m (20000m for un-registered users). But remember, don't try to break our DRM system, or go faster than 80mph: 'cause now we really do know where you live.
(Microsoft(tm) GPS network(r) may not be accurate and should not be used for mission critical applications, in the event of network outage, Microsoft is not responsible for loss off life or ruined terrorist plans, See Mictosoft GPS-NT)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
A great site for information about GPS is Here
I'm kinda surprised that the DoD would go on with their decision to make civilian GPS as accurate as it is technologically possible, even after we know that the hijackers located and flew into their targets on September 11th using civilian GPS. I'm not saying that the hijackers should spoil the treat for the rest of us. I just find it paradoxical.
And what if other countries design their offensive weapons to aim with our system? (Temporarily shutting civilian GPS down might work.. then again, we can tweak the numbers that are transmitted to any civilian client during this event so that we are able to redirect those weapons to our targets)
Of course, NASA released Blackjack a while ago.
And they wouldn't post my story about rotten.com being banned in Germany.
The noise you refer to is known as Selective Availability (SA). It's an error that drifts over time. I believe it takes about a day to average it out exactly. Also, the DOD turned off SA a few years ago. Although with recent events it may be turned back on again if it hasn't already.
Now the error is the same for the same general area. So you can leave one gps at a known location and carry a second gps around with you. From the first GPS you transmit the error (you know where you are and you know where it says you are, you transmit the difference). And then subtract that error from the second gps to get extremely good accuracy. This is known as Differential GPS and I think it can achieve accuracy to about a meter.
For those who work in the GPS community the DoD statement has a faulty reference. It links to ICD-GPS-200 revision B when in fact the last release of the ICD was revision C. Hopefully this will be corrected shortly.
For those who are wondering why the DoD removed the "degredation" from the civilian GPS signal it is because they now have a more effective means of preventing enemies of the US from using GPS - selective deniability. This link talks of its use in Afghanistan. By improving the signal to friendly nations it improves GPS as a product which means that US companies who make GPS equipment (and dominate the market) can improve their sales figures.
scott.
GPS has not only an accuracy of 1m of military uses but a resolution of a few inches. this is accomplished by feeding the satellite input into a special device that is used for missiles to strike accurately hardened targets
".Sig Stealer" was here
and they can still piss off the Chinese royally by flying their cruise missiles into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrad. Maybe they should've been using the civilian GPS?
Anyway, Diff. GPS has been around for ages. It's what I would use if I ever got myself back on track with designing and writing a Traffic/Collision Avoidance System out of the mishmash of BSD's ISO/OSI, fsp, gnats, and whathaveyou...
Have compiler, will @#$%$^%$&& General Protection Error
Did anyone check this out? They deliver GPS data for a fixed point in the Bay Area to do DGPS. Wouldn't it be cool to setup a network of these stations/sites all over the world so you could select the one closest to your current location?
Geek by Nature - Linux by Choice.
They must be using an etrex ... ;)
I am surprised noone yet has noticed in the quality-document exactly where you have the largest errors. Perhaps the average readers don't have patience for a 100 page document?
To save you the trouble, the Middle East, east towards Indonesia and over much of China the DOPs were rather large. Funnily this was not comented in the document. Not that I expected it though.
They are both right in a way. Any global map coordinate system depends on a reference elipsoid (aka squashed sphere) that approximates the Earth's surface and a reference meridian which determines where zero longitude is on the elipsoid. This is known as a "datum". The one used by GPS is known as WGS84. The WGS84 elipsoid is defined in such a way that the average movement of the Earth's surface due to plate tectonics is zero wrt the coordinate system.
Maps in the UK traditionally use a datum set up by the Ordnance Survey (known as OSGB36) which uses a different elipsoid and results in a disagreement between a GPS receiver and an OS map of about 100 metres unless you change the datum used by the GPS receiver to agree with the map.
In fact due to the movement of the Earth's crust, the whole of Great Britain is moving North East wrt WGS84 and so the Greenwich meridian is actually getting further away from the meridian as shown on a GPS receiver.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
It sounds odd that boaties get better vertical positioning that land-based people.
I 'spose they need to know that their boat is currently at 0 meters above sea level - otherwise the boaties might get a bit concerned.
(True story: Standing on seashore looking at handheld GPS receiver - it said I was way up in the air.)