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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.
search ebay for the visor prism, - color palm handspring unit - $150 with shipping - used - 65000 colors
nice organizer with handspring expansion slot
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staples, etc. - handspring unit GPS magellan - 12 channel - $49 - new on clearance - software for moving map, location, speed, etc.
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this unit with good mapping software for $29 rivals dedicated color moving map GPS units costing thousands.
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get the spint phone module from ebay for $20 for the visor handspring and now it is a phone too.
so he can drive over the same tracks in his wheat field every year (I'm not kidding, read the fine article) and compress as little of his soil as possible
everything in moderation
What you should of done was planned the route for all the houses at once, then fed that info into your palm/ppc/gps device, probably would of saved a few miles on your total route. Or maybe that's what you did and I misread it.
I've always wanted to do this for garage sales back when the technology was out of sight for prices. Now that it's cheap, I no longer do the garage sale circuit.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
I think you are refering to DGPS?
Conventional civillian GPS (which is not the same as Military GPS, even with SA turned off as it is now) is accurate to typically ~10m. You can enhance that a long way by doing phase matching as well as code matching - survey GPS devices can get down to a few cms (for a price!).
DGPS works on the basis that for each satellite in the area the error arriving at two units within a couple of hundred miles is roughly the same. (Extra delay is caused by things like atmospheric conditions.) You put one reciever on a known point, and calculate the error for each satellite you can see. You then send all of the calculated corrections to the roaming reciever so it can remove the error in the signals it's getting before it calculates it's position. This is considerably cheaper than using a survey grade GPS, as well as faster, but unlike a survey grade GPS you need to have set up a nearby DGPS transmitter first. The (FAA?) have done this around US airports I believe, to allow autolanding systems to double check against DGPS data as well as ILS beacons.
It's worth noting that to be able to use DGPS it's _not_ enough to calculate the error in your _position_ and transmit the correction to that as the roaming unit may be using different satellites to you - you have to transmit the error on each satellite signal. Some Garmin units let you extract this data using an undocumented API.
Beep beep.
Regardless, the machines are heavy. They compress the soil that the wheels drive over. Roots grow less quickly in compacted soil. Driving anywhere each year (or whatever the crop change period is) will eventually compact large chunks of field which will have to be tilled/aerated before re-planting. Driving on the same tracks (more or less) every time minimized this.
Hope that helps.
everything in moderation
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.
My brother, who farms in Iowa, has been using GPS for a couple of years now. One use of GPS is he when he harvests the combine uses the GPS to map out the yields in small areas of the field instead of just knowing the yield for the whole field. Using this info and soils tests he can determine what areas have good amounts of nutrients and what areas do not. The next summer when he plants he feeds this info into the equipment and with the GPS it automatically adjusts the amount of fertilizer that each part of the field needs. Modern farming involes more high tech then many people realize and one the main reasons US farmers out produce any other farmers in the world.
Actually not all farmers plow up the whole fields now days with the various low tillage systems being used. My brother does what is called ridge tilling and only plows between the ridges where the corn or beens are planted. This reduces the amount of plowing and intern reduces the amount of soil erosion.
The article says GPS cost about $9 billion over 30 years to field. The average US population over the past 30 years has been about 250 million (more now, less in 1970), or 1/4 billion. So that's about $36 per person, or about a dollar per American per year, not adjusted for inflation.
Much as people love to whine about government waste, you've got to hand it to them--GPS has been a good deal for all of us.
Yield Monitoring
Chemical Application History
Developing fertilizer application plans
Tracking Soil Analysis Results
Identification of "problem areas" on fields
Finding the best locations for equipment
Profit /Loss charts by field
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
You laugh, but in England there's already a service that lets you locate mobile ("cell" in your 'Merkin lingo) phones without using GPS: http://www.fleetonline.net/
FWIW, what cellphones use is generally not GPS, but good old fashioned triangulation. Which, interestingly, means it's probably more accurate than GPS too.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Here is a simpler example - With a 40 foot implement (what the tractor is pulling), an average driver may overlap the end of the implement 3 feet into the previous pass to be sure that he doesn't miss any soil. It is hard work to drive accurately enough to be closer than this. With GPS, the overlap can be cut to 1 foot. The tractor is now doing 5% more work (39 vs 37 feet) with the same fuel and wear and tear. This can quickly pay for the GPS.
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
"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
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.
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