Posted 11/04/08 at 01:11:31 PM by Michael Brown

In the immortal words of Buckaroo Bonzai, “Wherever you go, there you are.” But if you want to know precisely where “there” is, you need a GPS device. Let’s examine how this technology operates.

The fundamental idea of a satellite-based navigation system was conceived prior to Word War II, but no one pursued the idea aggressively until the Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Research continued through the 1960s, and the U.S. Department of Defense settled on the first design in 1973.

The first developmental GPS satellite—Navstar 1—was launched in 1978, the first fully operational GPS satellite was put into orbit in 1989, and the system was declared fully operational in 1995. Although GPS remains an indispensable military tool (and is maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense), the technology was made available to consumers in the 1980s and can now be found in relatively inexpensive devices ranging from cellphones and PDAs to dedicated handheld GPS receivers.

Read more after the jump.

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white paper, GPS, location tracking, global positioning system, satellites

Posted 07/17/08 at 08:09:44 PM by Norman Chan

As you probably know, one of the new features in the iPhone 3G is the built-in GPS radio, which lets you pinpoint your location for hipster-loving social networking apps like twitter and loopt. In Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, he showed off the GPS functionality with a video of the Maps application tracking a car as it drove down Lombard Street in San Francisco. The blinking blue dot followed the car as to passed each block, updating at a short enough intervals to move fluidly. While that’s cool and practical, we wanted to push the iPhone’s GPS to its limits. And the best way we could think of to stress test vehicle tracking was to try it on a moving airplane.

Read on to see how the iPhone performed at 200 miles per hour – in the air.  

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iphone, consumer electronics, GPS, test, iphone 3g, boeing 737, location tracking