Tag Archive for 'GPS'

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GPS-Galileo interoperability agreement

Published on July 27, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Business, Europe, Funding, Galileo, GPS, Interoperability, LBS, Positioning.

Today the EU and US announced their agreement on the GPS-Galileo common civil signal. So future (civil) devices will be able to communicate with GPS and/or Galileo satellites.

Interoperability usually is a good thing and especially in that case it’ll help Galileo to literally take off because GPS is widely adopted.

However, a few questions remain…

A strong driving force behind Galileo was to become independent from US-operated GPS. In an earlier agreement the US already ensured that Galileo can be regionally turned off for security reasons. Does the current new interoperability agreement have any effect on the earlier “US veto” agreement? What happened to the independence argument in this new agreement?

One of the main advantages of Galileo over GPS was its higher accuracy (it was said to be to function even indoor quite well). As far as I know positioning accuracy depends on frequency and signal interference (I’m no engineer, so correct me if I’m wrong). If GPS and Galileo use the same signal, what happened to that advantage? I would assume that GPS and Galileo achieve the same accuracy then.

To say future devices will, based on the agreed interoperability, support both systems is kind of a weak argument. I guess they would’ve done so anyways. Putting two chips in one device shouldn’t be a problem until 2012 (when Galileo is supposed to start).

Since private companies left and the financing of Galileo is very likely done by public funding, which somehow shows that the private sector doesn’t really trust in future Galileo business opportunities, the “supporting European LBS business” argument is slightly disappearing too.

So where is the point for Galileo? Or why should the EU not drop Galileo, license, build and operate it’s own GPS satellites instead and probably save a lot of tax money?

GPS FON hotspots

Published on January 15, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: FON, GPS, Wifi.

As FON user you have now another option to find the closest FON hotspot to your position:

go to FON Maps Liberator
navigate to your area
download the FON hotspots as GPX
and feed your GPS device with the data.

If you don’t call a GPS device your own you still can use this FON hotspot directory or mobile maps (they offer a GPS tool too, btw) on your cell phone to locate FON hotspots on the way. (via TecnoMaps)

Cool GPS

Published on January 7, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Apple, GPS, Macworld, Marketing, Rumors.

Like every year right before the infamous Macworld Expo in San Francisco, many rumors about what’s next coming out of Apple’s pipe are making the round. As Mac user it’s pretty hard to stay out of this circus.

Anyways, especially this rumor, about integrating GPS technology in Apple products and making their devices sort of location aware, has called my attention.

What could it mean?

GPS technology, besides its use in industry and in-car navigation systems, is currently an alpha geek gadget. There are a few early adopters, like the geocaching scene or OSM, who enjoy playing around with GPS. But it’s still a small user group and not ready for the mass market.

As seen many times before, Apple’s marketing department can easily stamp the word COOL on a product and turn an alpha geek gadget into a lifestyle product.

I think if Apple would suddenly start integrating GPS in Mac OS X or any other Apple product, it would

bring considerable attention from the entertainment sector to that technology,
probably trigger development of new (entertaining) GPS applications and
GPS would definitely become a COOL thing.

So, this year again, I’m anxiously looking to San Francisco on Tuesday.

GALILEO green paper

Published on December 14, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Europe, Galileo, GPS, Politics.

If you’re interested in the development of GALILEO, the European satellite navigation system, you should have a look at the green paper published by the European Commission.

It gives a good overview, raises a few questions about future GALILEO applications and gives thereby a slight insight into the commission’s view of that project. (via TecnoMaps)

GPS data search

Published on October 30, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Geodata, Google Co op, GPS, Map, Search.

The GPS tracklog blog has created a GPS data search as a custom search engine based on Google’s Co-op platform, aimed to bundle resources of free available GPS maps, POIs, etc.

If you happen to know a source which should be included, head over and let Rich know. Once all listed GPS resources got indexed by Google this customized search will be pretty useful.

4816, positioning art

Published on August 27, 2006 in Geotech and Other. Closed Tags: 4816, Art, Fun, Geotag, GPS, Participation, Vienna.

If you call a GPS device your own, live in the area of Vienna and enjoy discovering your neighborhood from a new perspective then you should have a look at 4816:

the intersection of the minutes

4816 is about finding the minute points on the GPS grid in the urban area of Vienna. The point N48° 11,000´ E16° 19,000 is an example of these 185 intersections of latitudinal and longitudinal minutes within Vienna. … At each intercept point a photo is taken in each compass direction.

By traversing the GPS intercept points you take a journey through Vienna. The goal is known. But what will be the nature of its environment? Will it be approachable? What will be the special thing about it?

Kick-off is this thursday night (8/31/2006) at the FLUC in Vienna.

To get a picture of how far this project can get, I marked the minute intersections in and around Vienna in a Google Map.

Looking at certain markers on the satellite image I started thinking about methods to stabilize a little boat in the middle of the danube, precisely at N48°16′ E16°22′, for the time necessary to take a picture in each compass direction. Any ideas?

At locations like N48°15′ E16°22′ you should be quick and better have a copy of the railway schedule in your pocket if you don’t want to be run over by a train.

Well, before trying this two points I should check if all my insurance fees are paid.

Still fun and less dangerous will be explaining to people why I it is so important to enter their garden and make 4 pictures at this magic location.

I think Don Cooke would love this project.

Update
I have now a GPX-file and a KML-file for Google Earth available which show only the minute intersections within the boundaries of Vienna. Since my Google Map parses the same GPX-file, it got updated too.

Aspern maze

Published on August 20, 2006 in Other. Closed Tags: Geotag, GPS, Map, Orientation, Vienna.

Never ever try accessing Flugfeld Aspern from the southern side.

Today I wanted to get to the old runways, I’ve never been there before and I know this area only from above, from maps, development plans and Google Earth. From above things appear easier than they actually are. A rectangular settlement and street structure is supposed to be easy for orientation and mind maps. Very misleading and probably the reason why I left the map at home because it’s seems so easy to go there.

No way! I simply couldn’t find a way to the old rollways. All the fences and hedges in this area destroy any sense for direction. At a certain point I even found myself going in circles!

Maybe I should’ve placed a waypoint on my GPS before I left for Flugfeld Aspern.

However, next time I’ll try from the northern side, put the map in my bag and mark some spots on the GPS before leaving.

See the track, including some photos, here.

Flickr knows the place

Published on August 2, 2006 in Geotech and Tech. Closed Tags: Flickr, Geotag, GPS, Photos.

Flickr reads out IPTC place information and automatically tags your pictures with it. Tools like GPS Photo Linker allow you, based on given GPS tracks, to add coordinates, elevation and IPTC place information to your photo. I figured this out after I geotagged and uploaded the pictures of our last weekend trip. Nice feature!

ArcGIS on Mac OS X

Published on July 2, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Apple, ArcGIS, Boot Camp, ESRI, GIS, GPS, Mac OS X, Parallels.

Some might go out and play Minigolf on their free weekends, I stay at home and fiddle around with some geo things on my new MacBook.

As result of this afternoon I got ESRI’s ArcGIS up and running on Mac OS X. Of course with a little help of a virtual Windows installation in the background.

What needs to be done?

Well, first I had to decide which virtualization software I want to use. Basically I had a closer look at Apple’s Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link). Whereas Boot Camp doesn’t count as virtualization tool, it just enables booting and running Windows on any Intel Mac. That was mainly the reason why I didn’t go with Boot Camp. Every time you need Windows-only software you’ll have to restart your machine. In the case of ArcGIS I’m not planning to use it on a 10 hrs/day basis on the laptop, it’s just an “emergency” installation, to edit and modify some minor things on the way or to use it for presentation and demo purposes. So in the end I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop.

There are of course some other tools available, like Virtual PC for instance, but after a quick research on some reviews I decided to focus on Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop for my purposes.

What about perfomance?

RAM limitations Actually I was positively surprised by ArcGIS’s performance in Parallels Desktop. I expected it to be sluggish and painfully slow, but it wasn’t at all. To complete basic tasks and do some map editing it’s quite ok and usable. The main limitations are RAM and video card. On Parallels Desktop you allocate a certain amount of RAM to your Windows installation, 512MB in my case. I think you can only allocate the half of your built-in RAM as maximum.

Virtual video driver The video card is another major drawback: Windows sees a virtual graphic card with only 8MB of VRAM available. Not too much if you’re planning to do some 3D visualization (which I won’t). However, I’m wondering how ArcGIS Explorer (3D!) is performing under this conditions since there won’t be a Mac version.

A Windows installation enabled by Boot Camp accesses all of your RAM, makes use of your video card instead of emulating its own and the processor isn’t occupied with Mac OS X tasks while you are working in Windows. There are good chances that ArcGIS will act somewhat faster too.

Something else?

No luck with GPS so far. The Garmin GPSmap 60C is recognized by Windows but not by MapSource. I wish Garmin would fix their USB issue and come up with some Mac support. It can’t be that hard, other devices seem to work just fine.

Along with Apple’s switch to Intel it’s now easier than ever before to use Windows-only applications (like most GIS and GPS software) on Mac OS X. There are various virtualization products available which deliver good Windows perfomances. Using Boot Camp even gives you the full perfomance of your machine, considering some missing hardware drivers (Boot Camp is still beta). Let’s see in August what comes with Mac OS 10.5 out of the pipe.

Where 2.0 day #2

Published on June 15, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Autodesk, ESRI, GIS, GPS, Open source, SVG, Where 2.0, World Wind.

There are dozens of posts out there that cover very well the second day and all the talks of Where 2.0. So I’ll briefly sketch my personal highlights of today (as I did yesterday):

I really got impressed by the effort of NASA’s World Wind team to improve their product and their enthusiasm behind all their work. From an EULA point of view it’s quite clear that in a professional environment NASA’s World Wind is the only option to go (by now) if one would like to use globe applications:

World wind has no use restriction,
it’s 100% open source software,
extendable due to their add-ons,
direct integration of WMS (and soon WFS),
supports GIS file formats like ESRI shapefiles.

Once the place names can be accessed via WFS and don’t have to be packed into the application itself, the download size (60 MB at the moment) will significantly decrease to probably only a few megabytes.
Support for more platforms should be achieved in fall 2006 as World Wind is currently ported to Java. Well, not only ported but reprogrammed as far as I understood today.

Apparently, for Autodesk did the concept of Open Source make sense, as they claimed that the revenue is made in other segments of the mapserver market than selling server software and they could meet user needs better by adopting Open Source development cycles for parts of their product portfolio.

There were only a few GIS talks at Where 2.0, but they made me wanna try some of the shown tools like OSSIM and GRASS (well, GRASS I tried once but had not the time to dig deep enough into it).

Pretty funny was the presentation of Donald Cooke from TeleAtlas! I definitely will get a copy of “Fun with GPS“.

Mr Jack Dangermond demonstrated the strategy of ESRI products: author, serve and publish. The audience saw a demo of ArcGIS Explorer (incl. Jabber chat), how data is edited in ArcGIS Desktop and published as WMS on the server. Quite impressing was the demo of ArcWeb SVG Map Viewer, which illustrated with a view clicks the power of the-next-big-thing-since-5-years SVG by changing to various projections, applying different styles and switching layers on/off without reloading (no, not even asynchronous!) anything. To me it became quite clear the ESRI isn’t heading at all into this Where 2.0 market, they clearly stick to their professional GIS business and concentrate in providing the technology to enable the back-end for services like Google maps (I don’t know if Google maps is using any ESRI technology at all…).

Check out this excellent Where 2.0 photoset at Flickr (btw, wasn’t Stewart Butterfield on the speakers list?) and the roundup written by the Where 2.0 co-chairs.

See you next year at Where 2.0, 19.6-20.6.2007, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA.