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GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010
adamengst writes "A US Government Accountability Office report raises concerns about the Air Force's ability to modernize and maintain the constellation of satellites necessary to provide GPS services to military and civilian users. TidBITS looks at the situation and possible solutions."
Sounds like a software/project management issue to me. I didn't finish reading the article, but I hope one of their proposed solutions was to fire the incompetent people who can't deliver on-time or within budget.
.02c
just my
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Best not to rely entirely on one system anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The real concern is a major solar event - if they're having a big issue replacing one every other year, imagine if a major solar storm took out a dozen at once.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Ah, and you all laughed when Europe started to launch Galileo sats. Haha!
This isn't news. The article simply says that there have been problems getting new satellites in orbit; but the ones that are there are functioning fine. Yes, they COULD fail, but they haven't done so yet, and there isn't yet any indication that they will.
Move along, move along.
Why move to Europe? I mean, its not like they'll not be restricting the system so that it only works over Europe. Why not just buy a Galileo receiver (when they become available)?
Also, isn't Galileo supposed to be backwards compatible with GPS?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Surveys have to be right to centimetres
No, they just have to be consistent.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Doesn't matter.. you aren't going to get better than 10m accuracy without DGPS and 1m with it. Surveys have to be right to centimetres - no GPS can do that (possibly some of the military stuff, but I'd be surprised if even they were that accurate).
C-Nav DGPS has 11 cm resolution in 3-d. Suck it.
On 9/10/2001, Rumsfeld gave a speech about wasteful military spending
Given his position as Secretary of Defense, he was in the best possible position to fix the woes he spoke of. How'd that work out? It's funny how you fail to fix problems when you have a financial interest in not seeing them fixed. Sure would be interesting to see a full accounting of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's accounts these days, and just how much Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Halliburton all enhanced their retirements.....
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Doesn't matter.. you aren't going to get better than 10m accuracy without DGPS and 1m with it. Surveys have to be right to centimetres - no GPS can do that.
Yes, they can. They just aren't consumer handheld GPS receivers:
http://www.trimble.com/survey/GNSS-Surveying-Systems.aspx
They don't give instant position: they accumulate data over a period of time and use that to derive the exact position, usually after correcting it with a comparable stream of data collected from a nearby known reference point.
Under ideal situations the accuracy of GPS equipment can approach 5 millimeter[...]
> Thats why I never accept apologies. If they were really sorry they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Wait. You think that John Paul II (or anyone else alive today) was the one who put Galileo on trial!? Or do you use that strange variant of the word "they" which lumps together both guilty and innocent alike (AKA "guilt by association").
Direction of travel is determined in both systems by taking the difference in position over a known time interval.
Sorry, I should have said velocity is determined in both systems by taking the difference in position over a known time interval. For direction of travel the time interval doesn't matter of course.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I already pay for GPS in my taxes. Yes people who don't pay taxes and people who don't pay taxes to the US government still get to use it. But seeing as how easy it is to make a GPS device now, I doubt that non-US citizens would pay an extra tax for it /shrug.
but hypothetically, how much would you pay?
Just curious what people think its worth... say for example if the US privatized it and some corporation charged a monthly fee or licensed access to hardware manufacturers (which of course would result in the cost being passed onto consumers). Personally I might pay like $20 extra dollars for a device (1 time), but I would not pay even $1 monthly 'cause the last thing I need is another bill to keep track of.
We laughed at the fact that Europe has NOT stated to launch Galileo sats. As of yet, the system is still operational and I can't find any data saying they've even launched a single sat. Last I can see they were supposed to in 2H 2008, but I can't find anything saying they did.
The funny things about Galileo isn't that they are working on their own system. Makes good sense, especially since the US and EU apparently worked out their differences with it and the two systems will work together to give even better results. The funny thing is all the politicing and such going on that is keeping the project in vaporware status for a long time. By the original timeline, the system ought to be up now, and instead it isn't even starting.
...naming a bunch of things that orbit the Earth after Ptolemy... :-D
...or, coming at it from a different slant (closer to yours), maybe Copernicus or Aristarchus