As the technology grows bigger and bigger, the size of the Earth getting smaller and smaller. In the 90s our Earth fitted well in our television sets. But now it could very well fit with in our palm. This is not an exaggeration. It is reality. A mobile phone could pin point your location on this planet with and accuracy of few meters.
One of the positive outcome (I think the only positive outcome) of cold war was it made GPS navigation free of cost. After Korean flight was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR air space President Ronald Reagen issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use as a common good.
Last week I got a new handy for my extension of my mobile contract. I decided to go for GPS handy and got Nokia 6220 classic. I had enough with sony ericson's "ultra fast" software. I don't want to pay for for A-GPS , which costs a lot for data transfer via mobile network. I just started my handy without SIM, and it worked well. I could use this phone just as a navigator. It is not so professional, but for a user like me(I dont have car), this is a quite sufficient for day to day life.
Its a techno toy for me. I can play with satellite's now. I can communicate with satellites now. Isn't sound great :).It is fascinating to see the signal strengths and satellite positions in my handy. If I could, I would like move every part of of the Earth to check at least I could see 4 satellite at any point of time.I could calculate the speed of the bus by sitting inside. Next time when I travel with ICE, I may able to calculate the speed of ICE.
Most people really don't know how remarkable this GPS is. The surface area of earth is 510,072,000 km². A GPS system can pin point your location in this vast surface area with an accuracy of about 50m. Lets make circle with radius of 50m and its area is 2500pi square meter. This is about 0.00785 sq.km. When we calculate the accuracy in percentage its 99.99999999874%. Isn't great?
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