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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."
There he is! No, wait...
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!
with land disputes. "Your fence is on my property" etc. We have had problems as it is with surveys in the last couple of years. It was blamed on poorly trained surveyors and some instances issues were settled in court particularly over contradicting reports and who pays for the cost of the surveys. In one instance 1/4 mile of new fence had to be moved at a cost of $10,000 and lawyer/surveyor fees of $25,000 over the fence been 5 feet out. The land in question later was sold for $60,000. What a waste of money over a silly pissing contest.
That's OK. By then Russian GLONASS will be fully operational and both the Europeans and the Chinese are thinking of launching their own satellite navigation systems. Out of these three, chances are at least one will be available for the US to use in case of a global conflict.
Plenty of people anticipated this, but nobody has given a shit enough about it to do anything substantial. I was first hearing warnings about this years ago. As a programmer, I anticipated the Millenium Bug almost 20 years beforehand, and refused to take those shortcuts that everyone else thought were wise. Back on the GPS Ranch, meanwhile, the EU is busy putting its own superior system in place, in part because they don't want to be dependent upon our system, esp. if and when we fuck up and fail to keep it operational.
Just one more reason to move to Europe.
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.
They defend "freedom."
I'm all for opening up completely the books of any government subcontractor. If you don't like transparency, then don't take government contracts. It may be tough to police, with companies trying to cheat with subsidiaries, but I think the payoff would be enormous.
On 9/10/2001, Rumsfeld gave a speech about wasteful military spending. Check it out in print, or a small piece on CBS. There was a link to his whole speech years ago - I don't know where that went. In it he states that up to 2.3 trillion dollars is "unaccounted" for, whatever that means. If you read between the lines, he is pushing for privatization of the military. We all know how well that worked out.
"What about Goecaching!?" Every nerds favorite hobby could be in jeopardy!
"Everyone" is subjective, "hobby" is misleading and "favorite" is relative... very relative. ;)
"nerd" was right on, however.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
A friends mom escaped the wreck of a 90ft Fish Packer as it hit the rocks at night in a passage with strong currents due to a problem caused by relying on GPS. It was due to something like how it derived the heading vs the direction of travel or some-such.
Moral of the story was that using static ground stations like LORAN, this would not have occurred. Anyhow, now ground stations have been dismantled and vessel's receivers scrapped and there is nothing groundbased to replace GPS with should GPS fail. High altitude communications aircraft seem viable; however, there again is a reliance on something that is not physically bolted down and easily fixable.
An interesting footnote is mentioned by Buckminster Fuller in his 50 year summation masterwork "Critical Path": on pages 186-7. The Americans started their radio-accurate mapping from Compass Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and proceeded by radio triangulation to work their way down to South America, across the Atlantic and up Africa to Europe. This was needed for accurately guiding bombers above the clouds, as the ground survey maps were often 10's of miles incorrect.
The Germans had done this as well for Europe and perhaps Russia, so when Berlin fell, the Russians went in early and took the German mapping data. Russia had radio-accurate maps of all of Europe and published data from the US, while the US did not have maps of Russia. This lead to the importance in the cold war of US spy planes and satellites for basic mapping for targeting ICBM's, including as suggested by Fuller a US presence in Iran and Afghanistan as radio triangulation bases. Russia performed massive deceptions of fake cities and so on to perpetuate this information gradient.
Are the 3 different GPS systems being proposed (U.S., Galileo, a possibly Russian system) be broadcasting on frequencies close enough to each other that receivers that use all 3 systems will be common and fit into cell phones?
That would be the best outcome : software defined receivers that can pick up a signal from any satellite positioning signal in the sky : GPS, wide area differential GPS, Galileo, everything. Massive redundancy would mean that if you were to go between buildings or even inside buildings, there would be a greater chance that at least some of the satellites were still visible.
Everything that depends on global positioning would work better : from airline navigation systems to X prize landers.
A normal event, sure. But a repeat of the 1859 solar flare would likely damage many satellites not in the Earth's shadow at the height of the impact. Is the whole GPS constellation set up to handle that type of event? Or would more than half the satellites go down in a hour?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
A friends mom escaped the wreck of a 90ft Fish Packer as it hit the rocks at night in a passage with strong currents due to a problem caused by relying on GPS. It was due to something like how it derived the heading vs the direction of travel or some-such.
Something wrong there. Both LORAN and GPS only give position (GPS gives time too, but that doesn't help here). Direction of travel is determined in both systems by taking the difference in position over a known time interval. GPS can give heading by using the phase difference between receivers on different parts of the vessel, whereas the wavelength of LORAN was probably too long for that to work. Upshot is, a problem involving headings and direction of travel isn't the fault of GPS, and using LORAN would have been no defence. It may have been a problem with the GPS receiver software, but LORAN calculations could go wrong too. Most likely it was a navigator not understanding the systems they had.
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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.
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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.
There's more than just GPS.
Here's a listing of all current/proposed global systems. Regional only systems such as IRNSS or Beidou1 are not listed.
GPS - United States - Fully Operation
Galileo - EU/China/Israel/South Korea/Norway/Etc - 2013
Beidou2/Compass - China - 2012?
GLONASS/ - Russia/India - Complete in 2010
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.