Comment on FCC chair says we’re too dependent on GPS and wants to explore ‘alternatives’.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 3 days agoNah the idea is sound. As someone else said, GPS is incredibly fragile. Also very terrestrial…it doesn’t work once you leave the atmosphere.
This will probably be another SpaceX grift, but there are alternative technologies that are more resilient to attack. From military/defense perspective (the original reason for GPS), that’s pretty important.
it doesn’t work once you leave the atmosphere.
Fun fact: just this past week an experiment on a lunar lander confirmed that GPS signals can be detected from the surface of the moon. I don’t know if those signals can give any kind of location precision, but it is an interesting finding.
Xanza@lemm.ee 3 days ago
No, not really. The GPS signal isn’t designed to penetrate concrete, no. But that doesn’t make it fragile.
Considering it was never meant to…that’s really not that goddamn weird. It’s a global positioning satellite system. So clearly for it to work you have to be on the fuckin’ globe…
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Having functional GPS in a tunnel would be very nice…as someone who drives through Boston and fucking hates tunnels.
But that’s not what I meant by fragile. I meant it can be disrupted/jammed fairly trivially.
Xanza@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I fear for the world. You afraid that you’re gonna make a wrong turn? Inside of a tunnel? A fuckin’ tunnel my guy?
wjs018@piefed.social 3 days ago
You have clearly never driven on 93 through Boston where the person you replied to said they are from (aka the Big Dig). It is basically an entire highway that is underneath the city. There are many on and off ramps, lanes suddenly become exit only, complex multi-lane exits that branch...it's intimidating. As somebody that has lived in the Boston area for 15 years now, I still mess things up.
lengau@midwest.social 2 days ago
There’s no reason why some sort of augmentation system couldn’t improve the navigation situation with the big dig. Stick some low power beacons that provide GPS-like signal in the tunnel based on their predetermined location and we’ll have GPS accounting for special relativity, general relativity and continental drift.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Global Positioning System, I sleep Universal Positioning System, real shit
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There was an article today about how they just used GPS on the moon.