FCC Paves the Way For Improved GPS Accuracy (theverge.com) 78
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) paved the way for improved GPS and location accuracy today, approving an order that will allow U.S. phones to access a European satellite system. The order allows non-federal consumer devices to access the European Union's version of GPS, which is also known as Galileo. The system is available globally, and it officially went live in 2016. By opening up access, devices that can retrieve a signal from both Galileo and the U.S. GPS system will see improved timing estimates and location reliability. The iPhone 8 was the first Apple product to support it. Other phone models from Huawei and Samsung support the system, too. "Since the debut of the first consumer handheld GPS device in 1989, consumers and industry in the United States have relied on the U.S. GPS to support satellite-based positioning, navigation, and timing services that are integral to everyday applications ranging from driving directions to precision farming," the FCC said in a release. Now, the U.S. system will be able to commingle with the European one, making the way for better reliability, range, and accuracy.
Permission to listen to a radio signal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you need permission to listen to radio signals? I thought the FCC were only concerned with sending radio signals? Why would they care?
GNSS satellites orbit at 23,222km, so I would assume the signals were more or less globally available in any case.
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I'm really confused here, especially since there have been a bunch of phones shipping with dual GPS/Galileo support for a while now. Was this previously illegal? The FCC already approved all of these devices.
Pixel 2, iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, etc.
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What do you mean by contacting a foreign satellite? These phones aren't sending signals to satellites, are they? I didn't think that's how GPS (or Galileo, or otherwise) worked. They just receive signals from satellites.
Re:Permission to listen to a radio signal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would they care?
Do you have a dog? If you throw a stick and tell the dog to fetch, would you be upset if it refused?
This is the same. DoD built GPS, and they told the Europeans not to build a parallel system. The Europeans didn't do what they were told.
So DoD threw a hissy fit, and had the FCC ban the use of Galileo signals within the US. Does the FCC have the authority to do this, since the devices are only receiving and not transmitting? That isn't clear, but it was not challenged.
Many phones disable Galileo in software. So they use the extra signals when outside US territory, but disable it within US territory. So just a software patch should be enough to enable the extra accuracy.
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Many phones disable Galileo in software. So they use the extra signals when outside US territory, but disable it within US territory.
So they have to get an approximate location using GPS only first, and then, if you are outside US territory, can enable signals received from other satellites? Sounds like a PITA.
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So they have to get an approximate location using GPS only first
Not at all. There are many ways to get a location. If I disable GPS (and all other systems) on my phone I'll still have it accurately identify where I am to a couple of 10s of meters thanks to Google location services. If I disable those as well then I'm only accurate to a couple of km depending on the location services provided by the tower/network.
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This is given you have cell phone service. You can be in airplane mode and use your GPS. How does your device know whether you can receive Galileo signals in airplane mode?
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Interesting side note: Airplane mode used to disable the GPS reception on early mobile phones.
But in your edge case the get a GPS fix before enabling Galileo still make sense. Just because you have enough GPS satellites for a fix doesn't mean you have significant accuracy so you can still benefit from more satellites. This is especially true in crowded cities where location seems to jump around a lot. Ironically this is a big problem mostly in America rather than Europe since European cities generally aren'
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How about the Russian and Chinese systems? People in the US tell me that the Russian GLONASS works fine for them.
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Um, no. "Potential enemy states" aren't going to worry about a f*kin FCC license when they are engaging in hostile activities. Furthermore, this link [galileognss.eu](from a previous post) explains that its the ground station that needs the license. There is nothing about restricting the transmitter (satellite).
F* you , Tweedy Pai. This rule is just an attempt to keep people from bypassing US broadcasters markets by aiming a dish at a Canadian TV satellite. You people are rapidly approaching the Stasi and North Koreans. I
Re:Permission to listen to a radio signal? (Score:5, Informative)
The developer of the GPStest app elaborates on that in a blog post:
https://galileognss.eu/why-gal... [galileognss.eu]
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Anyone heard any news? Otherwise, maybe it's time for several tens of thousands of relevant people to request, fill out and return, some forms :
Re:Permission to listen to a radio signal? (Score:5, Informative)
According to the FCC a phone receviing a Galileo signal is a ground station in contact with foreign satellites, which is only allowed with after a lengthy FCC approval process
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11... [techcrunch.com]
Apparently in October 2013, the EU applied to the FCC to allow reception of Galileo signals in the US. Apparently, the FCC has now partially granted (bands E1 and E5), partially denied (band E6) this request (http://insidegnss.com/fcc-poised-to-approve-broad-use-of-galileo-in-u-s/).
Yes, the FCC is aware that people in the US are already receiving signals from foreign satellites without asking the FCC first:
"it becomes clear that many devices in the United States are already operating with foreign signals. But nowhere in our record is there a good picture of how many devices in this country are interacting with these foreign satellite systems, what it means for compliance with our rules, and what it means for the security of our systems." (Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel)
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There are rules and then there are rules.
You can demodulate anything you want, although listening to cellular phone frequencies in the US is dubious and most receivers that can demodulate cellular have been banned. You can make your own if you're clever.
Using something as a reference signal, however, has implications. GPS provides two references, locus and apparent time. Time + several heard satellites give you location. This is a calibration. It now extends to using Galileo (as you cite, in certain bands),
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"Why do you need permission to listen to radio signals?"
People went to concentration camps for listening to the BBC depending on their location for a couple of years.
Ditto for listening to west-radio in the GDR.
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Allow? (Score:5, Informative)
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They're wanting to make sure the satellites don't intefere with our elections.
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From a link in another post here, which mentions GLONASS at the end: https://galileognss.eu/why-gal... [galileognss.eu]
But beware: I had a new Garmin Edge 1000 with GPS + GLONASS for a month, when one day it suddenly started failing to get its location. After some googling, I discovered that it was a known issue that GLONASS occasionally has issues, and when that happens, instead of falling back to using only the GPS signal, the dumb Garmin unit just fails completely. Disabling GLONASS restored its ability to find its locat
Accuracy or precision? (Score:2)
It's late, but I initially interpreted this to be precision and thought how much more precise do I need it? Isn't it precise to within a few feet already?
But accuracy is different.
I actually did think it was fairly accurate, but if sometimes it shows you being miles off even then I haven't heard many stories about it.
Or maybe this just gives us more data and only slightly moves the needle from very accurate to slightly more very accurate.
I'm too tired to RTFA to see what they're talking about.
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Galileo is purportedly accurate to 1 cm (for 'commercial service') but even the unencrypted signal is accurate to 1 meter. GPS to 5 meters.
When driving, the GPS receiver is generally correcting by snapping you to a road. Most people using GPS have probably experienced the software guess wrong about whether you took an off-ramp or not. This accuracy would not exhibit that sort of mistake.
When in my house, my GPS shows me as maybe in my house, maybe in the yard, maybe in my neighbor's house. It really doe
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Driverless cars that know how far they are from the curb without looking
A car can't get out of measuring the environment directly. Even with position data, the 'map' would be inevitably out of date a lot of the time. It wouldn't be able to account for debris in the road, or workers temporarily painting new lines on the road, all that stuff.
Sure, other applications are there, but I don't think self-driving cars are in as dire need, since they must gather contextual data directly either way.
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These positioning systems work well, when you receive a good signal from enough satellites. Accuracy can also be improved by differential systems such as EGNOS (again broadcast by satellites). In the air, on plains or on mountains there is no problem.
The situation is different in valleys. With just GPS one can easily get a position that is off by 100 meters, and also get no signal from the satellites broadcasting the correction information for differential GPS.
To solve the first issue, you need signals from
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It's late, but I initially interpreted this to be precision and thought how much more precise do I need it? Isn't it precise to within a few feet already?
It varies but more precision is useful. A lot of tools you probably use routinely like the navigation system in your car could be made simpler and better if they didn't have to guess your location much of the time. The GPS in my car doesn't actually know for sure if I'm on a road much of the time but it guesses based on various clues (direction and speed of travel among them). But it's wrong sometimes. My house is about 1000 meters from the road my driveway connects to but it's close to another road on
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Something my 30 dollar MN8's have done for years (Score:2)
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Apparently uBlox NEO-M8N (what it's actually called) has indeed had Galileo and not bothered to disable it in the USA. Found this while websearching. I guess I should order one up for my homebrew tracker. I got a M6 instead, which does glonass but not galileo, just because it was cheaper.
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Owning the receiver is not illegal in itself (a transmitter may be illegal to own). It is only a crime to USE it. Therefore it the customer responsibility to configure that ublox module correctly (which I'm sure everyone does...).
It's not really clear that it is a crime to use it, has that actually ever gone to court? I'm pretty sure that it hasn't, and that if it did, the outcome would be the opposite of what the FCC wants.
uBlox modules are not only famously unconfigured when you get them, but they are also commonly counterfeit. Which is another problem with a M6 that, AFAICT, crops up less with the M8N. Lots of M6s are fake, and don't have as much flash as they are supposed to. Therefore, you can't upgrade their software. The coun
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FCC Fact Sheet and Draft Order (Score:1)
A FCC Fact Sheet and Draft Order is at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354772A1.pdf .
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Open up your GPS information page .. you'll see that your phone's receiver is able to "see" a dozen or more satellites at once with a clear view of the sky.
Dedicated receivers can outperform a phone of course, but that's not the point of your post.
Does consumer Galileo have COCOM limits? (Score:2)
I for one would like to know when I'm higher than 59,000 feet, or going faster than 1200 mph.
B**SH&& (Score:2)
What actually ENFORCES this? (Score:2)
I have a Nexus 6P... rooted, running LineageOS. It shows only GPS and Glonass in ChartCross GPStest+. I'm dying to know which subsystem is responsible for enforcing the "this user is in the US, hide Galileo" rule.
The only thing I can think of is that it's part of the Qualcomm radio modem driver... the one opaque binary in the N6P's software stack. I can't see how it could be enforced by Android itself... the moment anyone at XDA saw a brazen difference in kernel code like "boolean galileoAvailable &= !i
been getting GLONASS tracking for years (Score:2)
Odd, every phone I've had over the last several years has had no problem receiving GLONASS telemetry data.
If I remember correctly, it's required to sell phones in Russia without paying an exhorbitant tax.
Want to see for yourself? -- go download "GPS Status" on the android app store and see how many non US-GPS satellites it hears.
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The iPhone 8 was the first Apple product to support it. Other phone models from Huawei and Samsung support the system, too.
Ha. I see what you're doing there. Trying to word it to sound like Apple had it first, while sticking to the truth. Well done.
FCC improving? (Score:1)
Is it really more accurate in practice? (Score:2)
GPS + GLONASS has been around for a long time now.
No one used anything but GPS because it was free and it worked well enough. But that made having GLONASS as an non-US-controlled alternative to GPS useless. It's there, but nothing uses it. So the Russians required cell phones to have it to be sold in Russia, which was the lacking motivation for GNSS vendors to support GLONASS and now everyone does.
And is the result more accurate GNSS from the extra system? Not really. If you're in a location where GLON