Is National Differential GPS Lost?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday September 5, 2006 @07:10AM from the so-where-are-we-again? dept.

Nealix writes, "This article at GPSWorld reports that National Differential GPS (NDGPS) is endangered in the 2007 budget. This has ramifications for a variety of government programs such as the Intelligent Transportation System and Positive Train Control by the Department of Transportation. Blind people and robots also benefit from highly accurate GPS navigational capability provided by NDGPS, which appears to work better in the urban canyons. If NDGPS loses, the winner would appear to be the FAA-backed Wide Area Augmentation Service (WAAS). Of course, what would be really cool is to see more GPS sites around the country make DGPS data (RTCM) available over the Internet."

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Article Unclear by uab21 · 2006-09-05 07:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

Obviously I have missed something in TFA. It states that there are areas where NDGPD is available that WAAS is not, but that also WAAS is available where NDGPS is not. NDGPS requires additional hardware which is A) expensive, and B) bulky, whereas WAAS is available on pretty much all currently available receivers. Both systems (NDGPS and WAAS) have comparable accuracy (~1 meter).
Why, again, should we be sorry that NDGPS is going away? It sounds like market forces at work here. The only specific instance that TFA mentions where NDGPS has an advantage is *some* in-building penetration. Why should we build out a *national* network for only some in-building penetration? It sounds to me that WAAS is getting funding because it is technically and economically the better solution. Why is this a problem?