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Russian GPS Alternative Near Completion
Russia has successfully launched another round of GLONASS satellites bringing the grand total to 18 of the navigational units online. "The GPS competitor -- first begun in the Soviet era and only recently revived after years of post-collapse neglect -- is now theoretically capable of providing coverage to the entire Russian territory, with First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov claiming that the first compatible consumer devices will be available in the middle of next year. By 2010 Russia plans to open the system up to outside nations as well, contributing to an eventual three- or even four-system global market"
In Soviet Russia, Satelite tracks you!
paul reinheimer
...we're going to have more choice in satellite positioning systems then we do with satellite radio?
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
What was the saying? "A man with one clock always knows what time it is -- a man with two clocks is never sure"?
I suppose if every one of these systems provides a precise enough location, for most purposes it won't matter if they all conflict with one another by a meter or so.
"You should switch from the free US GPS to our free GPS, so that, you won't be relying on their free GPS after the nuclear war."
This is my sig.
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TROLL ALERT! Parent is a spam-link - one of those new myminicity things that seem to show up a lot on slashdot recently.
Ok, GLONASS is not very accurate because it is far from completion - you need ground based infrastructure as well as decent satellites. This system will be good enough for Russian military as they are not too bothered about 10m spread for their multi-megaton nukes, but if you drive a car with this thing then such a low accuracy will matter a lot.
Also GPS is pretty well damn established in terms of electronics and its price - there is no way GLONASS will take any significant market share anywhere in the world apart from Russia where, as it often happens there, legislation will be used to ensure it is GLONASS on sale rather than GPS. But given level of corruption there even this won't work well.
So move along, nothing to see here, and definately not something worth reporting.
This is as important as so-called "second sourcing", which promises that if one system goes down, others will still be available.
They say it can theoretically cover all of Russia because only 13 of the 18 are operational. Here's an interesting quote from the article: "The main point is to avoid the 1997 situation, when 24 sputniks were on the orbit, but only the military were making use of the system. However, it is now feared that a similar situation is apt to re-occur, since there are some problems with the development of navigation equipment for the consumers at large, although the constructor-general is trying to cope with them"
Here's one from the International Herald Tribune.
/.
Somebody please stomp out myminicity. It's seriously polluting
-a.e.mossberg
Hey, I have a great idea! Aperture Science should launch a GLaDOS satellite!
Then we can all be test subjects and enjoy delicious and moist cake!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The joke went like this:
Now, Russia is not exactly like Soviet Union, but it is not entirely dissimilar either. So even if they do provide coverage for other parts of the world and make it otherwise not worse than the current American offering, I strongly doubt, they'll achieve the same quality and reliability reputation as the existing system.
Only the "true patriots" will use the Russian system, unless the government decides to (heavily) sponsor the devices using it and try to ban/tax/discourage the others (in blatant violation of the Free Trade commitments, of course).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you were in a sensor-to-shooter situation (like NEC suggests) the delta would, of course, be a serious pain in the proverbial but I can't quite see a NEC linkup between the US and Russia :-).
However, the nice thing is that the Russian network acts as a backup - the moment this is stable it voids the whole quality degrading tactic the US has been using. Nothing wrong with a bit of redundancu IMHO.
A man with one GPS knows where he is; a man with two is never quite sure.
[Apologies to Lee Segall.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is good news for land surveyors everywhere. Most all surveyors have switched over to GPS based equipment in the last 10 years. I have been out in the field with GPS equipment, and watched my accuracy go to hell because there were not enough satilites above the horizon. Being able to pull signals from both systems means less downtime for land surveyors, and better field accuracy.
Engaget does not have one fact correct. Topcon has been offering surveying grade GPS units that can pull signals from both the US based system, and the GLONASS system for at least 3 years.
http://www.topconpositioning.com/uploads/tx_tttopconproducts/HiPerPro_Broch_REVB.pdf
BTW, if you are wondering how land surveyors get the accuracy down to 1cm for gps, it involves using two GPS recievers and a process called RTK. In RTK one reciever (the base) is placed over a known point, and equipped with a radio transmitter. This station transmitts a correction for the GPS signal to the other reciever (the rover). The results are very accurate, and our firm has pretty much stopped using conventional total station, except where vertical accuracy is an issue (gps is only good to 10cm in vertical accuracy).
orbiting earth, it's unfortunate that so many countries want their own positioning satellite systems. Its almost certain that global nuclear war would destroy all countries involved in creating their own private GPS-ish networks, so its really too bad that we all can't just share. Brings back memories of the cold-war =(
I made him a slashdot foe. (I'm off topic but so is parent and GP?)
GPS satellites are not in geostationary orbit. They are in non-equatorial medium earth orbit (roughly 12 hour period).
Its normally AC so that won't work
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I had thoughts about cake after seeing the name of the Russian system, myself. As long as it doesn't offer to bake us, I guess we're ok.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Also, can you provide some geographic reference to where you haven't had enough satellites above the horizon?
Between this and Roland, is any link still safe?
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Not just for Soviet submarine crewmen anymore!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Sounds like the world's getting ready to redraw some political boundaries and justify some defense spending.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
They aren't geosynchronous.
Brett
Being able to pull signals from both systems means less downtime for land surveyors, and better field accuracy
No, it just means twice as many inaccurate readings. I think the different systems, operated by different countries' militaries, will NOT cheerfully work together to give you a better fix on your position.
One of the most compelling reasons for deploying alternatives is that the US controls Navstar GPS. The US government can introduce random errors into the CA (civilian) codes, decreasing the accuracy of GPS receivers. This is called selective availability. US Military receivers can, of course, get the "correct" signal by being loaded with crypto keys to access P(Y) codes. Additionally, CA code (and even P-code), is susceptible to spoofing by the enemy. Obviously, without the right keys, GPS is hardly acceptable as a positioning system for non-US militaries.
Navigation systems don't use geostationary orbits.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One thing that would bug me about depending on this system, if I were Russian, is that the Russians are notoriously inept at ensuring long life for their satellites. They tend to just launch a lot of them and accept a short lifespan as they wig out. The US, by contrast, tends to go for gold-plated satellites that live a very long time, and launch far fewer. Is the Russian "shotgun" scheme going to work out for a navigation satellite system? I don't know, but it's a question I'd be asking myself before switching from GPS to Glonass.
I mean, in addition to asking myself whether some cut of the profits from Glonass are going to be spent ensuring that Vladimir Putin stays Supreme Leader for Life.
One of them does...
A little more related to GLONASS, there's COMPASS, the global positioning system of China. It's first satellite was successfully launched last February.
Here I provided (shameless but informative plug) news on Europe's Galileo, which somehow solved their important funding problems. As for GLONASS, Putin himself clearly stated he wants GLONASS back to full speed.
Anyone avid of GPS-related news is welcomed here (this is the GPS topic on Slashgeo, yeah, a plug, but hey, it's right on topic no? And there's no ads whatsoever
Animoog.org
If you're still having problems with your GPS receiver, maybe it's time to get a new one..
my guess is he's in the mountains.
Slashdot just needs to follow redirects on links. Unfortunately, this has been a problem for a number of years and so far Taco & Co. have refused to fixed it.
My blog
I think they already did.
My blog
Justifying defense spending is easy. Just line up your favorite talking heads on TV and have them talk about how the people who look different and talk weird really really hate freedom and want to kill all right-thinking peace-loving citizens. Have the talking heads subtly or not-so-subtly question the courage and patriotism of anybody who isn't pissing their pants over the supposedly imminent threat.
Then arrange to borrow the funding for the defense spending. This way, you can put off paying the bills until it's somebody else's problem. With any luck, your political opponent will be in office then, and you can criticize them for the economy that you screwed up. Bonus points if they try to raise taxes to pay off the debts you incurred -- or even just try to end the huge tax cuts you gave to your filthy-rich buddies. (Many of whom just happened to profit enormously from defense contracts and/or own the media corporations who practiced "balanced" journalism by not questioning your lies.)
Wheee! It's a fun game that everyone enjoys
I wonder if the Russian system will have the equivalent offsets that the US system has, you know... to keep terrorists and other miscreants from using them to accurately call in artillery on the local police stations from home made, butane powered potato mortars.
Basically you need one satellite to resolve each variable in the solution. Thus if you hook up GPS and GLONASS it costs you one saltellite. THus, adding 5 GLONASS satellites to the solution is the same as more or less equivalent to adding 4 GPS satellites. There are many top-end GPS receivers that do this to great effect.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Woo-hoo! Way to spout off something you don't obviously have knowledge about. DGPS and RTK are different things and use different methods. DGPS will get you down to about 1m which is fine for your weekend car trip. . . not for surveying purposes except in very rare occasions. You still have multi-path issues and atmospheric ionization. At distance of more than 10-15 km atmospheric conditions will play a huge role in lessening accuracy. Do a search for DGPS vs RTK and you can enlighten yourself.
I used to think much the same as you. Then I started a company that develops high precision surveying equipment and discovered it wasn't as simple as I'd thought.
This is actually the second time GLONASS has become fully operational. The first time was back on February of 1996 (see 'Understanding GPS Principles and Applications' for details). However, older satellites started failing soon after and they weren't able to replace them quickly enough so the constellation quickly degraded in functionality.
Q: it hums but would not go ..
I would think that RTK would be more accurate than DGPS.
If the Base system is at a known point only a few hundred feet from the rover then it should be a little more accurate than DGPS. From the Wikipedia.
"The United States Federal Radionavigation Plan and the IALA Recommendation on the Performance and Monitoring of DGNSS Services in the Band 283.5-325 kHz cite the United States Department of Transportation's 1993 estimated error growth of 0.67 m per 100 km from the broadcast site but measurements of accuracy in Portugal suggest a degradation of just 0.22 m per 100 km.[2]"
RTK bets DGPS in accuracy at the expense of speed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In Soviet Russia, You give GPS directions!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There is a big market for a "free* GPS system. That market is basically "the entire world".
It gets quite a bit smaller when there's a subscription fee involved. And even that market is quite small when there's a free alternative.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I believe GLONASS would be acurate and open until BAD THING happens. But then, it will become encrypted and available to Russia military only. :-)
Russia, unlike other countries, doesnt assault anyone over the globe, so there is no need for selective GLONASS access, unless someone assaults Russia itself.
BTW, if some country would want military-grade positioning, now it has two shops to choose
Not exactly. DGPS requires post processing after you get back into the office in order to download the correction files from your reference station. In RTK the correction is done in realtime, so there is no post-processing required. This is particularly handy when you are trying to do something that requires you to find a calculated position (like laying out a buidling or grade staking).
DGPS is fine if you are wanting a position within a foot or two. The accuracy of a GPS calculated position is a function of the distance you are from your base station. Typically, we run our bases within 1 mile of the roving units to get acceptable horizontal accuracy (plus or minus 1 cm).
As for the satilite counts, The Leica 500 recievers we use have to have at least 5 good satilites to get a lock. Also, the recievers tend to filter out any satilites that are below 15 degress above the horizon, as atmospheric interference makes the signals from those too eratic to be of much use. There are some days when you pull up your onboard almanac, and see 8 satilites, but only 4 of them are useable. With the current stock of GPS satilies that are up there, you typically only see windows of an hour or two every 24 hours when you are down due to not enough satilites. Having a GLOSNOS enabled reciever pretty much eliminates these down times due to the fact that even an extra 8 satilies helps fill in the times when you don't have enough US GPS satilites avalible.
Surveying with 5 satilites is pretty dicy at best. You cant get up next to buildings, or trees without loosing lock. The ideal number is 8 good signals so you can move around next to objects, and loose a couple of signals, but still have a good lock on your position. Ten or twelve satilies is when we get our best results.
You might want to read the above post for how GPS works. You don't get your position from the satilites, you just get a time encoded signal. The reciever then uses the signal from at least 3 satilites to triangulate your position. If your reciever can recieve and interperate the signal fromt the GLOSNOS satilites, there is no reason why it can't use the results to augment the results you pulled calculated from the US GPS system.
I think the different systems, operated by different countries' militaries, will NOT cheerfully work together to give you a better fix on your position.
I fail to see how it would be possible for the two systems to be made to not work together. More data points is always going to give you better information. If I measure the length of something using three different methods, each giving me a 10% error, I can always combine the three readings and obtain a better answer than just one. If I remember my statistics correctly, the errors can be made to cancel each other out.
The fact that someone has already made a receiver that does exactly this makes your statement hard to understand.
AccountKiller
The cake is a lie!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So what improvement can be achieved by combining GLONASS & GPS? Another 10 satellites should improve accuracy, but the media isn't covering this.
On the other hand a man with two clocks who averages them can know better than a man with one clock.
No matter how much petro wealth is created, a nation conceived from a lie can not do great things. At best, they can copy. Even then, poorly.
I had always hoped that when George Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes, and found someone he could trust, he would force a copy of a biography of George Washington into his hands. It would have given him a recipe to follow.
Sadly, it was not to be. The Russians are beyond salvation.
I wish them the best (really, I do).
Just what is this myminicity thing anyway? I've seen increasing Howls of Rage about links leading to it on /. and searching only turns up, well, Howls of Rage on /. about it so far.
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
It's a jerkoff forum spammer that keeps jumping into conversations with supposed links to interesting and relevant tidbits that all point through various redirects to his own useless site.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you are getting 10 satellites with strong L2 signals you are lucky. At 40 degrees north I rarely have eight satellites with decent L2 SNRs, and really appreciate the extra 1 to 3 sats GLONASS gives me. I'm talking about a Trimble R8 model 2, arguably the best GPS antenna and receiver on the market today.
This is going to help.
If you've ever worked with high-precision GPS gear, you know how frustrating it is. I've used such gear on robot vehicles. Three satellites give you approximate latitude and longitude, but not elevation. With four, you get elevation. With five, Omnistar corrections work and you can get 15cm accuracy. There are many times when you can't see five satellites on land; some may be too low in the sky and blocked by terrain. Plus, some GPS satellites may be down. They're not always operational.
In cities, it's hard to see five sats most of the time. Combination GPS/GLONASS units will be a big help for high-precision ground work.
The big problem with the original GLONASS sats was a short design life. They were only intended to work for a few years before replacement. The newer sats have a longer design life, so Russia should be able to keep the constellation running now. GPS sats have a useful life of about 15 years. #57 was launched on December 20, 2007, and replaces #37, launched in 1993.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=+%D0%B6%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B6%D0%B8%D1%82%2C+%D0%B0+%D0%B2+%D0%B6%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83+%D0%BD%D0%B5+%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B5%D1%82%3F
Q: How many satellites does it take to fry a World? A: ??? Any offers?
Every little helps!
It's comptetion - it's good for you. Free markets, remember?
And as always, Europe talks about striving to be the forerunner in science and technology, talks some more, makes a halfhearted attempt of achieving the goal, gets into fights with the different parties involved, and is now surpassed by Russia of all countries. I'm ashamed of my continent.
-- Cheers!
You're probably a terrestrial user. Most people who rely on GPS for navigation are in the air or at sea where the impediments to a good signal (it being blocked or reflected) are pretty much nil.
dom
A terrestrial user in the flat part of Ohio. As for reflections, those are greatly mitigated by the antenna design. The grandparent is apparently also a land surveyor - and survey grade receivers/antennas are much more discriminating than consumer ones. I don't know anyone outside surveyors and the military who pay attention to L2 signal strength.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
...that way Russians would perhaps not venture into Finnish air space all the time.
Such episodes do not really give a high rank of their "navigation equipment" and/or skills, so maybe the GLONASS will help them out!
mod parent up please, it is much more informative than that what i have written.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
RTK is a real-time form of DGPS. DGPS describes any system in which a receiver at a know position is used to correct a receiver at an unknown/uncorrected position, be it in real-time or post-processed.
Really??? Last I checked WAAS satellites, in additions to providing corrections, can be used as ranging sources as well...
Continent? Then rejoice: a huge and the most important chunk of Russia is located in Europe!
I thought once I saw the !glowingass tag that there would be some shred of humor in this one.
I thought with christmas just passed, there would be some retarded reindeer joke or something... Something to make me laugh while I am stuck @ work doing nothing!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
How about spaceflightnow!! http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0712/25glonass/
Jebus.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
What good does L2 do to surveyors without Y code capability?
The L2 is on a different frequency than the L1, by monitoring the different propagation delays of the L1 and the L2 frequencies you are able to model ionospheric conditions and compensate for them.
The cyphertext is good enough for that.
Just one of the needed tricks to get reliable, real-time, sub CM positions.
The Y code itself isn't nearly as valuable as dual-frequency reception.
In Soviet Science, Gladnost satellite launch YOU!
.
- aqk
F U
You may want to read up on GPS/GLONASS history a bit before descending to a level of senseless ranting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS#Timeline
Both systems were developed in about the same time and with a high likelihood they borrowed extensively from each other through industrial espionage and other channels. I worked for a satnav hardware company that was developing dual (GPS/GLONASS) receivers. For one, the hardware guys kept repeating how both systems were TOO similar in their implementation (like having almost identical frame formats, etc). For two, just to put some perspective on timing - all this was in the early 90s and GLONASS was in a operational state. Its partial demise came later on, when lost/broken satellites were not getting replaced.
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