In this episode, we discuss global positioning systems (GPSs) from A to Z.
Guests
Blake Krone
Blake Krone
Blake Krone is a field administration support technician at the University of Minnesota's Academic and Distributed Computing Services and also owns MobilityX , a company that provides mobile computing solutions such as GPS navigation systems for vehicles. Blake has been using GPS to map different trips for the past four years, such as trips over four-by-four trails in Colorado to flights from Minneapolis to Honolulu. Blake has a B.A.S. in information technology infrastructure from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Craig Shankwitz
Craig Shankwitz
Craig Shankwitz is the program director of the Intelligent Vehicles Lab at the University of Minnesota's Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Institute. Shankwitz received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1992 in the area of control theory. Prior to his current position, he was a research fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and later worked as a control engineer responsible for the motion control of the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) at the University of Iowa.
For Your Files
Support technician Blake Krone said the global positioning system (GPS) uses satellites in space to find you:
"You have an antenna in your vehicle or in your hand if you're just hiking, and that goes and it gets a signal from a satellite. For a basic reading of where you are, you can have two satellites. Three satellites will give you your altitude above sea level, any more than that is preferred."
We asked Blake if there was a charge to utilize GPS signals:
"No, there's no charge for GPS, except for hardware or software that you purchase to use it. The GPS signal itself is free. There are no monthly bills like with a cell phone or anything else. You just need to buy the hardware upfront to use GPS [and] after that it's free use. That was determined in a law that was passed in 1998—GPS is going to be free for everybody to use."
And finally Blake said many of us may have some of the components of GPS for emergency service and not even know it:
"Every cell phone that's been manufactured in the past couple years features a GPS antenna in [it]. It's actually a hybrid between GPS and then using the towers that you're connected to for the cell service. [This means] whenever you call 911, they know where you are without you actually having to say anything."
Links
The TechnoBus, a demonstration vehicle provided by Metro Transit for testing at the University of Minnesota ITS Institute, is equipped with high-accuracy differential GPS, digital maps, computerized systems, radar, and more.
For more information about the TechnoBus and other navigational technologies being tested at the University of Minnesota Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Institute, see the following Web pages:
There are no tech terms for this week.