Just How Good Is GPS Tracking

From the day we start school through most of our lives we are obsessed with scores and grades.  Did we pull a 4.0?  Did our favorite team make the playoffs?  The list goes on.  GPS tracking is no different.  Everyone wants to know how good it is, usually they aretlaking about the actual accuracy of the ositions calculated by the receivers and outage times … zero is best.

Obviously the system won’t attain absolute perfect accuracy.  The specs for unclassifuied civilian use say basiclaly plus or minus 10 meters.  But usually the system itself perfrmns a lot better thna that.

How much better? Well, the USAF, the operators of the system for the worls, spend alot of time documenting pastperformance and predicting the future.  Here’s a snap shot of a tool you cna use any time, from anywhere inthe world, to see how well the system is meeting its goals:

Just go to the USAF Offical site and you can update your expectations any time you wish.

On impressive thing to notice.  This chart is showing 2 to 4 meter accuracy for most of the populated world, most of the time.  that’s amost five times better thna the performance standard.  Not too shabby.  The US militray is pretty unpopular these days, especially in the US where they are just ‘client soldiers’ off in Iraq while the rest of the country grapples with the “real war”, trying to kepe up the ortgagepayments on the house the “iover bought’ to impress.  But you might givve a thought to the people who spend their days, nights, weekends and holidays making a military system work five times betetr than designed for all US citizens along with everyone else in the world.  My hat is off to them.