Congrats to the Wildcats for beating Duke for the Preseason NIT championship. Next Devil do be destroyed is ASU tonight.
Sorry for the delay on this one. As I mentioned in my last post, I took a trip back to Tucson to visit family and friends. This morning I decided to sleep in and then I got caught up in the hustle of lunch. I have two quick and easy articles today. Both focus on new GPS technologies. Well, one is new and the other has been out for a while, but I have not really talked about it yet. I have talked about Lockheed's GPS III mission in the past. The GPS III system will eventually take the place of the current constellation. The testing process that has to be conducted is long and exhaustive. Part of the testing is to ensure that the new satellites will be backwards compatible with the current constellation. The cost of launching a completely new system and turning off the old system is out of the question. Also, there is no way to get all of the user receivers in a position to work with the new system. The added benefit is that there are more satellites out there to transmit data. As the article suggests, the new GPS III system is backward compatible. This is good news and the first step in a long series to get the new technology out into space. Real Time Kinematic GPS has been around for a long time. Network based ones use cellular towers as a base station to correct the data. The benefit is that you can set up in far less time and have many options to connect to. The down side is that you are tethered to areas with good cell coverage. This article goes a little into detail about how NRTK works. It uses examples from Europe, but the technology is applicable to North America. The article also discusses how CORS height effects users. The results are interesting, but the discussion of how NRTK works and the links that they provide are a great place to start learning about NRTK. I like NRTK and brought the technology into my company. Previously we used GNSS capable Trimbles and Total Stations to do all of their field mapping. What I like about NRTK is that there is very little set up and it is easily trainable. On jobs where we need survey grade mapping, but do not have the budget or expertise for a Total Station we can use a NRTK. Quick set up, reasonable precision in archaeology, and very little
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AuthorI am a GIS professional in Walla Walla, WA. I use this blog to force myself to really read through all of the GIS news that I get in my inbox. It also helps me practice writing. Archives
January 2015
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