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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."
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.
"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?
Actually, it does line up.
In greenwich they have museum about longitude measurment, and they have there a GPS device (turned on) and it shows almost 000 latitude (almost because it's a few meters away from the line itself).
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Yes, but now they are decreasing the accuracy just in the Afganistan area with what they call Selective Availability.
Clinton issued the order to discontinue this obfuscation of the signal because of the SA capability and because he realized the benefits to businesses and ordinary people of doing it.
As a side note, during Desert Storm the GPS system became more accurate because most of the troops had off the shelf GPS units, not the military grade units.
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.
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.
Because "non-military" sets are turning up as essential navigation equipment in places like ships and airplanes, where +/- 100 meter accuracy would be a disaster waiting to happen.
That plus they can now selectively degrade the accuracy in a small region, plus jam it in even smaller regions, means they don't need to worry so much about degrading non-military GPS.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
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
Tnx
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Oops, I meant longitude. Sorry...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
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)
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?
You will easily get 10meter horizontal accuracy from an off the shelf unit today. Vertical accuracy is another story. (Seems they try to accumulate the error ito the vertical component, makes sense if your on the ground, sucks if your in the air.)
It's all a matter of datum, I think. I've been down to Greenwich with a GPS-12 and stood on the line, and it was shown as being just slightly off. Maybe 13 seconds or something -- can't remember, as my GPS with the waypoints concerned is at home.
The GPS displayed zero about 30m west of the line. Of course, this might all just be a matter of measurement accuracy, and a matter of the datum in use. Not enough of a difference to worry about, anyway...