Global Positioning Systems
kbaker May 16th, 2008
There are many technologies and gadgets I like. But one of the most fascinating to me is Global Positioning. I’m still amazed by the fact that Global Position Systems (GPS) work, and work as well as they do. Maybe its my love of clocks and timepieces, maybe its the thought of receiving messages from a satellite orbiting the earth. Whatever it is, I love GPS.
But what is it good for? There are many, many uses for a GPS and I hope to be able to get into some of them in future posts. But the first thing I did when I bought my GPS was I used it to determine the latitude and longitude of some special places and locations. Using the GPS I recorded the lat/long of the grave sites of my ancestors and added the location data to the genealogical information I already had about them.
Now the lat/long coordinates given by a GPS are on average accurate to about 20 feet. On a good day I’ve gotten the accuracy down to around 8 feet. So armed with the lat/long from my notes and a few digital pictures of the area, any one of my children or grandchildren could easily find the grave site of my great-grandfather. This offers a great way to enable family and friends to find important personal landmarks.
And I don’t believe GPS is going away any time soon. Many industries use GPS as part of their daily operations. Even the new flight control systems in development today will use GPS information as their primary way of knowing where the planes are in the sky.
A GPS is not for everyone. It’s a fun gadget with few uses in your daily routine. But as GPS enabled phones and cameras become commonplace, you will have more opportunities to take advantage of this new type of information.
I always take my GPS withme in case I get lost on my bot scout campouts. But normally I use it to chart me speed and progress in my running races.