General GPS website Reference & News

Share general news, ideas and discussions about GPS and GPS navigation

Moderators: Moderators, Regional Mappers

Forum rules
1. Be nice to each other and respect the moderators. Post in normal font size, color and weight. Follow Nettiquette
2. Remain on topic. Discuss general GPS and GPS navigation topics only
3. NO abuse, profanity and insults
4. NO spamming, cross posting and opening of duplicate topics
5. NO advertisement post or link
6. NO post/link to warez, cracks, serials or illegally obtained copyrighted content
7. Each message posted is owned by and is the opinion of the original poster. Neither mfm nor its owner or moderators are legally responsible for anything posted on the forum
User avatar
hornet
Regional Mapper
Posts: 279
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 8:16 am
Location: SP

General GPS website Reference & News

Postby hornet » Wed May 27, 2009 10:05 am

GPS news or reference to share.

http://www.gpsworld.com/
http://gpsmagazine.com/

:rox:
Image

User avatar
uncle wong
Regional Mapper
Posts: 888
Joined: Wed Jan 21, 2009 12:57 am
Location: Kuala Lumpur - Selangor - Johor I did not have a GPS device
Contact:

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby uncle wong » Wed May 27, 2009 10:36 am

Enjoy the GPS’s life!

User avatar
skylai
Valued Contributor
Posts: 430
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 2:21 pm
Location: prai noki5800

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby skylai » Wed Jun 10, 2009 7:46 am

You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Android 把nokia symbian 手机改朝换代了…

User avatar
tympg
Senior Mapper
Posts: 1586
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 11:01 am
Location: Penang

Most complete Earth topo map published

Postby tympg » Wed Jul 01, 2009 10:32 am

"Most complete Earth [topo] map published" -- BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8126197.stm

The link to ASTER is here: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/gdem.asp (But looks like the map is not ready these few days)
Garmin nüvi 2575R; Garmin eTrex Vista HCx; Android 5.0.1 Phone

User avatar
tympg
Senior Mapper
Posts: 1586
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 11:01 am
Location: Penang

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby tympg » Wed Feb 10, 2010 4:34 pm

GPS signals will be less accurate for the next few years because of heightened solar activity:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8494225.stm
Garmin nüvi 2575R; Garmin eTrex Vista HCx; Android 5.0.1 Phone

User avatar
vash_h
Posts: 428
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2008 12:14 am
Location: Petaling Jaya
Contact:

dont blame the device on poor GPS reception.. BLAME THE SUN!

Postby vash_h » Fri Feb 12, 2010 9:56 am

bump into this 5 minutes ago.. interesting read..

somehow.. i can feel people in papago, garmin, nokia, HTC briefing their call centres.. "there is nothing wrong with your GPS device.. it is the electromagnetic interference from the sun causing the problem.. " LOL

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8494225.stm

Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News


An X-ray image shows activity at the Sun's surface
Image

Researchers say the Sun is awakening after a period of low activity, which does not bode well for a world ever more dependent on satellite navigation.

The Sun's irregular activity can wreak havoc with the weak sat-nav signals we use.

The last time the Sun reached a peak in activity, satellite navigation was barely a consumer product.

But the Sun is on its way to another solar maximum, which could generate large and unpredictable sat-nav errors.

It is not just car sat-nav devices that make use of the satellite signals; accurate and dependable sat-nav signals have, since the last solar maximum, quietly become a necessity for modern infrastructure.

Military operations worldwide depend on them, although they use far more sophisticated equipment.

Sat-nav devices now form a key part of emergency vehicles' arsenals. They are used for high-precision surveying, docking ships and they may soon be used to automatically land commercial aircraft.

Closer to home, more and more trains depend on a firm location fix before their doors will open.

Simple geometry

The satellite navigation concept is embodied currently by the US GPS system and Russia's Glonass network, with contenders to come in the form of Europe's Galileo constellation and China's Compass system.

It depends on what is - at its root - a simple triangulation calculation.

A fleet of satellites circling the Earth are constantly beaming a radio signal with two bits of exceptionally precise information: where exactly they are, and at exactly what time.

A sat-nav receiver on Earth - or on a ship or plane - collects the time and position signals from the satellites that happen to be in its line of sight.

It then works out, based on how long it took those signals to arrive, how far it is from each of those satellites. Some simple geometry yields its position.

Image
1. Satellites advertise their exact position, and the precise time at which they are sending it
2. The signal travels through the outer atmosphere, the ionosphere; its speed depends on how much the Sun's radiation and particle winds are affecting the ionosphere's composition
3. A receiver on Earth determines how long the signals took to arrive from a number of satellites, calculating the position from the time differences

But those signals are incredibly weak and, as researchers have only recently begun to learn, sensitive to the activity on the Sun.

Solar flares - vast exhalations of magnetic energy from the Sun's surface - spray out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves through to high-energy gamma-rays, along with bursts of high-energy particles toward the Earth.

The radiation or waves that come from the Sun can make sat-nav receivers unable to pick out the weak signal from satellites from the solar flare's aftermath.

There is little that current technology can do to mitigate this problem, with the exception of complex directional antennas used in military applications.

Sat-nav receivers will be blinded for tens of minutes, probably a few times a year at the solar maximum.

Charged up

A further complication comes from the nature of the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere, the ionosphere.
That is composed in part of particles that have ionised, or been ripped apart by radiation from the Sun, with the composition dependent on how much radiation is coming from the Sun at a given time.

The problem comes about because sat-nav technology assumes that signals pass through at a constant speed - which in the ionosphere isn't necessarily the case.

"The key point is how fast the signals actually travelled," said Cathryn Mitchell of the University of Bath.

"When they come through the ionosphere, they slow down by an amount that is actually quite variable, and that adds an error into the system when you do the calculations for your position," Professor Mitchell told BBC News.

The amount of solar activity runs on many cycles; the ionisation will be different on the sun-lit side of the Earth from the night side, and different between summer and winter; each of these cycles imparts a small error to a sat-nav's position.

But the disruption caused by solar flares is significantly higher.

The increased radiation will ionise more molecules, and the bursts of particles can become trapped in the ionosphere as the Earth's magnetic field drags them in.

The effects that sat-nav users will face, however, are difficult to predict.

"We can look at the measurements from the last solar maximum," Professor Mitchell said.

"If we project those forward, it varies quite a lot across the Earth; looking at the UK it will be about 10-metre errors in the positioning."

The errors would be much more long-lasting than the "blindness" problem, lasting hours or even days.

"Ten metres out is probably going to be OK for a sat-nav system in a car, but if you're using the system for something safety-critical like ships coming into harbour for navigation or possibly in the future landing aircraft, you're looking for much greater accuracy and more importantly, much greater reliability."

Bob Cockshott, a director of the government-funded Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, said that for most consumer applications such as sat-nav for cars, the problem will be more troublesome than dangerous.

"You might find for a number of hours or even a day or two you couldn't go out surveying or be able to dock your oil tanker at the deep-ocean oil well," he told BBC News.

"It's more at the annoyance level than something that's going to bankrupt your business."

A number of schemes have been proposed to do real-time corrections to the signals as the atmosphere changes, allowing for local adjustments that are broadcast to receivers by other means such as the mobile phone network.

However, Mr Cockshott said that it remains unclear whether such a correction makes sense economically for manufacturers of sat-nav-enabled technology.

So as the Sun builds up to its peak in a few years' time, be aware that your sat-nav may for a time give some strange results - or for a short while none at all.
<-My Blog: HaroldChia.com->
<-MFM MAPS + Garmin Nuvi 50LM + Papago Z1 + Garmin Nuvi 205w + Samsung Galaxy Note 2 N7100 ->

User avatar
9W2CBL
Polygon Mapper
Posts: 755
Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 9:56 pm
Location: Seremban (Nuvi 200, Nuvi 255W and Mobile XT S60)
Contact:

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby 9W2CBL » Fri Feb 12, 2010 11:43 am

With high solar activities is good for Ham Radio operator to make distance contact on the band.

However the side effect of the high solar activities, is a bad side for commercial such as us the GPS user, the solar activities could affect the satellites performance.

Cheers!
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius
The avatar is design by Bro. Sulphur - Thanks!
Owned - nuvi200 (US Version), nuvi255W (TWN -> SGMY -> US -> TWN), Last MobileXT V5.00.60

luis
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Aug 22, 2010 7:16 pm

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby luis » Thu Sep 09, 2010 3:22 pm

I have a GPS that works with my D300. It is my idea GPS devoice, first, easy to install and use, because I don’t like to set complicated things. Second, catch GPS info quickly, and accurately. Third, do not affect any function that my camera has, like hotshoe and 10-pin shutter. And it is really small so I can carry it everywhere freely.
I ordered it online http://www.e-geotag.com/shopping.aspx, by paypal which is safe and convenient. And I received the package after 4 days by express though the shipping fee is a little expensive; anyway, it was really fast. To my great joy, it is much smaller than it seemed on the website, we can say tiny and cute.
I test it by going to the mountain nearby with my D300. The easytagger was easy setting and easy to use it caught satellite signal within 1 minute. Not only it recorded the geo info currently, but also tracked the route that I walked, plotting it along with the photos.
I put them in google map and share it with my family and friends, easytagger made my trip quite meaningful!
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

User avatar
zamad
Valued Contributor
Posts: 2312
Joined: Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:50 am
Location: Shah Alam

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby zamad » Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:07 pm

Gary Hayman's website on 'Tricks, Tips, Work Arounds, Hints, Secrets and Ideas for the Garmin nüvi GPS (and others)' is here: http://home.comcast.net/~ghayman3/garmin.gps/index.html
mfm : magnificent free maps
Garmin nüvi 2575RLM v2.80, Garmin 60CSx v4.00, Garmin nüvi 205W(patched), Papago R5800 X8.5, Qstarz Q1000P (Datalogger)
Retired: GMXT Palm T|X, nuvifone A10 v5.0.77, Garmin-Asus G60 v2.43, GPSlim236 (Datalogger)

User avatar
tympg
Senior Mapper
Posts: 1586
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 11:01 am
Location: Penang

Re: General GPS website Reference & News

Postby tympg » Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:16 am

The sun just had a big flare-up.
http://bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-12485104?

Be prepared for higher GPS signalling errors for the next few days.
Garmin nüvi 2575R; Garmin eTrex Vista HCx; Android 5.0.1 Phone


Return to “General GPS Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 12 guests