[HN Gopher] GPS vs. Glonass vs. Galileo
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GPS vs. Glonass vs. Galileo
 
Author : cokernel_hacker
Score  : 69 points
Date   : 2022-11-27 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
 
web link (www.gpsrchive.com)
w3m dump (www.gpsrchive.com)
 
| rzimmerman wrote:
| Interestingly despite becoming "fully operational" in 1995, GPS
| was in use in the 1980s and played a huge part in the Gulf War in
| 1990/1991. "Fully operational" probably means 12 satellites in
| view at all times for any point on the earth between
| 55degN/55degS, but it's still very useful even at lower levels of
| service.
| 
| It's pretty amazing that a system like that could be envisioned
| in the 1970s and be fundamentally life-changing by the 1990s.
| Truly a modern marvel of engineering that we rely upon for
| precise timing, power grid synchronization, navigation, and a lot
| more.
 
| smartmic wrote:
| Unfortunately, as it is with many European projects, Galileo is
| over-promised but yet under-delivered. Currently only 22
| satellites are usable: https://www.gsc-europa.eu/system-service-
| status/constellatio...
 
  | wewxjfq wrote:
  | Care to enlighten us how the satellite failures of Galileo are
  | worse than the satellite failures of the other systems?
 
    | mrtksn wrote:
    | Here is an article explaining the 2019 outage and the issues
    | with the satellites:
    | https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/galileo-accident/
    | 
    | The article argues that the Galileo project has a bit too
    | many participants in the development. Europe does have some
    | hugely successful multi-participant international projects
    | like Airbus or CERN but it is indeed more challenging to run
    | projects funded by 30 countries each having different
    | culture, language and interests.
    | 
    | It's really a re-occurring theme with no easy fix. The
    | European countries are too small to do such large projects by
    | themselves and our multi millennial history is about fighting
    | each other, so it's not always a smooth sail.
 
| throw0101c wrote:
| If anyone wants to get into the nitty-gritty details of GPS /
| GNSS, there's a good series of lectures (course) available from
| Standford University; playlist:
| 
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Fyn_h6LKU&list=PLGvhNIiu1u...
| 
| Topics include navigation message structure, signal encoding,
| error budgets, Keplerian parameters, path loss/antenna gain/link
| budget, plus orbital details of GLONASS/QZSS/BeiDou/Galileo.
 
| rzimmerman wrote:
| The Position Calculation and Satellite Selection sections are a
| little over-simplified. It's not true that one satellite is used
| for time synchronization and three are used for trilateration. In
| a four-satellite case, all four are used to solve the four
| dimensional problem of "where am I in time and space?" In
| reality, upwards of 12 satellites are used to find a solution to
| this problem and adding more data improves accuracy.
| 
| It's true that satellites overhead provide better more vertical
| position information and that satellites at low elevation are
| more impacted by the atmosphere. But the math isn't that simple -
| satellites aren't used for specific purposes. They all contribute
| to a position solution and useful parameters like vertical and
| horizontal uncertainty.
 
| dataflow wrote:
| How did L5 get enabled and still leave us with an accuracy worse
| than 3.5m? Wasn't it supposed to give us 30cm? What happened to
| that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
 
  | killingtime74 wrote:
  | Don't quote me but I believe you have to use both bands to get
  | that accuracy. Some devices support it.
  | https://support.garmin.com/en-NZ/?faq=9NWiPDU4gM0JWMfdWFol7A.
  | 
  | Real life test https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/04/garmin-
  | vertix-accuracy.h...
 
    | dataflow wrote:
    | Thanks. I've tried a phone with support for both L1 and L5
    | (and other systems) and I don't notice any improvements over
    | my old phone. In fact it seems to take longer to get a fix. I
    | would love to hear if anyone has found a phone that actually
    | gets significantly better performance with L5.
 
      | pifm_guy wrote:
      | Time to get a fix is mostly what clever techniques the
      | receiver uses. There are various papers demonstrating
      | getting a fix that is probably correct with just a few
      | milliseconds of signal and then lots of processing.
      | 
      | You also have to cut corners to get a (probably correct)
      | fix fast. Things like assuming the almanac hasn't changed
      | since last time, the user hasn't moved more than a few
      | hundred miles, the system clock hasn't drifted by more than
      | a second or so, and no satellites have become unhealthy.
 
        | chrisfosterelli wrote:
        | I've always noticed my Garmin watch gets a fix extremely
        | fast except for the first time I use it after traveling
        | somewhere new. That first one always takes several
        | minutes.
 
    | trollerator23 wrote:
    | Not all of the satellites have L5 either. As of today only
    | 16.
 
| JCM9 wrote:
| GPS can be much more accurate than what the article says. For
| example, over the continental US the extra WAAS satellites
| provide accuracy down to more like 3-4 feet for GPS based
| aircraft navigation. These satellites broadcast correction
| signals to allow receivers to adjust for small fluctuations in
| the standard GPS signal. Using that system aircraft can navigate
| in 3D down to about 200 ft off the ground for a landing approach
| without the need for any ground-based equipment or transmitters
| at the airport.
 
| jonathankoren wrote:
| According to this paper, if you hook in all four sat nav systems,
| you can achieve 10 cm accuracy in minutes, 5cm in 30 minutes, and
| millimeter accuracy in a few hours.
| 
| https://www.nature.com/articles/srep08328
 
| tdeck wrote:
| If you're interested in this, you might be interested in the
| terrestrial radio navigation systems that predated GPS:
| 
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_%28navigation_system%29
| 
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN
| 
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C#e_LORAN
| 
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_navigation
 
| dale_glass wrote:
| Those maps are interesting.
| 
| So GPS doesn't work well in Greenland or a good chunk of Russia?
 
| ck2 wrote:
| Also interesting is the American extension to GPS called WAAS
| which is used for aircraft precision.
| 
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System
 
| ummonk wrote:
| Kind of weird not to describe BeiDou as well...
 
  | danieldk wrote:
  | GPSrChive is very much focused on Garmin GPSr and I don't think
  | there are any Garmin devices that support BeiDou.
 
    | z2 wrote:
    | From Garmin, though without a breakdown of proportion of
    | devices:
    | 
    | In addition to GPS, Garmin products utilize other global
    | navigation satellite systems (GNSS) including the Russian
    | Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), the European
    | Union Galileo system (Galileo), and the Chinese BeiDou
    | Navigation Satellite System (BDS), and satellite based
    | augmentation systems (SBAS) including the U.S. Wide Area
    | Augmentation System (WAAS), the Japanese MTSAT-based
    | Satellite Augmentation System (MSAS) and Quasi-Zenith
    | Satellite System (QZSS), and the European Geostationary
    | Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) aviation Safety of Life
    | (SoL) service.
    | 
    | Though to the extent this is a US-centric site, the other
    | reason for not caring much about Beidou is that the FCC still
    | has a geofence block for Beidou, so that no signals may be
    | used in US territory: https://www.gps.gov/spectrum/foreign/.
    | It's as if Beidou doesn't exist in the US, and even a
    | receiver that supports it will only start using the signal
    | once it first confirms through other GNSS's that it's not
    | located in US. (Example: most phones made in the last 3-5
    | years)
 
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(page generated 2022-11-27 23:00 UTC)