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"

Comments

2mm, China's COMPASS and more on GLONASS

[Lord Satri]

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. For your curiosity, one can use GPS signal to get a precision of 2mm. No this isn't an error or bullshit (and it is not DGPS), it's "phase resolution". In short, you use the GPS signal's phase from multiple GPS satellites to get a 2mm spatial resolution. Whether Selective Availability is on or not doesn't matter, but you can do this only in post-processing mode however, not real-time (afaik). A friend was doing his PhD on this. There are a few great applications, such as doing GPS phase-resolution for bridges, thus knowing by how much they move due to traffic, temperature, lateral wind, etc. The funny thing is we don't even know the position of the satellite at such a precision, but it does not matter, we're using the phase of multiple satellites here, not the content of the signal. (I'm not a professional of GPS phase resolution myself, anyone with more knowledge is welcomed to correct me, I'll appreciate :-)

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 ;-). Happy holiday time.