Russian GPS Alternative Near Completion 177
Russia has successfully launched another round of GLONASS satellites bringing the grand total to 18 of the navigational units online. "The GPS competitor -- first begun in the Soviet era and only recently revived after years of post-collapse neglect -- is now theoretically capable of providing coverage to the entire Russian territory, with First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov claiming that the first compatible consumer devices will be available in the middle of next year. By 2010 Russia plans to open the system up to outside nations as well, contributing to an eventual three- or even four-system global market"
Re:No, it's not used for targeting.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poor research by /. No suprises then. (Score:2, Interesting)
If by 'only the most modern', you mean 'the majority of the GPS receivers made in the last 10 years', then yes. WAAS wasn't around back in the days of GPS infancy, but most new receivers have it, and yes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System [wikipedia.org]
Re:Required, Sorry (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poor research by /. No suprises then. (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest issue with WAAS being that those of us in the central area of North America may have both satellites very near the horizon. If you are on either coast one satellite is high enough above the horizon to be clear line of sight past most ground obstacles. exceptions being large nearby buildings, or mountains.
Of course, I don't see much difference in usage on the ground with, or without waas. Ground based clutter causes other error types anyway and you have to use GPS as an aid, not as a solution to a non-existent problem. It works and it works damn well, but it won't auto-navigate your car through traffic.
Re:A man with one clock... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was doing more of this stuff, clients would sometimes take several GPS points, and find to their delite that nearly always the three points were much closer than the supposed precision of plain old non-differential GPS. As a result, they began to assume the system had more precision than rated.
Intrigued by this I set up a fixed station that tracked all the fixes coming out of the receiver over several hour period. What I found is that sequential readings tended to be strongly correlated to their immediate predecessors but weakly correlated to fixes taken much earlier. Essentially the receiver would report all the points as being in a smallish bucket a couple of meters wide, but every fifteen or twenty minutes it would pick up the bucket and put it a different place five or even ten meters away. Then there'd be a run for fifteen minutes or so at the new "bucket position", after which the bucket would move once again.
The way I interpret this is that the various sources of error change as a satellite's position changes. Perhaps a mountain range gives a strong reflection in one position or not another, or perhaps a new satellite rises (or an old one sets), leading to a whole new set of data.
So, it stands to reason that having more than twice the number of satellites means that the various random sources of error would tend to be averaged out more, provided any difference between the old and new system could be accounted for systematically.
Re:Why alternatives? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Poor research by /. No suprises then. (Score:3, Interesting)
only the latest generation of consumer gps chipsets (sirf star III and alike) does support it. and it doesn't work well on the ground so pilots and navy are pretty much only ones who can use it.
you might not believe it, but either ones are among a minority of gps users.
Re:Poor research by /. No suprises then. (Score:3, Interesting)
Dupe (of a sort) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Justifying defense spending (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a good idea to take your government with a grain of salt, but this is just over-the-top.
I guess I should post a rant about the cynical leftists who keep people poor forever so that they can justify raising taxes to pay welfare benefits, who want minorities oppressed to make sure they never vote Republican, etc. But two strawmen do not make a right.
Whenever I hear or read something really extreme that I disagree with, I try to remind myself that it's likely that the extreme person is basically a decent person, and if I got to know them I might like them. If I got to know you, I might like you, even though you come off sounding like my political enemy. (And before you knee-jerk... I'm more of a small-l libertarian than anything else, but defense spending is IMHO one of the few legitimate things for government to be doing.)
Re:I found this interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah! More GPS sat's (Score:3, Interesting)