Things Are Looking A Little Better Now
Isn’t it amazing how Dollars and/or Euros can “talk”? You’ll recall a number of articles, (samples here, here and here) past and recent I’ve penned about the somewhat ill-advised Galileo navigation system, a big candidate in my book for the Harvard Business School’s top choice in their “how not to build a business” series.
But some good sense, perhaps influenced by economic reality has forced a meeting of the minds, and the outcome will likely be very beneficial for the US, France, the rest of the European Union and the world at large:
Galileo satellites will link with GPS
A combined system will provide more accuracy for positioning systems
Tom Young, Computing 17 Jul 2007The US government and the European Union (EU) are expected to reach an agreement within a week to provide a service that will use both the US global positioning system (GPS) and the EU’s proposed Galileo satellite network.
EU and US satellites would send information on the same radio frequency, enabling receivers to take signals from both systems and combine the data.
‘The market probably will drive dual-use receivers. We think probably that single GPS-specific or Galileo-specific receivers will phase out in time,’ said Raymond Clore, a GPS-Galileo senior adviser from the US State Department.
The agreement would mean the service being provided by 60 satellites instead of 30, increasing coverage and reliability of the network…. Full article on GPS-Galileo “unity” here:
This makes a heck of a lot of sense, given the the EU seems bent on continuing their project … which, of course, is fine with me. The accuracy of any GPS or GPS-like system is influenced more than anything else by “satellite geometry”. To get any navigational fix, the receiver must “see” a minimum number of satellites. Typically this minimum is 4. The current GPS constellation assures that a receiver will almost always see 4 satellite’s minimum, world-wide.
May 2007 GPS Tracking ROI Round-Up
Many folks report they have trouble finding data they want to refer back to on this blog (and other blogs, for that matter). We recently implemented a full “Archives” page (see title bar just above where your eyes are focused right now).
Here also, is a new feature I have decided to add … a monthly round-up of the previous month’s posts:
31: GPS Tracking And Hours Of Service (HOS) “Swindle Sheets” and why you care about them
30: Pop Quiz … How Many Things Is GPS Tracking, Right This Minute? What GPS really “tracks”
30: Google Has Lost The Bubble And GPS Won’t Find It For Them (Part 2) Why Google is missing the point
29: Google Has Lost The Bubble And GPS Won’t Find It For Them (Part 1) Why Eric Schmidt ought to produce before he brags
28: Finding Your Way Around Tracking ROI …. GPS Not Needed How to find information here at ROI Tracking
28: GPS And Google On The Golf Course? Why men and boys are separated by the price of toys\
7: Bare Skin For The Long Weekend Angelina’s tattoos and GPS coordinates
26: Read Everything Before Doing Anything … Even With GPS How your sage misinterpreted a slick gas location system
25: Overdue Credit Where I get a lot of GPS information and where you can too
25: GPS Doing Something Useful? So Near But Yet So Far How to save gas with your cell hone but not your GPS
24: Thar’s Money In Them GPS Hills How the GPS/GIS business has really taken off financially
23: GPS Fails … Oh Really? Blaming other failures on GPS and how to be smarter
23: I-GPS …The Opposite Of Progress Is Congress? Tell me again why we elect ignoramuses to rule our lives?
21: GPS “Spying” In More Ways Than One Things being watched aren’t always what you think they are
21: Galileo Stubs Its Toe, Again The EU finds out that looking a gift horse in the mouth costs real money
20: GPS For Sport or Exploration … Weekend Eye Candy A lovely system to track your running, cycling and other outdoor activities
19: Using GPS Without Even Knowing Thinks you may not have known
18: GPS Works — Or Does It? Does the system work?
15: Where’s The GPS? And Power Lines To The Sun? Tracking trains without tracking trains and metered “solar” power
15: RFID It Ain’t GPS All “Tracking” is “tracking” but not all “tracking” is GPS tracking
14: GPS Works Stolen Truck Recovered in 60 Seconds How much faster response do you want?
11: In Case You’re Wondering — Everyone Can Use GPS GPS isn’t only for the military, law enforcement and big business
09: GPS Saves More Than Wasted Gas GPS can truly save lives … something to think of when you think it’s only dollars and cents.
08: Top 5 Reasons GPS Tracking Makes Sense Why you should think of dollars and cents saved instead of spent
08: Holy MOLTARS, I Hope This Thing Has GPS! A motar-launched GPS enabled blimp … fantastic
08: I’m Sure It Will Have a GPS Another intelligent Lighter Than Air/GPS teaming project
07: GPS Tracks Emotions GPS won’t make you happy, but it will tell you where the ad folks are
06: GPS for Pets Update Track that dog .. if you can?
02: Another County Tries To Figure GPS Out Reading the excuses the county leadership comes up with is nearly as interesting as wondering what they have against running their country as opposed to letting their county run them.
More "GPS" That Isn’t
A very nice article in the Dallas Morning News today entitled “Zip Codes Paint Portrait Of Dallas” by Cheryl Hall (good work, Cheryl). I suggest you go read it and also spend a little time with the included interactive map on the same page … then come back here and tell me you privacy concerns … or your kudos, for that matter.
You can go direct to the map here
Years ago when GPS wasn’t even a common public access utility and fellow named Jack Dangermond and his wife, Laura formed a little firm in Redlands, California, to do land use analysis studies. Today their company is called ESRI (and by the way, still debt-free and privately held, big props to the Dangermonds for resisting the all to common sell out to venture capitalists who make all the money and stifle all the initiatives) and is the world leader in specialized Geographic Information System (GIS) software. GIS simply means taking a database of, for an example, property ownership records and displaying and analyzing those records visually by plotting the records on a map … tying the geographical aspects of the data to the textual.
When GIS got started there was essentially no competition for ESRI’s products, there was ESRI and everyone else unsuccessfully playing catchup. Software being what it is, ESRI today has many competitors, some very capable. But ESRI saw the proper vision from the early days. They don’t just make the software … they actively find the data to go behind the GIS and integrate it … sometimes for a fee (and a good fee, too, ESRI’s annual revenues are at least 2/3 of a billion bucks) and often for free as well, to get the word out to the world and make the world aware of the “Power Of Place”.
The Dallas example is a great illustration of this principle in action. All the data “behind the map” is available somewhere … often even for free such as the volumes of information collected by the US Census. Individually, though, the data don’t do much. Collected, standardized and, most importantly, displayed on a map by readily understood geographic subdivisions such as Zip Codes the data become powerful and insightful.
But I mentioned privacy at the head of the article. There’s no private information being disclosed here, so why even question it … what do you, gentle reader, care if someone collects non-identifiable data regarding the demographics of your and makes it publicly available?
Tried to buy homeowners insurance in Florida lately? Wonder why your auto insurance costs twice what a friend across town pays? Wonder why home mortgages are hard to get approved on “your side of the tracks” but seem to be nearly given away across town?
You’re looking at the reason, folks. ESRI makes a lot of those millions and millions in profit from firms who decide what they will offer and how much the customers will pay based strictly on where those customers live and who lives there with them. When you talk about or think about privacy and GPS issues, make sure you go a little deeper into your mental review. It isn’t the knowledge of where someone is that might adversely affect their life … it is the knowledge of their location and all the other aspects of their lives gathered together on one computer screen that gives me a little shiver up and down my spine.
I-GPS …The Opposite Of Progress Is Congress?
The US Congress is saving the taxpayer’s money … or are they?
House lawmakers have denied an $81 million Defense Department request for the development of handheld satellite navigation receivers capable of receiving Iridium and Global Positioning System signals, saying the concept is not sufficiently proven to warrant funding.
DOD requested $71 million for the effort in the Air Force research and development budget for fiscal year 2008. Defense officials requested an additional $10 million in the U.S. Special Operations Command budget. Full article on Congressional GPS shortsightedness penny pinching here:
Just a few weeks ago I highlighted the great idea of using additional signals from other available systems to enhance GPS. There are some tremendous advantages here:
- Resistance to intentional jamming by terrorists or act of war
- Resistance to solar flares and other atmospheric/electromagnetic disturbances
- Significant increase in accuracy and dependability
More than anything I welcomed this initiative because we have already made the investment in thousands and thousands of other signal sources. It’s just plain stupid to ignore the extra aids to GPS that are already out there “for the taking”.
Now should a big company like Boeing be the ones to pursue the research? Well, who else? Head in the cloud “not for profit” organization like MITRE and Aerospace … those guys can’t conceive anything that doesn’t costs billions before it even turns a wheel and they have no concept of profit. Boeing takes raw metal and fashions the world’s most successful airplanes, satellites. etc., so I think right there is a vote in favor of moving forward.
Anyway, as the old saying goes, “if the opposite of “pro” is “Con”, then is the opposite of “Progress” really “Congress”? It sure looks like it in this case. Congressmen, you blew it here.
In Case You’re Wondering — Everyone Can Use GPS
I promised that this site was going to be re-purposed towrd those who want to learn about GPS but are not ready for all the technogeek articles I have tended to publish in the past. For the business and tech side of GPS I have now set up a separtae GPS Business Blog at www.gpsbus.com Feel free to visit there.
But for the rest of us, here’s agreat video that shows thesafety benefits of having GPS tracking in your car or truck, even for a private usser.
Thanks to C|Net and OnStar … OnStar is just one vendor in this market but it’s a company that has made a huge impact in just a few years in making this esoteric technology “real” to ordinary users.
Storms Of (GPS) Life
The great Randy Travis had a wonderful hit called “Storms Of Life”.
I’d better change my wandrin ways,
I know I’ve seen my better days,
Always gettin’ high when I get low.
Well, I left my soul out in the rain,
Lord, what a price I’ve had to pay.
The storms of life are washin’ me away.
Do I think the GPS has seen its better days? Not at all, but I do think GPS (and Glonass, and Galileo) may see a lot of storms over the next 4 years or so.
If you find your Global Positioning System (GPS) device acting weirdly, the problem might be the Sun. Researchers at Cornell University reported Wednesday that an unprecedented solar storm last December had a serious impact on GPS.
.. The findings, presented in Washington, D.C. at the first Space Weather Enterprise Forum, focused on a giant solar flare on December 6, 2006. It created a tremendous radio burst that caused GPS signals to be dropped for a large number of receivers, the researchers said.
Solar flares have been known to disrupt satellite communications and impact electricity grids before, but the researchers said the December event was different. Read More On Solar Flares at NASA.
Now if there’s one thing I hate about all forms of the media, including personal, opinionated blogs like this one, it’s those who run around with a lot of Chicken Little warnings. S I am not about to issue any. But I will say this:
- Solar Max, the approximately 11 year cycle of maximum solar disturbances is less than 4 years off
- We know little about the cycle, we know even less about its overall effect on GPS, since GPS was in its infancy during the last Solar Max
- Solar flares pump out huge bursts of energy right in the middle of the band used by GPS and all its current adjuncts/partners/competitors.
- There is no practical work around at this stage of the game. We can’t increase the output power of the satellites to any degree and we can’t effectively shield existing receivers.
So what’s the word from industry? I have been searching for a week now to find any rational tech articles that show any real work in progress. For my pilot colleagues, better be very careful in getting rid of all the “steam gage” navigation on your instrument panel because especially for vertical guidance GPS is liable to suffer significant outages/anomalies over the next 4 or 5 years. Or not.
Will Russia Pay Us Not To Use GPS?
Somewhat lounge-in-cheek the headline, but you can’t blame me for coming to such an unfounded but logical conclusion. Russia has been doggedly attempting to complete a system of satellites called Glonass (Global Navigation Satellite System) since the early 1990’s which “competes” with or duplicates the US GPS (Global Positioning System)
Recently, Mr. Bush’s friend Vlad spoke,
President Vladimir V. Putin, who speaks often about Glonass and its possibilities, has prodded his scientists to make the product consumer friendly.
“The network must be impeccable, better than G.P.S., and cheaper if we want clients to choose Glonass,†Mr. Putin said last month at a Russian government meeting on the system, according to the Interfax news agency.
“You know how much I care about Glonass,†Mr. Putin told his ministers.
Now it’s a presidents job to give rah rah talks to the “troops”, but when he told his system developers to make the Glonass “cheaper” than the GPS he lost me. Since the US never charges anyone in the world a nickel to use the GPS, the only way this country boy can see to make a cost of zero any cheaper than zero is to pay someone to use it. Boggles the mind. Read more