You probably knew already that the GPS system that’s used in most navigational devices these days was developed by the US military back in 1989. In the year 2000, former US president Bill Clinton opened up the system and the GPS satellites started providing more accurate information to the general public. After accurate positioning was [...]
You probably knew already that the GPS system that’s used in most navigational devices these days was developed by the US military back in 1989. In the year 2000, former US president Bill Clinton opened up the system and the GPS satellites started providing more accurate information to the general public. After accurate positioning was available to the general public the consumer GPS market rapidly grew into what it is today.
The GPS we know and love is part of a larger family of systems called Global Navigational Satellite Systems or GNSS. It’s similar to having different operating systems like Windows, Linux and OS X for a computer - they’re different but they ultimately get the same jobs done in the end.
- GPS is the USA system - Wikipedia GPS Entry
- GLONASS is the Russian system - Wikipedia GLONASS Entry
- Galileo is the European system - Wikipedia Galileo Entry
- Compass is the Chinese system - Wikipedia Compass Entry
I’d write a little more information about all those systems, but really who cares - and for those of you that do, I provided you links to very informative Wikipedia entries. Right now only the USA (GPS) system is fully operational and open to the general public.
Here comes the most important question of all: What do having all those different systems mean the average GPS end user like me? I just want to use the GPS to navigate while I’m driving or keep me from getting lost when I go hiking.
Things aren’t looking so bad in the answer to that question. Since us end users drive the market the manufacturers are hopefully going to listen to what we want.
When I turn on my GPS, or hopefully one day my GNSS device, I don’t want to worry about which satellites are available to me to use or have to configure some little gadget all the time to get it to work properly. I’m going to have more important things on my mind like driving or enjoying the view from atop some majestic mountain peak. I think manufacturers are intuitive enough to know that we’re not all Linux geeks and don’t want to configure it all the time so they’re going to design device that work on whatever system is available and devices that will probably use more than one system at a time to get even better accuracy.
Actually - there are already chips being designed to handle more than one system and a Quick Google Search shows that there’s already some pathetic competition killers trying to patent having all the different receivers on one chip (sarcasm: Wow, such a novel idea!).
Anyways, we’ll let the manufacturers work out all the details. Give me my GPS, make it accurate and make it ‘just work’.
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GPS has become very common in the last few years. The GPS we know and love is part of a larger family of systems called Global Navigational Satellite Systems or GNSS.