Slashdot Mirror
GPS Slowly Changing How Things Are Done
Hemos forwarded me a link to a story at Fast Company about how GPS is changing the way people do business. Several good examples are used, from farmers in Alabama to anti-theft devices. Some notes on GPS' military origins as well. Also worth noting is how GPS, like computers, wasn't adopted overnight, but rather over time as applications were found.
"I'm working late tonight, don't wait up..."
..err, I meant to say, cool!
"Oh really? Then how come your cell phone is in Joe's Tavern with your secretary's pager bobbing over your coordinates?"
"...*dialtone*..."
.unsigged
I have a Garmin GPS V and LOVE it. The turn-by-turn routing has been a huge help. We started looking to buy a house and would print out a ton of MLS listings. Without the GPS we'd have to spend a lot of time planning our route. With the GPS we just punch in the address of the next house and off we go. Very accurate.
Maybe SCO can use GPS to locate *nix code in Linux. So far they sure don't seem to have found much of it otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
search ebay for the visor prism, - color palm handspring unit - $150 with shipping - used - 65000 colors
nice organizer with handspring expansion slot
--------------------
staples, etc. - handspring unit GPS magellan - 12 channel - $49 - new on clearance - software for moving map, location, speed, etc.
-------
this unit with good mapping software for $29 rivals dedicated color moving map GPS units costing thousands.
----
get the spint phone module from ebay for $20 for the visor handspring and now it is a phone too.
Comparable to DirectTV (see slashdot article about them). The signals would be scrambled unless you paid $9.99 per month for a "license fee". They could use the stupidest encryption around, and anybody who broke it would be put in jail and fined. Scramblin it for a military purpose makes sense, but scrambling it to protect "intellectual property" is just stupid. Unit cost for one more person to use it is zero. Like America's Army game, an example of good use of government to keep things sane. A libertarian might argue for donation-based entities, but either way it gets done.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
We worked on a turn-key project over a year ago (before matters got screwed by an acquisition), and one aspect of the product was to track GPS position and record it every so often with a few other real-time parameters, such as speed, direction, and average MPH. The project completed the first product phase of deployment, but actually using the GPS data (while recording WAS working) was slated for phase 2. Unfortunately, I think the whole thing got mothballed because the company receiving the product was not technically inclined one bit. Such a waste of effort. It would have helped cut their yearly expenses down a lot.
As a long-time sailor, I have heard more stories than I can count about vessels lost or damaged because skippers entered bad coordinates for a buoy or harbor entrance. Are rogue tractors next?
"For the moment, they've managed to resist the hottest new GPS tool: tractors that steer themselves. The price is still too high, but the idea is appealing, because with an auto-steer tractor, they would be able to work at night."
without paying an outrageous monthly fee akin to protection money, or calling a company to do it for me for a fee, then gps will have arrived for me.
One stolen car, recovered by my family, not police.
One van, stolen twice, recovered by my family twice, not police.
One 4x4, stolen, never recovered, $10,000 loss, insurance settlement was a joke after months of haggling and threatening to sue.
My father and I use GPS receivers as often as possible. We are both Geocachers.
For those of you that don't know what Geocaching is, here is a quote from the geocaching.com FAQ:
"What is Geocaching?
Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache. "
Wardriving is a perfect example of how GPS has changed the way we look at computer security, especially where wireless LANs are concerned.
Check out wifimaps.com to see if your wlan has been scanned.
I saw a headline about a GPS service for cell-phones; a cool toy! I read more, and was disillusioned by "for emergency purposes only." Turns out, the GPS information is only seen by emergency persons if you call 911. Sucks, eh?
Can someone enlighten me as to why a farmer driving a tractor would need to know their location to a 1' accuracy?
It wouldn't help because there are still Bathe party loyalists using GPS jammers they bought from, uuh, Trinidad and Tobago. Yeah, that's the ticket. I knew you smart guys would understand.
-Rummy
They were too busy getting ready to spit on our troops after we liberated them (again)
The mind boggles. How many people are going to accept a system that lets their insurance company track everywhere they drive? Yes, I'm surely more obsessive about this kind of thing than Joe Average, but surely you don't have to be a privacy nut to have some issues with this.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
haha so i lied , fooled you all !
now if you will excuse me i must get back to making sure my family for generations to come never has to work again...ever
oh wait you already did that for me
regards
G.W Bush
I just lived in one of the highest car theft regions of the nation, in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood. I believe for a few or more years, it was number one in the nation.
I not aware of too many neighborhoods in the US where the average one and two family houses run in the neighborhood of $450,000 to $750,000 with individual houses on some streets running $1,000,000+ for a one family, and where a three bedroom apartment rents for $2,000+ a month in what is considered a suburban area.
Very nice post though. Why don't you log on, and stand behind your words?
And since you seem to have dificulty with reading comprehension, let's go over it again. One van, one car, one 4x4. And they were vehicles worth stealing, or they wouldn't have been stolen.
Someone has a bug up their ass about commercial entities.
"Comparable to DirectTV (see slashdot article about them). The signals would be scrambled unless you paid $9.99 per month for a "license fee". "
As compared to the US military who could have simply sayed no to commercial usage...
"They could use the stupidest encryption around, and anybody who broke it would be put in jail and fined. Scramblin it for a military purpose makes sense, but scrambling it to protect "intellectual property" is just stupid. "
and then throwing your ass in Leavenworth because you broke the encryption, and gave away plans to "enemy combatents".
"Unit cost for one more person to use it is zero. Like America's Army game, an example of good use of government to keep things sane. "
Unless they said no to commercial usage then you'd have to sing a different tune about how the evil government wouldn't let you do what you wanted with the signal you "paid for" with your tax money.
BTW Even with the government saying yes to commercial use. It was commercialism that brought the cost down enough, we all can have a "/." story about it.
Not to shoot you down or anything but I work specifially with GPS. The GPS C/A code broadcast on L1 (1.57542 GHz) has never been encrypted. The military simply encoded ephemerides for the GPS satellites that were inprecise (this was called "Selective Ability") onto the L1 signal. This led to a user range error of ~30 meters. After this was turned off in 2001 the error went down to ~3 meters. There has always been the PPS ("Precise Positioning Service") P-code signal on the L2 frequency (1.22760 GHz). This is actually encrypted, and is what the military uses in its. Acurracy with this service can be in the range of centimeters (low dynamics case). Working with the L2 signal requires a security clearance and a bunch of goverment red-tape. In the next 10 years there is going to be an explosion of GPS tech. First off the EU is putting up Galileo, which will double the number of SV's orbiting the earth (more satellites in view = better positioning accuracy). Althought the signal structures are not the exact same, because they will be broadcasting at similar carrier frequencies designing a dual use receiver will be a piece of cake. Also GPS is being heavily upgraded. They are adding a third signal with M-code(L3), and adding C/A code on L2. There is also talk about increasing the signal strength, which is a great boon to indoor GPS and using the GPS signal for remote sensing applications. All in all it is a great industry to be in.
"Driving on the same tracks (more or less) every time minimized this. "
And as a former farmer you don't need GPS to do this. Also we can drive at night just fine.
which is a great boon to indoor GPS
Fantastic !! I will always be able to locate the TV remote no matter where it hides on me. Now wheres that fscking GPS receiver.....
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Where do you work?
YHL
HAND
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
That's "GNU Public Slayings".
Look, if it hadn't been for France bailing your asses out 250 years ago, you'd have continued to have your "country" run by some unelected idiot called George whose only qualification to the job was that his father did it.
Thankfully the French were there to help you defeat King George III, and you avoided that situation.
NASA GSFC & Purdue University
They're Russian, actually, if you read the news.
What will ever happen to human progress if we start all being nice to each other?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I hate to sound pessimistic but since when is something this glaringly obvious considered "worth noting"?
Or maybe, given the topic, my pessimistic little note should be restated to ask how accurate would your GPS unit have to be to measure the size of the rock you'd have to be living under to not know that GPS wasn't adopted overnight?
Goodness. I'm starting to sound as biter as those people who post about the newsworthiness of new articles.
I don't have an account?
Unlike most of the posters here I would guess?
And probably unlike the guy bringing class warfare into a gps statement/observation/wish?
290 comment limit per day is enough for 29 usable ip addresses, with 10 per for ac's, don't you think?
SPAM much?
Now we're modding spam up?! My faith in intelligent moderators is now validated.
"It is not theft as there is no tangible property involved. "
Yet in both cases you benifit without the exchange of money to those who make something worth "borrowing". Funny how life works.
"About your second comment, it cost $10 bucks for cable, my cable bill is over $35 for the same service. Come again about the natural evolution is to become cheaper."
Another failed student of Econ 101. It's natural behaviour is to gravitate to whatever people are willing to pay for it. Don't want to pay $35/month then don't. Enough do that and the price drops. Simple as that.
Like utility infrastructure. I work at a water company, and before a contractor burries pipeline, we use RTK (realtime kinematic) GPS to record its location down to 0.04' (or 1cm). So when line locators need to mark facilities its much more accurate. Normal GPS isnt that accurate, but we use base stations and radios to send correction data in real time out to the GPS collection devices.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Score: -1, No content
Dumb-ass moderators today
Look, if it hadn't been for France bailing your asses out 250 years ago, you'd have continued to have your "country" run by some unelected idiot called George whose only qualification to the job was that his father did it.
Hmmm.... let's look at today
unelected? check
idiot? check
called George? check
his father did it? check
Looks like we need France's help once again. LIBERATE US, FRANCE!
I swear when I first read this, I thought it said it would double the number of SUV's orbiting the earth. I started to picture a bunch of Expeditions slowly spinning around in space (with the drivers inside talking on cell phones of course).
Disturbing.
unelected? please explain. Either the fucking hole is punched or not. If you can't properly vote, then it doesn't count (And if THEY DID COUNT THE FUCKING BROKEN BALLOTS, HE STILL WOULD HAVE WON!).
God, its almost 2004. Think ahead, not in the past people.
Several good examples are used, from farmers in Alabama to anti-theft devices.
Up here in Canada, farmers have been using it to level their fields for years now. Canada is usually pretty quick to pick up new technologies.
Not really, I saw the movie "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson (from "Braveheart") and in the movie, the French only bothered to show up after the war was basically over. SO THERE!
The recount that was done had Gore win in eight of the ten scenarios, including the all important "If they counted every vote". The two where Bush won were the way the vote was counted, and the scenario where Gore got only the three counties he wanted recounted recounted.
This lead to certain newspapers putting up headlines of the "Gore would have lost anyway" variety. Which in turn has lead every freeper wingnut to claim that Gore lost the election even in the recounted version. BS.
"...because with an auto-steer tractor, they would be able to work at night."
Most tractors these days have headlights. Some of the larger tractors come with enough lights from the factory that it almost feels like daylight when they're all on.
You're not going to see a lot of GPS guided tractors any time soon. There are too many random factors to consider, like random patches of soft soil (mud or sand), animals (my grandfather accidentally ran a lame deer through a combine once... Ick.), debris in the field (rocks, tree limbs, etc), etc.
We'd need optical recognition systems to be good enough to steer around the junk you don't plan for using GPS. Also, some stuff you don't want to steer around, you want to remove it from your path.
GPS is useful with farming, though. Plotting soil samples, and then using that data when applying fertilizer is faily nice.
Kathleen Fent = KEN TH' ELEFANT.
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about
One of the principle uses of GPS which I have seen in farming is doing year to year yield mapping. Thats where you have sophisticated equipment on your harvester that does realtime yield analysis (ie. figures out how much corn/soy/etc. you are pulling off the specific patch of land you are harvesting) and associates that number with the GPS coordinates the harvester is currently at. That way not only does a farmer know their per acre yield but knows where each of their good/bad yield spots are quantitatively and can either cross reference that with soil maps or other data to determine the reason for the different yields and if possible increase yeilds.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
One university's avionics department put a GPS receiver in each wingtip of an airplane and used them as a bank angle indicator. They just compared the altitude of one wingtip with the altitude of another wingtip.
If you have a ham radio license, you can hook your GPS to a transmitter and experiment with tracking yourself and things. The telemetry standard used for this also allows flagging your position with status information (e.g. "on duty") and weather information. See http://www.findu.com to track hams who are doing this, or google for "APRS".
You can't seriously tell me you would want Gore running the war against terrorism? We would all be dead by now...
Ever notice that human technological evolution closely mirrors our desire to more efficiently have sex with our neighbor? Or at least take her for a ride for less than the cost of taking her out? TGP [thumbnail gallery posts] is a major advance for economical, global hormone production. Instead of a nice car, fat wallet, good looks and flowers, you need one little quick click to get some happiness. Browse porn sites more, spend less. With most sexual technological advances, they have civilian applications. TGP is a shining example. My favorite is the web browser. It was first built to help college students share "information" so mankind could .... in the ass faster.
What will ever happen to human progress if we get control of our raging hormones?
Just mark your car, ride miles away, and when you're ready to go back, just follow the arrow. No parking near landmarks to remember where the car is.
Reminds me of a contest the military is sponsoring. Basically they want a driverless ground vehicle. I thought GPS would solve the navigation part of the problem. But the military warns that GPS alone is insufficient for navigation. Can't remember the reason though.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
Considering the robot has to drive the car, avoid obstacles and find it's destination. I'll be very impressed if anyone succeeds.
But then again a lot of work has already been done on this sort of thing.
http://www.path.berkeley.edu/
For anyone griping about how much taxpayers have paid for GPS;
30 _years_ of GPS development... $9B
1 Iraq War... $100B
Go figure.
I'd laugh, if only that wasn't close to home. See, I had a GREAT cache hidden near the Sacramento International Airport, and then that whole 9/11 thing happened and the Sacramento County Sheriff department started patrolling the area around the airport.
Imagine my surprise when cop cars & some guy in a black truck come rolling up on my ass all A-Team style when I pulled over and got out of my car to go check on the cache.
After my heart jumped up into my throat, I showed them the cache, and while they agreed that it was a really neat hiding place, it was not a good idea to continue the cache in that location.
Sad thing is that we used to go drinking in the exact same field years before. No longer. =/
I'm still shocked that the electoral college survived this debacle. I always remember hearing, "Well, if a candidate won the popular vote by a real margin but lost the electoral college, the obsolete electoral system would be abandoned due to the public outcry."
Gore got 500,000 more votes than Dubya. Chads Schmads.
"Imagine," he says, "the end of property crime. Everything that has any value and could be stolen -- a car, a laptop, a piece of construction equipment" (not to mention every ship, plane, truck trailer, and toddler) -- "everything like that will know its location and be able to report it. We can go even further: You tell your laptop that it should only find itself at your office or your home. And if it finds itself in a car trunk, it wakes up, notices that it's in the wrong place, calls your cell phone, and says, 'Hi, this is your laptop. I'm at this location on this map you see. Is that okay?'"
That instantly made me think of the Phrack article on the Low Cost and Portable GPS Jammer. Never know when that baby's going to come in handy.
If these walls could talk they'd probly still ignore me. --MF DOOM
What do you do when the GPS unit breaks or the batteries crap out? Become buzzard food?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Hehe - i know - those new fangled incandescent lights and all...
t (a current farmer)
YHBT. KTHXBYE
You can add your "buddies", and then do things like "where is joe" (down to around 2 blocks) or "find nearest friend" amongst them all. Still haven't really found a practicle use for it, but I guess that's also part of the point of the article: Give users the option, and eventually they'll figure out innovative uses for it.
Why does it seem like to me that GPS transmitters (the BIG ones) are always in the butthole of nowhere. Like 1hr off the main road on a dirt road, make a right at the dog tied up to the tree? Interference? Some GPS guru please let me know.
I hate sigs.
got to love that GPS kid locator commercial.
It seems that more thought actually went into the GPS farming than into many recent computer patents, like Apple's "fast user switching" or any of the other process patents mentioned on Slashdot. Are farmers just not patenting because they aren't in technology? (Or is this process actually patented and it just wasn't mentioned...)
And yes, I think Gore would have done a better job. I think there's a slightly better chance that the WTC attack might not have happened, given I doubt Gore would have closed the investigation into Bin Laden, and I know he took airport and airplane security seriously enough to doubt his usual pro-gun-control views would have lead him to, as Bush did, issue the order banning guns from cockpits.
Clinton's government did, after all, head off a major attack on our airports on New Year's Eve 1999. Or did you forget that too?
I've got a T68i that lets me do that, and it is most certainly not a GPS phone. It is a GSM phone, not sure if you're confusing your acronyms...
Can one "stack" the phone module and the GPS module in the Handspring units, or must one be removed to use the other?
"I think the puppet on the left represents my interests."
"I think the puppet on the right is more my style."
"Hey, one guy's running both puppets!"
"Shaddup..."
Apologies to Mr. Hicks on the planet Arcturus if I didn't hit the precise wording, but you get the idea. You assume the other guy would be better, and that is where you are wrong.
Can anybody explain to me why these farmers get 1 feet of accuracy while I have to struggle with 18 feet maxium accuracy?
J.
I really think 160x160 screens suck for mapping, even in color. Moving up to 320x320, like on some of the Clies that can be had quite cheaply (esp. factory refurbs), adds so much more usability to the maps.
Clinton's government did, after all, head off a major attack on our airports on New Year's Eve 1999. Or did you forget that too?
He also used to turn away his CIA daily briefers.
Don't forget the 1993 WTC bombing, 1996 barracks bombing, 1998 embassey bombings, 2000 USS Cole bombing, those small nutcase shootings (Empire State building and CIA entrance).
Also, don't forget Sudan offered to turn over Osama to the US in 1997.
He also invited a known terrorist, Yassir Arafat, to the White House.
I dont know how many people are aware of it but qualcomm has a suite of products that track trucks and report gps info, engine info, cargo info over satellite or terrestial networks, look for little white domes on the top of the truck cabs those are the receiver/broadcast units. This was recently featured on the history channel. They also have an emercency panic button that wills send an alert to a dispatch center and local law enforcement over satellite
One of the things that I love about GPS data is that they've pretty much decided on a standard -- the NMEA data format. When I first got my Navman GPS for my iPAQ, I thought it was cool. I thought that the included navigation software was cool, and I thought that seeing my exact coordinates was cool. That could have been the end of it, and I would have been happy.
However, most GPS devices dump their data out in a standard CSV format. This makes it very easy for 3rd party software developers to treat a GPS device as a commodity. Rather than dealing specifically with Garman / Navman / etc, they just read the standard. It's great.
It also makes it trivial to write your own apps that interface with a saved data file. I wrote a really small app to overlay a car trip on a map, including red dots where I stopped. Now you can really say, "I'm serious -- look at how bad traffic was!" I've heard of other innovative programs, too, like correlating the timestamp on a picture from a digital camera with the GPS log to give you the coordinates where the picture was taken.
The most useful GPS data is the "RMC" string:
If you're interested, the data format is here.
It all goes downhill from first post
There's a ton of MS source code geocached, you just need to visit the right websites to find it.
Longitude: -122.13099913, Latitude: 47.63839512
It all goes downhill from first post
"Tuning in a satellite broadcast does not use part of a finite resource, it does not reduce the amount of broadcast available for sale."
Until the above thinking takes over like the disease it is. Then the companies can't make any money. Kind of hard to watch a "unlimited resource" that no longer exist because no money is coming in. Or were you under the impression that everything from the dollar signs back was also free to the company that's producing the product that's good enough to watch, but not to pay for?
GPS is a system of satellites. Those big towers in the middle of nowhere are probably high tension power. Maybe cell towers. Maybe just the alien signal transmitters, activating the servo implanted in your ignorant ass.
I want a PDA-like thingy with these features:
1. Cell phone
2. Runs Linux
3. Instant messaging
4. Computer (PDA, web browser)
5. GPS-capable
6. Easy link-up to desktop
7. Under $500 because I know I will drop and sit on it on occasion.
When will this be available for the huddled masses like me? I don't even need color.
Table-ized A.I.
We had to pay $60,000 for a rack mount GPS unit for the research ship I was on. We only got 2 or 3 satellite fixes and even then that was for only a handful of hours a day because the constellation wasn't complete. But by cracky we loved it! It was good enough then and by god ... by god... what we wouldn't have done for one of those modern sub $200 contraptions. Oh yea and a full constellation of satellites.
Navigation for scientific research (gravity & magnetic surveys) was interesting. We'd post process and combine a few hours of GPS a day, Transit Sat Nav (crude sat fixes + dead reconing), plus ARGO ranging navigation. The cool thing about ARGO was that it required shore stations where someone had to be by the transmitter for several weeks. And since the cruises were in the Carribean and off Brasil, sitting around a shore station (aka "the beach") for several weeks was pretttty fine.
...are not to be messed with. Years ago one of the guys at a switch I worked at thought that his wife was messing around on him. He knew the name of the guy and found out that this fellow had a cell phone. From his company. And of course so did his wife.
;)
The switch tech agreed to help him out one night when she was "out with the girls." Now, there was no GPS at the time but they were able to track the two phones by judging the signal strength and the tower that the phones were registering on. Wifey wasn't were she was supposed to be, surprise, surprise...
As they sat side by side in the restaurant both of their phones rang at the same time. When they answered the call was between their two phones. Not being rocket scientists it actually took a them a few minutes to figure out what had happened.
That was years ago, imagine the power these guys have NOW with GPS!
The moral of the story? DON'T PISS OFF A GEEK!!! They are more powerful than you could ever imagine...
I just looked at this post again, and it was modded Funny. Funny? It's a legitimate question! Oh well, I should know better than to expect rational moderations on slashdot.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Actually, the PPS transmits the P(Y) code on both L1 and L2. That's how the military gets better accuracy: the 2 different frequencies experience slightly different amounts of ionospheric delay, and by measuring this difference it's possible to correct for the delay.
more satellites in view = better positioning accuracy
This is not strictly true, since the position accuracy depends a lot on the relative position of the satellites you are taking a fix from (if they're all bunched up then you will experience significant dilution of precision). More satellites in view may increase the likelihood that you'll get a favorable geometric configuration. But it doesn't always, which is why the current GPS constellation is optimized to provide good geometric configurations, instead of to maximize the number of sats in view.
To make matters worse, some cheaper GPS receivers just grab data from the first 4 satellites they detect, and satellites that are directly overhead will have (slightly) stronger signals than their counterparts near the horizon as a result of the smaller amount of propagation loss and atmospheric loss their signals will experience. So there's a good chance that a cheap GPS receiver will take a fix from a bunch of satellites directly overhead (particularly with many more satellites in the sky to form that bunch), even if a more favorable configuration is in view, and end up with a much lower accuracy than they should. That said, I believe that most newer receivers look at all of the satellites in view, and pick the best 4.
Also GPS is being heavily upgraded. They are adding a third signal with M-code(L3), and adding C/A code on L2.
This isn't entirely accurate. M-code will in fact be on transmitted on both the L1 and L2 frequencies, not on L3. You're correct about the extra civilian signal on L2 (designated L2C), although I'm not sure if it's identical to the L1 C/A code. There's also another civilian signal that will be broadcast on L5 - this one will be primarily for aviation use and "safety-of-life" applications. I don't remember what L3 is being used for, but I'm fairly sure it's not going to have any kind of navigation code on it. Check out this article in the Aerospace Corporation's online "Crosslink" magazine for a nice overview of GPS modernization.
Have a look at the Gotive
threadeds blog
Using more than 4 satellites does improve your position accuracy, this is generally called an "over determined solution". When SA was enabled, the benefits of this were nullified by the inaccuracies introduced by SA, but today that is not the case. Im sorry about screwing up the signal schedule, its late :). The L5 signal (what I should of said when saying L3) is going to be a long period PRN code without a data message modulated on top. Current C/A code has a period of 1ms with a 50Hz data message modulated atop of this. The unknown data message bits prevent a pre-detection integration time of 10ms, and a tracking integration time of 20ms. This limits the performance of low-level acquisition and tracking (ie indoor or space case). The L5 signal, with no data message eliminates this barrier. The new satellits going up are also going to have better atomic clocks, further improving user end accuracy. Finally C/A on L2 are going not going to be of the current Gold Code type, the details are not yet released publically.
Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of an overdetermined solution. But you only get a benefit if those 4+ satellites are in a good geometrical configuration relative to each other. Making the assumption that just adding the Galileo sats will automatically improve position accuracy (as you did in your previous post) is incorrect. If you have, e.g., 5 satellites in view, but all are within 30 deg of each other and directly above you, you will get worse position accuracy than you would if you had just 4 sats that happened to have a near 90 deg separation. As I said before, that's why the current constellation is not optimized for number of sats in view. Initially they were planning on using a symmetric constellation, but found that the were getting bad dilution of precision, even with 6 sats in view, due to the relative position of those sats. That's why the current GPS constellation is a carefully designed asymmetric constellation - the slight offsets in the sat position from a symmetric constellation help to guarantee good geometric configurations. Just adding extra sats into something so carefully designed will not necessarily improve things.
DanCar Autosikring
The base units tracking software carries out conversations with the vehicles alarm unit (which contains a GPS module) over SMS and uses M$ MapPoint to display the current position. Also the state of things like tilt alarm, crash alarm, temperature, tire pressures, well it all depends on what other modules are plugged in really.
It can be used to track several vehicles in real time (accepted the SMS message round trip being about 15 seconds usually if in country, and about a minute if the vehicle is in another country)
It's been available for a few years now, it used to use AutoRoute but I got fed up with the SendKey nonsense so it uses MapPoint now.
threadeds blog
Go Boilers! :-)
DanCar do a unit with your requirements.
When an alarm is triggered it will phone up and a voice synth will tell you what is wrong, alternatively an SMS message, or both, to as many as ten different numbers.
You can then use some pc software to follow the car in real time on a map.
threadeds blog
Was anything ever adopted overnight? Why? No software, users. Surely it makes sense to let `early adopters` waste cash on stuff and wait to see if it takes off.
Also worth noting is how GPS, like computers, wasn't adopted overnight, but rather over time as applications were found.
something I post a couple days ago
--
I seriously wonder if that had happened whether the Republicans would have taken it lying down in much the same way as the Democrats have. Most Dems have mixed feelings about the Florida thing, and have generally taken the call to "get over it" (and are shouted down if they don't) and the topic of electoral college vs electoral majority seems to come up almost as rarely as the flawed Florida vote.
According to some articles I've read, the Republicans were actually in the process of creating a campaign against Gore just before the election for the exact eventuality above - where Gore loses the popular vote but wins the election anyway. And I don't doubt it. Screw the Repug's, I doubt the TV networks and the Talk Radio networks would have shut up about the issue.
Ironically, what we got in the end was far, far, worse. One key state wasn't counted properly, and the Supreme Court intervened and demanded that the interim vote count be considered final. So Bush didn't win the popular vote, and he didn't get a chance to win the electoral college. Yet despite being the loser of the first, and there being no legitimate winner of the second, he's been pretty much given a free ride since. Tells you how "liberal" our media is really, doesn't it?
Your "family" seems amazingly well connected to the crimnal underworld. Perhaps because you spend a lot of time in the company of such people (and other dodgy areas) that your cars keep getting nicked?
Handspring unit GPS magellan - 12 channel - $49
Good mapping software for $29
Sprint phone module from ebay for $20
Calling your friends from a ditch because your GPS was wrong: priceless.
Funny talking about GPS, precition and other good stuff and still using feet and miles in his essay...
You know, the only person I remember at Purdue who worked on GPS was a fellow named Jim Garrison. As I recall, he also worked at Goddard at one point, and his research involved measuring reflected GPS signals.
You two should get together and chat. I imagine you'd have a lot to talk about.
I am getting soooooo sick of the French bashing.
Too right! If it weren't for France, you'd all be speaking English right now!
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
You can't seriously tell me you would want Gore running the war against terrorism? We would all be dead by now...
May be we will be more successull finding the weapons of mass destruction. really think that We would all be dead by now...? Some soldiers may be alive. The US external image would be not so bad and US citizens may have keept the right to a judgement in cases of terrorism.
I can't say that GORE would have been better, but I' sure that somewhere there must be a better president.
You seem to forget that the Galileo constellation, while utilizing nearly the same inclination as GPS, is going to consist of 3 totally different oribital planes. Being in different orbital planes, the probablity of having a GDOP conducive to a good solution is much better with 48 satellites in 7 different planes rather than 27 in just 4.
mmm you may start considering something called books.
Actually I work with Prof Garrison. I'm on his research team. How do you know him?
I worked on a video game called EverTech (yeah, obviously a rip). It was basicly a MUDD game, with a top down view of campus (or anywhere else in the world), and in order to play in the game you had to roam around using GPS. Of course we only worked on it for a semester and were never given any real support hardware wise...
A bunch of people sounded interested in playing if we ever finished it.
So hollywood have convinced you of their "alternate history".
...) boycotted trade with britain and traded with america.
France joined the war in 1778, Spain also helped and they joined in, in 1779. The war didn't end until 1783. I'd say the french joined nearer halfway.
The French were the main supplier of American arms and several other countries (holland, sweeden, prussia
I'd like to think that the Galileo developers have worked with the GPS planners to make sure the two constellations play well together. However, while the initial acrimony over Galileo seems to have abated, I'm not sure how much actual cooperation is going on.
BTW, the GPS constellation consists of 6 planes, not 4.
Put your bias aside for a minute and realize that 9/11 didn't happen because of 8 months of the Bush presidency but an ongoing hatred of the United States that was evident back in the 1993 WTC attacks. Gore being president wouldn't have reduced the chance of 9/11 happening, the only question would have been our response.
given I doubt Gore would have closed the investigation into Bin Laden
The investigation had been going on for some time. You can argue theoreticals, but there's no particular reason to believe it would have been more successful in the 8 months leading up to 9/11 than the years prior. Plus, 9/11 apparently would have occurred even if Bin Laden had been captured since underlings were actually organizing and executing the attack. It's doubtful a Bin Laden capture in 2001 would have avoided the 9/11 attacks. A capture in 1995 or 1996 might have, though.
Clinton's government did, after all, head off a major attack on our airports on New Year's Eve 1999. Or did you forget that too?
9/11 wasn't planned, funded, and executed in the 8 months of the Bush presidency. So apparently Clinton's government succeeded at heading off the airport attack(s) [I had only heard about LAX, was unaware of other airports?], but they missed the upcoming WTC attack despite one having already occured back in 1993. They missed the Cole bombing as well as the two attacks on our embassies. 1 out of 4. They're batting 0.250.
"Are farmers just not patenting because they aren't in technology? (Or is this process actually patented and it just wasn't mentioned...)"
Despite the "other" response, as a former farmer the reason a regular farmer hasn't patented it. Is because we're in the farming business, not the patent business.
I thought that Mel Gibson died on Braveheart? How could he have made this movie, The Patriot?
:-/
I am confused
Thank you AC
Bill
bamph
"So be it. If a company can't figure out a way to charge for their service, then they go out of business."
Aside from the fact you missed the point (imagine that?). All you're saying is if companies can't overcome the publics carnal nature[1] then they deserve to go out of business. What a piss-poor world you're going to end up living in. Bad thing is you're going to be dragging the rest of us down with you.
"I pay for it, and yet see nothing wrong with tuning it in without paying. Ponder that one for a while."
Why should I ponder people excercising the worst side of themselves? People have been doing that since Cain killed Abel, and they've been going ever since.
[1] Encryption is a form of this. People still don't get the hint. Up next a death ray that zero's in on "pirates". Wonder if anyone will get the hint?
LMAO... I can't believe this joke is moderated as "Insightful". :)
..and its not that expensive.My dad used to have the service on a truck he sold some time ago.
Its very common nowadays for people to hire this services down here.
I guess its cheap because of high demand and because car robberies here are extremely common.
So now the robbers are opting to kidnap you with your vehicle to prevent you calling the GPS company or the cops...
Also some people have told me that the robbers can just take the car and quickly move it to an underground parking garage for a while or into a container to prevent location.Dont know the veracity of that though...
You can download a Java App to track your cell phone at www.gadgeteer.org I have a free service running that recieves UDP packets sent by the phone and creates a web page with a link to mapquest showing your current location
Free cell phone tracking
Anonymous coward posts the obvious followup, stating "unelected? check"
But of course, screwing that up. George Bush was elected. I mean, duh.
Getting a majority of the votes cast nationwide is not the criteria for getting elected.
All you monkeys stating otherwise are part of the problem. If you understood how our system worked maybe things would have been different. At least there would be less whining.
The US is not a (pure) democracy, and speaking as someone who is a member of some minority groups, I'm glad it isn't. For those who aren't from the US, it is a constitutional republic, where a certain measure of power is left to each of the 50 states. This prevents, say, California (the granola state) from riding roughshod over, say, Kansas (the carry on my wayward son state).
.signature: No such file or directory
What'd they do with the other 536 colors?
TT
I may have to rethink that since GPS is a great tool to make things cheaper, faster, and better and it came from the evil military budget.
At least it's from the USA, and not from *cough*, *cough*, France.
You would know the answer if you bothered to read the article:
The system has cost $9 billion to develop, launch, and sustain over 30 years... Today, the GPS industry in North America is estimated at $4 billion a year.
Not a bad investment of your tax dollars and mine.
Bush lost and was handed it all by his father's buddies in the supreme court. It's all well documented in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy . White voters were given the chance to correct their vote if they hadn't punched hard enough. This facility was disabled in the poor areas. This is after the bogus "purging" of the electoral rolls of thousands of individuals who shouldn't have been.
I'm not pro-democrat either. A lot of democrats vote with the republicans when in power. I am a UK subject (no, we aren't citizens technically) and our system sucks too, but the way they do it here is by redrawing the electoral boundaries to make minorities even smaller. Our first past the post system means that a political party only needs to command 40% of the vote to have a huge majority.
None of us live in a democracy and we should stop kidding ourselves.
Furthermore, the French sustained MORE losses than the (obviously much larger) United States in World War II, on the heels of devastating losses in World War I (in which the U.S. suffered relatively few casualties as a latecomer). And that doesn't count hundreds of thousands of civilian losses. Anyone who thinks the French folded easily and without losses is an ignoramus.
I am getting soooooo sick of the French bashing. Look, if it hadn't been for France bailing your asses out 250 years ago, you'd have continued to have your "country" run by some unelected idiot called George whose only qualification to the job was that his father did it. Thankfully the French were there to help you defeat King George III, and you avoided that situation.
:P The reality is that we both had a common enemy at the time, so we cooperated.
You have a very strange view of history.
So exactly how many soldiers did France send over to the US to help out?
Yeah, that's right.
It was helpful that France was also at war with England, but it's not as though France sent a sizeable portion of their army over to help us. Besides, you could argue that France would have lost that war if it wasn't for us Americans
It not like the US surrendered to England and the French had to come over here an save us.
Life is too short to proofread.
That's a good point. However, my argument was with your blanket generalization that "more sats in view = better position accuracy", which, as I said before, is not strictly true. Just adding more orbital planes will not necessarily lead to improved GDOP performance.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. It seems statistics come into play here. Even if you only have 3 satellites, having 5 measurements is going to be better than having 3 (the more measurements you have, the more random error you can remove). Say you had 5 satellites, but 2 of them were right next to other satellites, this could be treated as the situation above (somewhat). Correct?
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
Life is too short to proofread.
http://www.aprs.org/
http://www.aprs.net/ and http://www.findu.com/ have some neat APRS interfaces.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I would be. Yes, more measurements allows you to average out statistical noise. But the position error we are talking about is what is known as Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP). That kind of error is caused by having the satellites in view in a non-ideal (i.e. non-orthogonal) configuration. The errors are not statistical, but inherent in the geometry - averaging or filtering will not help.
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Only if you are assuming the exact same geometric configuration, but with one extra satellite. Otherwise your statement is not true. If you have more sats, but in a worse configuration, your GDOP will be worse, and you'll get lower accuracy. If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy". Which has been my point from the get-go. Please go back and read my earlier posts - I never claimed that more sats will inevitably lead to worse position accuracy, only that the "more sats in view = better position accuracy" statement was not true in all cases.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
If you will examine the previous posts you will find that we were talking specifically about position accuracy, which is where GDOP comes into play. Timing accuracy is a different issue.
If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy".
I see your point now. You could have 5 sats with poor GDOP or 3 with better locations.
While you valid have a point there, it seems like you're spiltting hairs. Yes, in some arbitrary math problem you could have more satellites, but less accuracy, but taking the current GPS constellation as a given, any additional satellites are going to improve your accuracy. I think it's reasonable to assume "same configuration with one extra sat" since they aren't planning on shooting any down.
That said, you're right.
Life is too short to proofread.
If your activities depend upon GPS (are not simply assisted or made more convenient by it) what happens when/if GPS fails?
I.e., if 911 emergency services depend upon GPS and map/direction assist systems in order to find your burning house, what happens if GPS fails for some reason?
I know GPS is built to be redundant, but business (or other activities) that _depend_ on GPS should have a "manual" backup when possible.
First off, GPS is a military thing that civilians have piggybacked on.
Secondly, those freeloading, "mooching" foreigners have started developing their own GPS systems, and the US has actually balked at this happening. Out of passing curiosity, why do you think that's happening? (Careful not to concentrate on this question too hard -- you don't want cognitive dissonance to blow any noggin gaskets.)
Remind me to try to sell you something sometime. You've bought a world view that's based on ridiculously oversimple "government is bad!" rhetoric. I'd place money that you have no idea what your real, individual tax burden is, but that doesn't seem to keep you saying they take a third. You're offering ten bucks a month for GPS when, say, the whole of NASA very likely doesn't get that much of your tax dollar -- they take about $1 out of every $1000 in the federal budget, to give you some idea how that works out. That's one lavish GPS system. I'd love to be a used car salesman when you walk through the door...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.