GPS Tracking ROI

Part 1:Why GPS?

Trying to figure out where you are and where you’re going is probably one of man’s oldest pastimes.

Navigation and positioning are crucial to so many activities and yet the process has always been quite cumbersome.

Over the years all kinds of technologies have tried to simplify the task but every one has had some disadvantage … Read the excellent Trimble tutorials here:

GPS is already sufficiently ingrained into our consciousness that many think it has been around forever. Especially since so many have the overt or covert thought that it is somehow part of the secret “black” world of spy programs (if, indeed, there be any) or somehow serves some hidden government spying agenda, I thought it might be illuminating to bring out some of the basics and the reasoning behind them.

Trimble Navigation Limited, on whose excellent website I relied upon heavily for this series, is a world leader in this still exciting technology, but the system itself and the reasons behind GPS go way back beyond Trimble’s time … and the reasons were certainly not always commercial.

Over the years man relied on a lot of methods and systems to find his way … for commercial reasons (Columbus, anyone?) to make war, or to map and establish ownership of land, the spoils of war. Hmmm, didn’t even think about how often “war” entered into the picture until I started to write this, but yes, war, or the hopeful prevention of war, was one of the main reasons GPS was developed.

In order to fight a war or to prevent others from feeling they can successfully attack you, you need to know where you and your forces are, and where the enemy is. There are a lot of systems out there that tell us something about where real or potential enemies are, but GPS is not one of them. GPS tracks no one and “spies” on no one. Of course GPS makes it more possible to track people or things, and some types of such tracking may be considered spying … but let’s clear the air and understand that whatever “spying” is being done, it’s not GPS that is doing it.

GPS’s only real role in life is to be a clock. More precisely a constellation of high-accuracy clocks orbiting the earth in precise orbits and being constantly updated by even higher-precision clocks on the ground. This makes it about as benign a government system as exists or ever existed, one certainly doesn’t think of the “city fathers” as “spying” when they put up a clock on top of the old town hall, right? They are just trying to help out the citizens by telling them the time and believe me, that’s basically all that GPS does.

Time has always been of great importance to navigation, positioning and knowing your location … tomorrow we’ll look at the systems that preceded GPS and a little about their relationship to time … and you may, like me, become fascinated with the precision and basic architectural simplicity of GPS.