The GPS or Global Positioning System is a globalnavigation system used for military and civilian applications alike.
As a positioning system, GPS allows users to map waypoints, tracking their position on a map to within a few meters of their exact location. Civilian use GPS systems are made by companies such as Magellan, Garmin and Trimble.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton issued a policy directive declaring GPS to be a dual-use system, meaning that it could be made avilable for a wide range of civilian and military purposes.
GPS is short for (the) Global Positioning System, a satellite navigation system developed by the US Department of Defense. A fleet of more than two dozen GPS satellites broadcasts precise timing signals to GPS receivers, allowing them to accurately determine location anywhere on Earth. In practice, this means that using a GPS device, you can find out where you are in terms of longitude, latitude and altitude.
In late 2005, the US government introduced the first in a series of new generation GPS staellites offering new capabilities. Chief among these is a second civilian GPS signal called L2C for greater accuracy and reliability.
GPS has become a vital global utility, indispensable for modern navigation on land, sea, and air around the world, as well as an important tool for map-making, and land surveying. GPS also provides an extremely precise time reference, required for telecommunications and some scientific research, including the study of earthquakes.
GPS was first made available for commercial applications in 1983, after the Soviet Air Force shot down the civilian airliner KAL 007 in restricted Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people on board.
GPS signals can also be affected by multipath reflections of the radio signals off the ground and/or surrounding structures (buildings, canyon walls, etc). For long delay multipath signals, the receiver itself can filter the signals out. A variety of receiver techniques, most notably Narrow Correlator spacing, have been developed to mitigate multipath errors.
GPS is coming into common use in cars these days. Most new cars allow you to purchase GPS technology that will help you plot your trip from one location to the next.
Because GPS is as much an accurate time keeper as a locator, one of the most common applications for GPS units is as a reference clock for time code generators or NTP clocks. For instance, when monitoring earthquakes, each seismic sensor can be synched with the GPS system to provide a synchronized, precise time source for measurements.
Hand-held GPS units are often used by hikers and mountain climbers to plot their courses and to accurately reflect exactly where they are. The author once used GPS to organize a helicopter evacuation of an injured motorcycle rider in a remote region of the La Sal mountains in Utah. A reading was taken, coordinates given, and the pilot was able to find us with ease.
In early years, the US military made the civilian application purposefully less powerful than it could. But since August 2000, the GPS civilian application provides the accuracy of GPS signals to within 2 meters (6 ft). Fact is, GPS accuracy can be improved further, to about 1 cm (half an inch) over short distances, using techniques such as Differential GPS (DGPS).
One of biggest problems for GPS accuracy is that changing atmospheric conditions change the speed of the GPS signals unpredictably as they pass through the ionosphere. The effect is minimized when the satellite is directly overhead and becomes greater toward the horizon, as the satellite signals must travel through the greater "thickness" of the ionosphere as the angle increases. Once the receiver's rough location is known, an internal mathematical model can be used to estimate and correct for the error.
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