Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS

As reported by Wired: If there was ever a justification needed for space technology, it’s that it keeps people like me from constantly being lost. These days, my smart phone is much better than me at getting around thanks to a fleet of satellites that tells it where it is at all times.

Though not a particularly romantic anniversary, today marks 25 years since the first satellite in the U.S. Global Positioning System launched from Cape Canaveral, beginning the set up for one of the wonders of the modern world. In the two and a half decades since then, GPS has become inextricably embedded into just about everything we own, finding use in cartography, smart phone apps, geotagging and geocaching, disaster relief, and hundreds of other applications, while simultaneously raising privacy concerns.

GPS relies on at least 24 satellites flying 20,000 kilometers overhead in one of six different orbital paths, tracing out what looks like a toy model of an atom. With their solar panels extended, each of these 1-ton satellites is about the same size as a giraffe. At any given moment, each satellite beams out a signal identifying itself and giving its time and location.

A model showing the 24 original GPS satellites
in orbit and a point on the Earth rotating.

Your GPS-enabled phone or car captures that signal and compares the time it was received to the time it was transmitted. A quick calculation involving the speed of light allows the device to figure out the distance to that satellite. If you have your distance to two or three satellites, you can triangulate your position on the Earth. When all the GPS satellites are working, a user always has at least four in view, allowing them to determine things like altitude, speed, and direction.

In order to properly triangulate, GPS requires extremely accurate timekeeping, which is why each satellite carries an atomic clock. The satellites are also some of the most important technology using lessons learned from Einstein, who taught us that clocks outside a gravitational well will run faster than those inside of it because of the warping of space-time. An opposite effect comes from the fact that GPS satellites move at 14,000 kilometers per hour (0.001 percent the speed of light), meaning that they experience a slight time dilation making their clocks run slow relative to one at rest on the ground. The two effects taken together mean that the clock on a GPS satellite runs about 38 microseconds faster each day than ones here on Earth. GPS requires accuracy of 20 to 30 nanoseconds (one microsecond is 1,000 nanoseconds), so both effects are part of the calculation determining how far away each satellite is at any given time.

The idea behind GPS comes from the very beginnings of the Space Race. In 1957, the Soviet’s newly launched Sputnik satellite emitted a characteristic radio beep that could be tuned in to as the object passed overhead. While the rest of the U.S. was freaking out, two scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory realized they could use those transmissions to pinpoint where the satellite was. As Sputnik approached, its radio signals would get compressed a little, shortening their wavelength, and as it receded, the wavelengths would lengthen. This is known as the Doppler effect and can easily be heard as an ambulance speeds toward you, the pitch of its siren getting higher.

The APL scientists used UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers in the U.S., to figure out Sputnik’s orbit. A year later, they were asked to do the opposite problem: Find out where someone was on Earth based on the location of an overhead satellite. This was soon taken up by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (later named DARPA, the agency responsible for developing the internet), which launched satellites starting in 1964 as part of the TRANSIT program, the first satellite navigation program. The U.S. Navy was the main user of the TRANSIT satellites, using them to provide location information for their missile submarines.

Developing, launching, and maintaining the satellites necessary for a full GPS system was horrendously expensive (eventually costing roughly $8 billion in today’s dollars). If it hadn’t been for the Cold War and the fact that the U.S. needed to launch nuclear missiles from anywhere and everywhere, GPS might never have happened. The paranoid U.S. military wanted to make sure they would be able to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack even if some of its nuclear arsenal was destroyed. It wasn’t enough to have aircraft bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launchers. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles were needed to provide a counterattack from the sea. (The Soviets, of course, had similarly spread-out countermeasures.)

But submarines needed to accurately know their position before launching a missile in order to hit their target. The Navy had TRANSIT for this. Working in parallel throughout the 1960s, the Air Force developed a similar concept called MOSAIC for their bombers and the Army launched satellites under the SECOR program that could determine the location of a unit somewhere on the globe.

By 1973, the branches of the U.S. military realized they could combine their ideas and come up with something superior to all three. In September of that year, the top brass met at the Pentagon and came up with what would eventually become known as the Navigation System Using Timing and Ranging program, called Navstar-GPS, which was later shortened to just GPS. Between 1978 and 1985, the military launched 11 satellites (10 of which worked) to test the new GPS system.

An unlaunched GPS unit, which looks like probably the most satellitey satellite ever. Image: Scott Ehardt

After Korean Air Lines flight 007 was shot down in 1983 for wandering into prohibited U.S.S.R. airspace, President Reagan promised that GPS would be opened up for civilian use on passenger aircraft once it was completed. The first GPS satellite in the modern fleet launched on Feb. 14, 1989. The Air Force had planned to use the space shuttle for this launch in 1986 but was delayed by the Challenger disaster and eventually used a Delta II rocket. The full GPS fleet was completed in 1994 and now at least 32 satellites are in orbit to provide redundancy. During the same time, the Russians developed and launched GLONASS, which works on principles similar to GPS, and is currently the only alternative location-finding system in the world.

At its beginning, the U.S. military feared that GPS technology would be used by enemies, and purposely degraded civilian information so that it could only provide accurate location information to within 100 meters. In 2000, President Clinton had this feature turned off and now civilian devices are usually accurate to within 5 to 10 meters. The European Union and China are currently building their own global navigation systems, known as Galileo and Beidou, respectively, that will serve as further alternatives to GPS in the coming decade. It seems likely that folks in the future will never have to worry about being lost again.

Revamping An Old Technology To Jam The GPS Jammers

As reported by Naked Security: Every day, GPS navigation systems are at work around the globe, guiding and tracking lorries, trucks, mobile phones, passenger vehicles, aerospace vessels and more, in spite of whatever the weather throws at them, as long as they're in line of sight with at least four satellites.

But while they're ubiquitous, GPS devices are also fragile.

That's because they run on feeble signals that can be spoofed and thrown off course by stronger signals (it's been demonstrated with an $80 million yacht and a drone).

Beyond spoofing, GPS can be swamped entirely by stronger signals coming from (illegal) GPS jammers - low-power, pocket-sized devices that drown out signals going to GPS receivers.


Such jammable GPS signals include those that power mobile phones, text messages, GPS systems, and WiFi networks.

You can pick up such jammers cheap on the internet, where they're sold under premises such as helping to silence the clamor that plagues noisy classrooms, theaters, restaurants, or business meetings.

They're also used by commercial drivers who don't want their employers tracking their every move, domestic violence victims who don't want to be found, and criminals who use jammers to intercept valuable cargo loads or commit other crimes.

A recent example: US authorities arrested what they said was a gang of high-tech burglars who allegedly cut telephone lines to disable alarms and used cellular telephone signal jamming devices to stop the back-up alarms from notifying the alarm companies’ central stations.

Beyond enabling crooks, jamming can have dangerous consequences.

In August 2013, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a $32K penalty for using a GPS jamming device.

Michele Ellison, Chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau, cites the potential consequences of GPS jamming and the FCC's motives behind jacking up punishment for using jammers:

While people who use jammers may think they are only silencing disruptive conversations or disabling unwanted GPS capabilities, they could also be preventing a scared teenager from calling 9-1-1, an elderly person from placing an urgent call to a doctor, or a rescue team from homing in on the location of a severely injured person. The price for one person's moment of peace or privacy could be the safety and well-being of others.

Beyond fines and warnings, communications experts have been seeking technological improvements in GPS that could overcome jammers.

Within the past year, the UK has been ramping up one such technology.

It's called eLORAN - short for enhanced LOng-RAnge Navigation - and it enables navigation by triangulating via low-frequency/longwave radio signals transmitted by fixed land-based radio beacons.

LORAN has been around for a while, having first been used in military operations in World War II, but the growing popularity of GPS pushed LORAN out in the 1990s.

The "enhanced" part of eLORAN comes from more recent improvements in the technology, including increased accuracy of traditional LORAN, achieved via advances in receiver design and transmission characteristics.

One such improvement is the ability of eLORAN receivers to now use signals from all stations in range, up to 40 stations.

Dana Goward, president and executive director of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNT) Foundation, which supports adoption of eLoran, told InsideGNSS that the eLORAN signal is about 1.3 million times more powerful than the GPS signal - far too brawny a signal to be tripped up by GPS jammers.
On top of that, the signals can, unlike GPS, reach underground, under water, and into buildings, InsideGNSS reports.

Here's how it's described by David Last, a British expert on positioning, navigation and timing systems (PNT), as quoted by InsideGNSS:

I draw the analogy by saying that Loran in its original form, which a lot of people remember, came from the days of black and white television. What we’ve got here [with eLoran] is still television, it’s still Loran — but it’s digital. It’s high-definition. It’s color. It’s big screen. It’s all of those things.

On top of that, eLORAN signals are seen as an excellent backup to GPS signals, being impervious not only to whatever a jammer throws at them but also to asteroids.

The Telegraph reports that the UK is pioneering the use of eLORAN for navigation.

The UK has, actually, been building eLORAN infrastructure since at least 2007, when the UK Department for Transport, via the General Lighthouse Authorities, awarded a 15-year contract to provide a state-of-the-art eLORAN service to improve the safety of mariners in the UK and Western Europe.

More recently, the General Lighthouse Authorities last year became the first in the world to deploy eLORAN to help counter the threat of GPS jamming for shipping companies operating both passenger and cargo services along the south and east coasts.

The technology is expected to be up and running and foiling GPS jammers by this summer.

Meanwhile, the US is following suit.

According to GPS World, President Barack Obama last month signed the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) for 2014 - an act that shows "an acute awareness" of the vulnerability of space systems to navigational disruption, it reports.

It sounds like the US is gearing up to protect national security, space systems and more with the unjammable technology. 

Inside The Google Earth Satellite Factory

Google Earth has given us a new way of looking at our cities and
neighborhoods - from space.

As reported by BBC: Behind a long rectangular window, in a high white room tended by ghostly figures in masks and hats, a new satellite is taking shape. Once in orbit later this year, WorldView-3 will be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever sent into space by a private company. Spinning around the planet some 600 kilometers (370 miles) above us, it will cover every part of the Earth’s surface every couple of days.

Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado is building WorldView-3 for commercial satellite operator DigitalGlobe. It is the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to beam back high-resolution pictures of our planet, images that most of us will eventually see on Google Maps or Google Earth.

This month Google Maps celebrates its ninth anniversary, and in June so does the company’s 3-D mapping app, Google Earth. Together they have changed the way we view the world. “Everybody I’m sure has looked up their house, their downtown, their business on Google Earth, and seen images from these satellites,” says Jeff Dierks, Program Manager at Ball. “It gives me a lot of pride when I see a satellite image on a news program with the DigitalGlobe logo on them.”

This clean room is where satellites such as Worldview-3 and
Worldview-2 (pictured) are built (Ball Aerospace).

Rather than operate its own spacecraft, Google buys its images from a small number of commercial satellite operators, and Dierks has worked on most of the satellites used. What’s surprising is how basic the technology is. “At its simplest, it is a decent resolution digital camera in space,” he explains, as we peer through the window into the clean room where the spacecraft is being built.

With its long cylindrical shape, WorldView-3 looks more like a telescope than a camera and it works on the same principle. The light comes in through a barrel structure, pointed at the Earth, and is bounced around by a series of mirrors, before being focused onto a CCD sensor. The big difference – apart from the size – between this and a typical handheld digital camera, is that the spacecraft will not just take snapshots but continuous images along thin strips of land or sea. Behind it, a giant Stars and Stripes flag has been painted across the wall. “Seeing the flag makes our government customers unbelievably happy,” laughs Dierks.

The satellite will be able to point to particular areas of interest and is capable of seeing objects just 25cm (10 inches) across. However, DigitalGlobe can only sell these highest-resolution images to customers in the US government. For everyone else, the company is only licensed to release images with a resolution of 50cm (20 inches). The latest US spy satellites, in comparison, are reported to be able to pick out objects less than 10cm (4 inches) across. But, for obvious reasons, the US military does not make those images available for free on Google.

DigitalGlobe's satellites have captured a wealth of views, such
as this of Paris' Versailles Palace (DigitalGlobe)

Still, from more than 600km away, travelling at around eight kilometers per second, capturing an image half-a-meter across is an impressive technical achievement, and is less likely to raise concerns about privacy.

Images from WorldView-3 will be sold to thousands of businesses for everything from urban planning to forest monitoring, oil exploration to map making. But most of us will probably use them to look at our house from space. Unfortunately, unless you live in a major city, then you are unlikely to benefit in the short term from the improved images captured by this new satellite.

“Large metropolitan areas get imaged most often,” Dierks concedes. “Once a year they pick cities like Denver or London and re-scan them and they get it into their database – how often Google buys those images and updates its maps, is up to them.”

Google is also only likely to purchase images captured on a cloud-free day. For some of us, this makes the odds of getting a new space picture of our house increasingly thin. “People ask ‘why can’t I see my new shed’, and I tell them to check back in a year or so,” Dierks says. In fact there is a good chance that, within the next year, if you look at a satellite picture of a major city it will include images captured by WorldView-3.

Ball Aerospace now has competition, Urthecast built new cameras
recently fitted to the International Space Station (NASA).

But today you also have the option of using services such as Bing or Apple maps, which also use images from DigitalGlobe. And very soon a new player will enter the market. Rather than pictures taken five years ago (the one of my house, for instance, is at least eight years old), UrtheCast promises live images of the Earth that anyone can download for free. Cosmonauts recently installed the Canadian company’s two UK-built cameras on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and the system will shortly enter its beta-testing phase. For those of us obsessed with looking at ourselves from space, this can only be good news.

Back in the clean room at Ball Aerospace in Colorado, Dierks is also looking forward to seeing his latest satellite in orbit. “If you talk to most of us here we've been space geeks for all of our lives,” he says. “I keep track of the satellite tracking programs on the computer at home and if it’s coming by, I’ll step out into the backyard and see the satellite I've built flying over. And that’s pretty neat.”

Bluetooth Technology Expands Beyond Wireless Devices

As reported by NY1 News: If you thought Bluetooth was purely created as a wireless way to link your mobile device to a headset or speaker or your car, boy, were you off, and a $60 H2O-Pal water bottle is one example of just how far off you were.

Using weight sensors and an accelerometer, the water bottle helps make sure you're getting the proper amount of hydration each day.

"You can attach it to the base of your favorite water bottle. It tracks your movement, and it knows when the water bottle moved, so it waits for the water bottle to be put back on a surface, and it then takes a weight measurement," says Igor Marjanovic of Out of Galaxy.

The app it connects to then tells you when to drink and even adjusts so that you're drinking more the hotter it is outside.

There's also a new wave of products that seem like Bluetooth no-brainers - app-enabled hearing aids.

The bluetooth enabled Resound Linx, which will sell for a little more than $3,000, allows users to control the volume, send phone calls or music straight to the hearing aid, and even set up one-touch customization.

"So if you like certain settings for your home, certain settings for when you're at the ballpark, the app can automatically ensure that those are set for you depending on where you move around," says Morten Hansen from ReSound.

And finally, just in case the socks you're wearing right now aren't quite high-tech enough for you, here you go - Bluetooth-enabled socks.

Called Sensoria Fitness socks, you will also have to wear a Bluetooth anklet in order to pull the data from the socks and send it to your phone. The setup will cost around $200.

"Real fabric has been treated to detect pressure for getting real cadence, real step counts, how the foot lands on the ground while you're running, and this is important to hopefully avoid injuries and have a better running technique," says Maurizio Macagno from Heapsylon.

Sensoria Fitness is also getting set to offer, through similar technology, heart rate-sensing t-shirts and sports bras.

Electronic Logging Device (ELD) rule now projected for Feb. 27

As reported by CCJ Digital: In its monthly update on significant rulemakings, the Department of Transportation has again revised the projected date of publication for a rule mandating Electronic Logging Devices (also known as Electronic Onboard Recorders) for all drivers subject to keeping records of duty status, backing it up this time to Feb. 27.

This is the third month in a row the DOT’s report has projected a date later in the same month, but in both December and January, no rule came, and the rule still has yet to clear the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The current DOT report predicts that the rule will clear OMB Friday, Feb. 14.

Upon publication, the proposed rule would have a 60-day comment period ending April 30.

Also updated in the DOT report is the status of the drug and alcohol clearinghouse rule,which cleared the OMB Jan. 27 and is now projected to be published Friday, Feb. 14. The rule would establish a database of drivers who have failed or refused to take a drug or alcohol test, and carriers would be required to upload test refusals or failures to the database. Carriers could also query the database when screening drivers.

It too will have a 60-day comment period, ending April 14.

The Carrier Safety Fitness Determination rule is still projected to be published in early August, per the report. The rule would allow the agency to change the methodology with which it calculates carriers’ Safety Fitness Determination scores, allowing it to use data from roadside inspections, crashes, investigations and violation history — a very similar data set as used in the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s Safety Measurement Score.

The DOT report also still projects its driver coercion to be published April 23. The rule would create a requirement that the agency “consider whether coercion of drivers” by shippers, receivers, carriers or brokers “is a concern when developing a rule.”

Portland Uses Wireless Alert System For First Time

As reported by KGW: The City of Portland used the Federal Wireless Emergency Alert system for the first time Sunday morning to warn residents after freezing rain blanketed the metro area with ice.

On Saturday evening, the freezing rain paralyzed the city that has already been reeling from three days of snow.

The system sent a special alert to all WEA-enabled cell phones in Multnomah County. The message read: "Portland strongly urges all residents to stay indoors today & not travel due to ice."

"The icy condition of sidewalks, in addition to the already slick roads, were key deciding factors in sending out the alert," Transportation Director Leah Treat said.

Sunday’s alert was the first time WEA was used by the City of Portland. The system was previously used by the National Weather Service and for Amber Alerts.

Five Ways GPS Helps Cut Costs and Improve Service

Farmers rely on GPS systems to program tractors to automatically
plow, fertilize, and harvest their fields.

As reported by Government Technology: The Global Positioning System (GPS) is made up of 24 operational satellites orbiting the earth at speeds around 7,000 mph. At this speed, you could travel across the entire United States in about 30 minutes. Did you know that GPS is used on golf courses to measure the distance between golfers and the pin? Farmers also rely on GPS systems to program tractors to automatically plow, fertilize, and harvest their fields.

Here are five ways GPS technology can help you cut costs within your government agency and provide better public service.

1.       Reduce downtime

With GPS, you can automatically collect location data and transmit the information to any computer or device with a browser. Managers can see where field employees are and produce reports showing where a worker has stopped, for how long, at what time, and on which date. Reducing idle time equates to improved efficiency and often less overtime – a cost savings no agency can ignore.

2.       Integrate and dispatch jobs to the field
Customer service representatives handle thousands of non-emergency 311 calls related to city streets; sidewalk curbs; signs and pavement markings; bicycle and pedestrian programs; and more. Being able to generate jobs information from the field allows for faster response to 311 requests. A prompt reply may even reduce the number of repeat calls – a win-win for everyone.

3.       Send help where it's needed – quickly
When storms or disasters hit, using mobile forms means departments can note what types of crews and equipment are needed and where, depending on the nature and location of the disaster area. This data can be transmitted back to headquarters where a detailed analysis can be done to set tasks for the next shift and adequately schedule work crews. In the event of a disaster, a prompt reply is expected of any city or state government. GPS and forms can ease the stress of an emergency by helping place the required help in the hardest hit areas.

4.       Automate timekeeping and payroll processing
Many city workers and contractors have to clock in and clock out for work. This often requires extra time to simply submit essential paperwork. GPS technology can automate timesheets and payroll processing, shaving minutes from hundreds of workers. The best part is that the timesheets can sync with your accounting program to make this truly a seamless process for both workers and administration.

5.       Use geofencing to ensure safety of employees and reduce fuel costs
A geofence is a virtual barrier for a specified geographic area. Programs that use geofencing allow managers to set up triggers when a vehicle enters or exits the defined boundaries. There are two common uses of this technology.

a.       Employee safety: Managers are alerted if an employee enters or leaves a specified area. With many city workers working in the field, it is critical to ensure their safety, but not knowing where everyone is located makes this nearly impossible. GPS technology can alert dispatchers if a code enforcer has not made contact and send backup if necessary.

b.      Reducing fuel costs: Studies have found that with GPS tracking installed on fleets, employees are less likely to make personal stops, therefore reducing fuel costs.