America is too dependent on tech developed owned and operated by the american military?!
the fuck?
One interesting alternative would be the Visual Positioning System (VPS) that Niantic has built from Pokemon go player data. Basically you can take a picture outside and your phone will know exactly where you are:
https://www.nianticspatial.com/locate#vps
Too bad they’re getting close to being bought out by a company that’s notorious for squeezing out every penny from their player base.
Edit: Correction, Pokemon Go is being bought from Niantic… The company itself is not being bought.
And this is why the EU should have ignored the US when they whined that our Gallileo system used different frequencies from GPS.
As it stands now Gallileo was built to using frequencies that the US can jam using GPS.
I really hope this means another attempt to use the magnetosphere itself. MAGNAV might actually be possible at this point.
Edit: better article. AI advancements make MAGNAV a real possibility now. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3408951/magnav-project-successfully-demonstrates-real-time-magnetic-navigation/
How does that handle high tension lines and the like, doesn’t it disturb the magnetosphere far too much? Kinda the reason even compasses don’t work anymore in town?
No idea. I think there’s a lot of machine learning - enabled mapping up front.
GPS isn’t just for google maps. I’m a land surveyor and we literally use GPS every single day. Without it we’re basically fucked. We do hydrographic surveying and without GPS we’d have to basically go back to analog as 90% of the equipment on our boat would be useless. Good luck figuring out how much water is left in the Colorado river without it.
Im not exactly an expert on this, but i am very familiar with what my job requires. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) will be completely fucked without it as it’s built on decades of data and monitoring. You can’t just look for “alternatives.” Whatever Elmo has is not robust enough for the precision that is required for what we use GPS for. And without shit like that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a city.
Most receivers already use GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and beidou.
