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Mike's Thing Of The Year Award

Since it's the time of year when everybody and their dog is jumping on the "... of the year" bandwagon, I guess there's no harm in my joining them. A few overenthusiastic people have already been making "... of the century!" proclamations, but as it's only 2004 I'm going to hold off on that one until I'm, oh, about 120.

The particular "of the year" I'd like to talk about is the "thing of the year" - in other words it's an excuse to talk about anything that's interesting, but I'm going to read that as "the thing which has taken the greatest strides towards technological ubiquity in the last year".

In that category, I give you the US Department of Defense NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, known to its friends as GPS.

GPS has been around for years. I saw my first GPS receiver many years ago, a hulking Garmin portable which ate batteries at a hell of a rate and produced a handy position readout in degrees, minutes and seconds that told you where you were within the restrictions imposed by the deliberately degraded signals which civilian users of GPS had to live with. This meant that accuracies of about +/-25 metres were about the norm, maybe a little better on a good day. At this time the civilian applications of GPS were generally limited to professional users who needed to know where they were on a regular basis, such as pilots and mariners.

The combination of two factors changed the face of GPS from the point of view of the civilian user. Firstly, the march of technology made it possible to develop smaller and cheaper GPS modules. Secondly, on May 1st 2000 President Clinton announced that the full accuracy of GPS was to be made available for civilian use by the removal of Selective Availability (SA). From then on, it was possible for anyone to find out where they were on the surface of the planet to within a very few metres just by consulting a little electronic gadget. Pause for a moment and consider what this means from a historical point of view. Pause also to consider whether this wider availability of accurate positioning signals would have happened if it had not been in place well before September 11 2001. When the data's graphed it's easy to see just how suddenly and dramatically the accuracy of civilian GPS changed overnight.

But happen it did, accompanied by a rider pointing out that the DoD reserved the right to re-impose SA if the need arose. It's now fairly unlikely that this will ever happen on a wide scale, as since then the barn doors have been flung wide open by the explosion in the use of GPS which followed the demise of SA.

GPS is now everywhere. Delivery vans, trucks and emergency vehicles have GPS modules on the roof so controllers know exactly where they are. Some trains use GPS to work out where they are and make sure that things like automated next station announcements are fired off at the right time. Perhaps the most obvious area in which GPS-enabled hardware has become a ubiquitous commodity is in car navigation systems. For a few hundred quid you can get a dinky box from Dixons which when plonked on your car dashboard will work out the route to the address you're headed for and nag you when it's time to turn left, or right, or go straight over the roundabout, or whatever. This is, when you think about it, some quite amazing technology.

To my eternal shame I've bought two GPS units this year. One is the Garmin Forerunner 201, a teeny unit which straps onto my wrist and tells me all kinds of interesting things about what I'm doing - pace per km (or pace per whatever), distance travelled, exactly where I've been, how to get home (if I get lost), and so on. I can then download all of this into my PC and spend hours obsessing over statistics. It's a fantastic little toy and a fine example of the specialist uses people are finding for GPS.

The other one is a little more sophisticated - the Garmin eTrex Vista C. This is a more general-purpose GPS, but it's still quite incredible to have a dinky palm-sized box stuck in my pocket which not only tells me where I am, but gives me directions to where I'm going and beeps angrily to tell me to, say, take the next right. As I have a nasty habit of failing to plan properly and therefore getting lost when I'm in unfamiliar places, it's proving very useful indeed even if the maps aren't quite as beautiful as the paper maps produced by the Ordnance Survey.

So. GPS - in a few short years from niche-market specialist tool to ubiquitous public utility. With the upcoming European navigation constellation GALILEO set to be in service by 2008 and the ongoing development of various augmentation systems designed to make GPS even more accurate for precision operations such as landing aircraft automatically, it seems there are still more interesting applications out there for this technology.

Posted by mpk at December 26, 2004 11:40 PM | TrackBack