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Chinese GPS System To Be Offered Free
MattSparkes writes, "The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, 'Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago.'"
The economic benefit of free location services is so great, it makes sense for a country to provide this the same way as it provides a national highway system.
Furthermore, it'd simply be absurd to make your businesses pay all the costs to field a system they aren't allowed to use, and have them pay fees to get similar service from a foreign country. Such a policy would serve neither security nor economic interests. I'm all for private development of technologies, but I can't feel too badly for Galileo investors if they were counting on China to act in such an irrational way.
The resolution of the Chinese system isn't so great, so clearly there's a business opportunity for the private sector there to create subscription services, either to a competing system or to some kind of terrestially based correction service.
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It seems to me that if you had a GPS device that could understand signals from all of the systems you would have a large increase in precision. Each system says you are at point A +/- some distance (effectively a circle with point A in the middle). Unless point A is EXACTLY the same for each system, and I can't imagine it would be, then you get three overlapping circles. You now know that you can only be in the area where the three circles overlap. Any area outside of the overlap is now known to be wrong. Am I right?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Inside joke. The Chinese word for compass is "south pointing device". Thats because they first used it for geomancy, where "good energy" comes from the south. The Vikings and other Europeans used the compass as a navigational aid for when the north star was occluded, so the European compass points north.