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Galileo: Europe's Version of GPS Reaches Key Phase
another random user sends this quote from the BBC:
"The third and fourth spacecraft in Europe's satellite navigation system have gone into orbit. The pair were launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. It is an important milestone for the multi-billion-euro project to create a European version of the U.S. Global Positioning System. With four satellites now in orbit — the first and second spacecraft were launched in 2011 — it becomes possible to test Galileo end-to-end. That is because a minimum of four satellites are required in the sky for a smartphone or vehicle to use their signals to calculate a positional fix."
Yes we do. I trust the USA, much more than the unelected corrupt EU politicians.
" If GPS guidance goes down (IE our hardware has a problem), we simply cannot drive the machines. They are too wide to drive manually (my sprayer is 120 feet wide-- very difficult to drive that manually at less than 5 feet overlap even with markers) and the inputs too expensive to waste on overlaps."
They did it -- with the same size machines -- before GPS.
Cry me a river.
Look, if you're going to mindlessly bash the Americans, do it right. Say something like "GPS was conceived by the perverted violent minds of the military, while our Galileo is a system of peace. Thus proving, once again, the innate superiority of Europeans over the Americans we have looked down upon ever since we kicked their sorry asses out of our own countries for having the wrong religion."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"No, you're not correct. The 3D information that you'd get without the fourth satellite would be so inaccurate as to be meaningless. You need the fourth satellite for a 3D fix that puts you in the right city, let alone the right street. That's qualitatively different from 'only for precision'."
Then why do the military only require 3 satellite locks? Eh? Answer me that, you fucking genius.
"That's not unique to the military signal. It's just a matter of how much money you want to throw at the problem."
The U.S. military GPS system was designed to work properly with only 3 visible satellites.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, or do whatever the hell you want with it. I didn't invent the system. But I do know just a little about it.
That makes modern farming methods even more pathetic than I formerly believed. I already knew that the end result of "green revolution" farming is a failure of crop land and the creation of hard pan due to the driving around of your beloved machines, but I didn't know that you guys were dumb enough to buy something that depends on GPS when you have perfectly acceptable locations to plant terrestrial navigation beacons. Farmers are smart enough to use solar-powered electric fences even when they have power, how come they're dumb enough to use celestial navigation when they could use terrestrial?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"