GPS: How Satellites Revolutionized Our Mastery of Geography
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ย. 2024
- If you think MapQuest seems old, let me tell you about travel in 1954.
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Me: "I'll just use my GPS app."
Teacher: "What, you think you're gonna carry a GPS location device around with you all the time when you're older?"
Our teachers were so, so, so wrong 😉
That and...do you think you'll always have a calculator with you?
@@QBCPerdition Exactly!! 🤣
It's still a useful skill to be able to read a map or do maths manually for those times when the battery in your phone dies, or you lose signal.
If you don't learn the fundamentals behind a tool or shortcut, you're going to struggle without it. Smartphones aren't very useful when the battery is dead.
@@stackflow343 The other day in a grocery shop, the person handed over physical cash to a young person. They looked genuinely perplexed and stressed out by this concept, as nearly everything is tap here. What went in and what came back was very wrong. I raised an eye brow and mused over the experience.
it is amazing to see the rapid advances technology has made over the last 20 years. I only regret i won't be here in 100 years to see what happens.
You never know... recent advances in medical science are pretty amazing
You can’t regret what you can’t control
Freeze my head I'm down for some Futurama head in a jar.
My dad is an engineer and he says the EXACT same thing!!
A nuclear wasteland probably
During the first Gulf War it was pretty common for local communities at home to buy Walmart grade GPS units for deployed soldiers from the area. The military issued units were absolute garbage.
Still true for the first year of the second iraq war
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the thumbnail, and the title of a video and thought “Wow, this looks really interesting and has a lot of views, it must be good” followed by me clicking on it and immediately thinking “Oh would you look at that, it’s Simon again”
In the electric utility industry, the GPS signal IRIG-B is sent to most of the protective relays that trip and close high voltage (12kV and up) circuit breakers that operate the system. These are used for time stamping events (short circuits, trips, closes, frequency, current and voltage levels, etc.) down to the picosecond. This is critical when reconstructing an event to analyze what happened when to determine changes for a better operation of the system.
Picosecond precision??? This is mind blowing. Iirc, light travels at about one foot per nanosecond, so the factors that would have to be compensated for--speed of light delay, relativistic effects, clock synchronization, etc--that's crazy impressive.
@@FectacularSpail the GPS system takes into account travel time of the signals and the bending of space-time due to gravity. It's very impressive. GPS satellites put out many signals at many frequencies. Since electric power in the US is at 60 Hertz, they typically use the millisecond signal since that is fast enough for utility analysis needs.
They also use the timing signal to help keep the grid in phase.
Cell phones also use your proximity to wifi signals to determine your location, even if you aren't "connected" to the wifi
A road I used to live on had two sections separated by a huge ditch, but they had the same name except one was rd and the other was st. Apple maps got those two backwards, so we always had problems with pizza delivery.
Being a pizza delivery person, I can tell you that the core problem is that drivers aren't learning their area, or they wouldn't have been tricked by that.
The key part I got from your story was that you are talking about the past.
Lol 😂
A whole video on GPS and not one mention of its greatest use yet: geocaching.
The footage at 8:37 has travelled well. It has nothing to do with the Japanese earthquake mentioned but was a brief clip of an Australian newsreader filmed during a 5.9 earthquake in the rural community of Rawson, Victoria on 22 September, 2021. The newsreader, Michael Rowlands, was in the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Melbourne studios.
maybe because it is easy to get as he posted to social media, as they were not broadcasting at the time.
Hey Simon do a video about people that have to much time and useless knowledge so they feel the need to try and correct everything on the internet they feel is wrong
GPS is awesome. But I learned navigation and cartography before GPS. Maps, charts, compasses and landmarks will always work, but GPS makes everything quicker and easier.
My grandma taught me to read a map about the time I could read. We traveled a lot when I was a kid. Im greatful I learned that skill
@@Error_404-F.cks_Not_Found especially since GPS does not tell you everything. It tells you a point, not a path (well.. Multiple points could, but that's not what this is about): I have seen people multiple times struggle to get to their inner-city location because Google maps may not know about changes in city layout, where exactly an entrance to a building is, or be otherwise imprecise. If you know how to read a map, combined with GPS points/paths, you can navigate a lot quicker (in todays urban world).
The military has been practicing jamming GPS signals in interior Alaska. They publicize when they are doing this, but this should tell us that when most people will need their GPS during a global military event it might not be available. It is pretty easy to actually jam these signals with a signal generator that can put out frequencies in the 1.5 GHz range.
Google maps is "absolutely certain" on my location. It says I'm in Las Vegas. I live in West Los Angeles and have not travelled outside the county since getting the phone. Like seriously there is how much distance, mountains and state lines between the two?
GPS has screwed up the locals , hell they cant find their local library without it. 👎 I live around some real quality people.
Though some mistakenly refer to the man or his institutions as “John” Hopkins, the “s” in his name belongs there: He was named for his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, the daughter of Richard Johns, who owned a 4,000-acre estate in Calvert County, Maryland. Margaret Johns married Gerard Hopkins in 1700; one of their children was named Johns Hopkins. The second Johns Hopkins is the subject of this story.
Legend 👌
Thanks for this video! When I worked on commercial boats we used a system called LORAN-C that was based off of land-based radio towers that operated in a similar way. It pre-dated map displays and just gave us coordinates (and later speed and direction) to plot on our maps. We used it primarily to plot the locations of where we dropped fishing nets, but when it was stormy and foggy that system was priceless to have on board for navigation. Once GPS with map displays were affordable for us, we swapped over, but that was not until the late 1990s.
I worked on those receivers in the Navy. We used to have a LORAN station near here in Ekultna back in the 1980s. The government had the antennas torn down.
Loran got updated to eLoran ie its been enhanced by using digital receivers, modern processing. Gets accuracies to about 30meters. There is quite a lot of people who think it should be rolled out on a large scale to act as a GPS backup.
@@abarratt8869 I agree. The way they are putting satellites up I think eventually enough collisions will happen to render low earth orbits a thing of the past
There was a US Coast Guard Station in Fallon, NV that supported LORAN.
By mapping land boundaries by GPS, the GPS is accurate, but human error has lead to more than a few lawsuits.
And don't forget about archeology. Now you can plot points and finds with extreme accuracy, for future excavations or to show what was found where.
I'm guessing that you were an EW before the CTT merger.
Just a note on archaeology & GPS. They have been doing this for awhile now. It really is something. Go to a marker on the corner of a field, get your location and thus the location of a previous dig, and just go dig it back up, no hunting at all. Then in an active dig, before removing finds or dismantling features, they can be plotted and mapped with ease in no time at all just by getting location data on what is about to be removed. With the kit in both being essentially some light easily manageable survey looking gear.
I have great respect for your videos, Simon and crew. Just two words on this one: the GPS signal, like all radio signals, cannot travel underwater. Therefore, in order for a submarine to obtain its position it has to surface or send an antenna, tethered to the sub, to the surface. The other point is that KAL flight 007, according to research journalist Seymour Hersh's book "The Target is Destroyed", once the 2 Soviet fighter jets were within firing range from the airliner, the pilots hesitated for 20 minutes. The Soviet pilots did not want to shoot down a civilian aircraft. It took a phone call from a Soviet general in the Kremlin ordering the interceptor pilots to fire their missiles, whereby the airliner was shot down.
The fact that the gps system needs to compensate for gravities effect on time dilation is mind blowing to me.
Working for Comcast back in the 90s. We had to learn how to read maps in training. It was a first for some, thankfully my dad made me the navigator for summer vacations so I knew how to read them already. 😅
JohnSSSSS Hopkins. We get a bit twitchy about that “s”.
I mean, if you're landing a nuke somewhere, what does 100 metres either way _really_ matter in the greater scheme of things 🧐🙃
Well it might if you are trying to put it down a tunnel.
for "hardened" targets, such as missile silos and command & Control bunkers, the more inaccurate the warhead, the bigger it needs to be to complete its mission.
"Selective Availability" had nothing to do with signal strength, it had to do with encryption. When SA was enabled, the US military got the full accuracy in an encrypted stream, everybody else got data that was degraded by injecting small, random errors in the data stream. The idea is that the US forces would have the full accuracy, and opposing forces (who could buy the civilian versions) would have less accuracy (I forget the designed degrade factor, something like 5-10). Both the FAA and the Coast Guard ended up developing side-channel systems to improve the accuracy of GPS (which original designed accuracy was to be better than something like +-10m) to enable improved better navigation of ships in harbors and aircraft landings at airports. The FAA version got standardized, and now most places have accuracies around +-1m for moving mode, and sub-cm accuracies for survey mode (where you tell the receiver that the unit is actually stationary, and changes in positions are errors to be averaged out over time).
"sub-cm accuracies for survey mode"... quick note on your comment about survey mode, I work and a land surveyor and can confirm this. To measure a point, we need to set up over a point and "burn it", at least that's what we call it here. We do that by leveling the GPS unit on a rod and then for 2.5 minutes sit there while it factors out errors. We then 180 the unit on the same point and do that again. With both sets of data on one point we average the two and get a more accurate reading. Very nice for large surveys but not as accurate as a total station and I prefer the laser for the increased accuracy, however only as long as you have good control and can set up the total station well on every setup, which lazy surveyors do not.
When I put Brain Blaze together with Megaprojects it makes me want to talk to Simon even more!!!!!!!!
GPS is very cool. As a land surveyor, GPS has become another tool we use to data collect location and elevation information very accurately. Not as accurate as the modern total station or theodolite but very convenient for large surveys where traversing with the total station is more of a burden. Also, drone surveys are a thing now thanks to GPS and photogrammetry, producing 3D point clouds with a wide variety of applications. Lovely stuff.
Glad to see it! I'd been asking for this through the comments of some of the older videos and clearly I wasn't the only one.
One big (I think) drawback to the ubiquity of GPS for navigation in cars is that neither of my kids - now both in their 20s - know where most things are or how to get to them without the handy GPS telling them when to turn. As I came of age in the late 1970s - early 1980s, I memorized how to get to virtually everywhere I went. It became a habit to the extent that I still remember all of the routes I've taken while driving over the years - up to and including trips of over 1,000 miles. In contrast, my kids generally can't remember anywhere they've gone outside of the town they are living in.
I had a similar experience with the popularity of cell phones - I can remember most phone numbers from when I was growing up (I'm 58 now), but since my first cell phone around 1998 (I think) I have been unable to remember any numbers. I can recall my ex-wife's and daughter's numbers if I think about it for a while, other than that I can't remember any - including my son's. The only reason I remember the 2 numbers that I do is because they haven't changed in 15 years or so.
With GPS, someone could find the exact location of The Blazement and rescue Danny, Callum, et cetera.
I say leave them alone. They are having fun. 😂😂
“More important than you know” in the thumbnail? Simon, I live in a city with terrible public transit, and my sense of direction is nonexistent. Without a GPS, who knows where I’d even be right now? 😂😂😂
Welcome to the Simon Whistler school...todays lesson is...GPS!!!!
Genuinely pretty surprised not to find a video on the Eurofighter. Come on people, let’s make this happen!
If there was something I would have doubted that people would take for granted in the not too distant future 15 years ago, GPS would be that thing.
As always, Thank you for presenting such fine and informative content.
Great work Simon and crew. 👍👍👍👍😁
Wow, Einstein played his part in this revolutionary development, never go wrong with him!
Such a thing we take for granted today, beats playing with yellow parchment and pin compass! lol 😁- another true Megaproject!
Mt Everest is only tallest above sea level Simon if we're being geeky about it.
Tallest goes to Mauna Kea in Hawaii for tallest title, sort of.
Ahhh shit the fact boy title has been over taken. Simon didn't rightly earn that self-imposed title anyways 🙄 lol
"The world used to be a bigger place"- Barbossa. "The world's the same.. There's just less in it.." -Sparrow
This is the first time I've heard someone using a train as an example for the doppler effect, usually it's ambulances and such
I almost always hear it as trains.
How aboot a SideProjects video on the various disaster-measuring scales? Like when did they come about, what happened when it was decided to develop a scale? What did they do before, and how many variations/revisions came before the current scales?
I believe that most of the scales you refer to deserve their own videos respectively
Great idea nonetheless!! 👍👍
Great video as always! I had no idea the public had access to those shark locations 😳😳gotta check that site before I get in the water
Well I learned the old ways, sextant, compass, maps, chronograph. Problem is most younger people can't navigate without gps, or read a map. For me gps has huge benefits especially in agriculture
That university's name is JOHNS Hopkins. The guy's first name was "Johns". No idea why they didn't name him the usual name.
"Though some mistakenly refer to the man or his institutions as “John” Hopkins, the “s” in his name belongs there: He was named for his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, the daughter of Richard Johns, who owned a 4,000-acre estate in Calvert County, Maryland. Margaret Johns married Gerard Hopkins in 1700; one of their children was named Johns Hopkins. The second Johns Hopkins is the subject of this story."
Another brilliant episode.
GPS uses atomic clocks to measure the time it takes for a signal to travel from the sattelite to a receiver. The time travelled gives a distance. With a minimum of three distances (up to 12) and a up to date almanac with sattelite positions the GPS receiver can calculate a real time position. The GPS sattelites sends the almanac via the GPS singal and it can be downloaded from the internet. This means GPS, GLONASS, Galieo, etc are also timing services for things like the enternet.
For the use of GPS new maps had to be made worldwide, because the old maps where not aquarete enough to be used with GPS. Some coast lines could differ for more than 2 Nautical Miles between old and new maps. On old maps you can only use traditional methods of navigation, like taking bearing and distance.
10:38 why is Europe on fire in this animation?
Simon just released his mixtape
Correction 8:35 : Japanese earthquake of 9.1 was in 2011 not 2001
...and also the shot of ABC Australia's Michael Rowland that introduced the reference was from a minor tremor northeast of Melbourne this year from where he was broadcasting live. Way to troll poor Michael, Simon!
I would love to see a video on The Mackinac Bridge in Michigan
Maybe the first TH-camr to listen to do a viewer requested video
Legend
In the mid 1970s I was on a US aircraft carrier at an undisclosed location in the Mediterranean Sea. A crewman was demonstrating this new technology called GPS that could pinpoint the location of the ship within meters. Confused, he stepped away from the chart the ship used and consulted a globe. He said we were in the middle of Indiana.
NAVIC (Indian GPS) is already active and functional.
As someone who used to live in DC for 3 years, I'm eternally grateful for the creation of GPS🙌
Apple Maps... Good one, Simon!
Thanks
You could do a whole series on cartography. You should, actually.
Now don't go giving him an idea for yet another ch. I can't keep up with him as it is. 😂😂😂
You're right, but a man can dream.
i watched a video recently about how the whole of the UK was mapped using triangulation , but NFI if it was one of Simons channels
Whats ironic about Grand Theft Auto, and similar driving games is they helped to revolutionize the way modern GPS systems are designed.
While strong on Who, Where, What, Why and When, this was VERY weak on HOW.
@ 08:40
Ad Erratum though:
That notorious Great Eastern Japan Earthquake occured back in 2011- not 2001, respectively...
Hopefully future GPS could track and predict real time earthquakes, volcanic activity, storm formations, and climate levels in areas most vulnerable to storms, hurricanes, and wildfires...
Megaprojects video on the Mosin Nagant?
You forgot to mention the most important app to come from GPS the bus tracker 🤣🤣
Google: spying on your arse using GPS & A-GPS..... and watching your vids.
Not so small nit: The L1 signal is available to everybody. To this day the L2 signal is not. Only L1 was affected by "Selective Availability" when it was still enabled.
My suggestion!!
That look for Apple Maps though.... Classic. :D
That little hate on apple maps was glorious.
Good video 👍
Something about 100 meter accuracy for a nuclear warhead isn't enough just doesn't sound right. Now...accurate enough for an antiship cruise missle...no, but a nuke?
this is pretty much true for "soft" targets (people out in the open), but for "hardened" targets, such as missile silos and command & Control bunkers, the more inaccurate the warhead, the bigger it needs to be to complete its mission.
Yea. Imagine trying to hit Cheyenne mountain complex with a nuke. Best bet would be literally dropping it at the front door.
If you are using a "bunker buster" nuke it really won't matter much. An airburst wouldn't do much anyway. Except irradiate the whole area. And help in a battle of attrition. When you get into Temps close to the surface of the sun...100 meters doesn't matter. Plus the colossal concussion effect.
And I'm totally wrong the temp of a nuke is almost a magnitude greater than the surface of the sun. It would flash vaporize anything remotely close to it.
An accuracy of six miles, when using the early satilite navigation system was a good result when seen from before it's initiation. A method of refining the clock system so that a GPS could be millimetre accurate, has been developed but too late for the European system. Using a sextent, the best a seaman might expect, is to be in a triangle of seven nautical sides. Without the sun, moon, or several important stars, along with an horizon, no standard sextant would work at all. Within six miles in any conditions, was an enormous advance and you could do that some six times a day, compared to three.
One huge use not mentioned is in electrical distribution. To ensure that power put on the electrical grid is in phase with the grid, relatively cheap GPS receivers have replace expensive and high maintenance atomic clocks.
JohnS HopkinS University, not John Hopkin's! Named after two people, not one named John!
Actually, Johns Hopkins was one man.
@@crazyeyez1502 ... Right
Thank you. That caught me sideways, too.
"Though some mistakenly refer to the man or his institutions as “John” Hopkins, the “s” in his name belongs there: He was named for his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, the daughter of Richard Johns, who owned a 4,000-acre estate in Calvert County, Maryland. Margaret Johns married Gerard Hopkins in 1700; one of their children was named Johns Hopkins. The second Johns Hopkins is the subject of this story."
Without GPS my job would be incredibly difficult and inefficient. My route sends me to places I've never been and getting out a map to find the next delivery would waste so much time.
yeah , i drove an Ambulance from 1990 to about 2010 .. navigating with a street map at speed wasn't easy
There is strong evidence to suggest that KAL Flight 007 was clearly identified by Soviet EWS radar, confirming it to be civilian flight, and was shot down anyway. This, in order to smoke out American reconnaissance flights out of Korea and Japan. The shoot-down would, in the ensuing tit-for-tat, diplomatic what-not, force Americans to admit to the overflights of Soviet territory and violations of airspace.
Not forgetting super accurate time.
Triangulation among multiple sets of satellites is why its so accurate. As in, you need at least 2 up at any time, and 3 to 5 to get a truly accurate long/lat/elevation position. I never correct the host, but this is the basic fundamentals of the technology
At a very simplified level, but not sure which part of the video you're addressing. Btw it's 3+ for a 2D fix, 4+ for a 3D fix, but a fixed solution doesn't mean an accurate solution.
Problem with that is, GPS doesn't use triangulation at all. It does not measure angles, only distances.
Best video this week, and it's only Monday.
When people talk about space and what all is in space circling the Earth. Think about this. The Moon is on avg around 250,000 miles away from us. If you have a basketball and a tennis ball. The basketball will be earth and that tennis ball will be the moon.
This is very close to being to scale if we shrunk down the Earth and moon the same amount. Well how far away would you put the tennis ball from the basketball to represent the scale distance. My wife said 450ft. My youngest son thats 16yrs old said 6 miles away.
Well the answer is 33ft away. Now take that same basketball and put the ISS at the distance you think it travels above Earth. The ISS is about 400miles above earth on avg.
Well the answer of this question is 1cm off of the Basketball would be how far away to scale. Apollo 8 was the first true mission from Earth that went the furthest for man. In my eyes, this was a mission that was just as important as the The Eagle has Landed, one small step for ( this ) man, one giant step for mankind.
If you get lost, remember: you can always find east by staring directly at the sun.
You need to do a mega projects about yourself and your channels, like what made you decide to start all this
I use to be very good at finding locations with a map. (being in the car all day) Now I'm not sure I could find the kitchen with a map........
The kitchen is about all I am certain I could find. Also the couch.
I have my own NTP server at home which gets its data from GPS. It's far more accurate than using an NTP server online somewhere, it turns out.
Shouldn't it be that due to general relativity clocks run about 7 microseconds slower on Earth relative to orbit? Since Earth is inside the gravity well, and hence that the clocks run slower? I'm not a physicist but that seems intuitive on my basic understanding of general relativity. More gravity = more time dilation. Good of you to put it in the video though, I'm always pointing out to people how GPS works due to a knowledge of general relativity.
Clocks run slower on earth even if you factor in special relativity time dilation of objects traveling closer to the speed of light for objects in orbit the clocks are always slower on earth to have it go fast enough to overtake it would escape the earths pull
I don't think it would mattered if they were off by 100 meters if they would have launched a nuclear weapon around 1965-1973. The bomb takes out miles so being off 300 feet, they are probably off by that much dropping a bomb. During WWII they were off by miles at times from where they were trying to hit.
hey cueball subs use inertial navigation mainly! GPS doesn't penetrate the ocean that good!! only to less than a 100 feet!!
Hey.. Can you PLEASE do the YF-23 vs the YF-22?
I promise I'll compromise and shut up if you just cover it on SideProjects.....
I feel stupid. The whole time I was using this to play a treasure hunt game with strangers.
the $10 billion invested in gps is peanut compared to the benefits!
OK but can we have a sideprojects video on the shortfin mako shark bucky
6:20 Maybe the GPS will tell them where to get their ABS fixed.
funny thing is the photo shown was Ama Dablam peak not Sagarmatha.
I have an idea: the proposed plans for a monorail system at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. The university has 5 campuses within miles of each other and has a bus system that causes havoc. There have been numerous plans to build a monorail and some have achieved significant support.
Outside of people in the area, nobody cares as it's not really something unique or groundbreaking. In other words: it's just a ordinary project. It would be like making a video on the light rail in Phoenix
A truly monumental system that is horrifically under appreciated but bloody hell $5B so I can play Pokemon Go... scary
An idea for a building megaproject: Universidad Laboral de Gijon, in Spain.
How is that mega?
If it weren't for GPS and smartphones, I'd probably still be lost somewhere between Skipton and Colne in the north west of England, cos I'm useless at navigation... :P
4:48 - Gravity fluctuations...?
Thank you
Super video💪💪
Johns Hopkins University says Hi.
John Hopkin's University? not so much.
Thrust SSC plz
Johns Hopkins University.
Another use for the GPS system. Geocaching! Treasure hunting for worthless treasure. 😁
Yes, great fun!
Not always worthless. Once I found a joint.
I see that, bored of TH-cam Fact Boi is now heading footballs in channel 4's Arnold Clarke adverts.
Improvements in GPS as well as Laser guidance are the reason we now have a missile with swords instead of a warhead. We can literally send a missile so accurate it can cut down a single person from miles away.
We uh... don't have that... unless you made one you haven't told anyone about.
@@nmxsanchez yes we do. Its been in use for a few years now. They couldn't keep it secret because its very obvious when you kill someone with it. Leaves a dismembered body and a 1 meter X shape in the ground on its crater
100m accuracy for a nuke... i think you still destroy the target lol
for "hardened" targets, such as missile silos and command & Control bunkers, the more inaccurate the warhead, the bigger it needs to be to complete its mission.
3:50 half of western europe on fire for some reason.
Thanks for telling me that it found a practical application to deal with shark attacks ;-\0
meanwhile there's that story of a faulty car navigation system that caused the driver to drove his car into a river.
If it's the one I remember, the GPS told the person to turn right. The road had been closed for bridge replacement. The driver ignored the road closed signs and drove off the abutment.
@@LTDunltd I mean it happens all the time where the route is interrupted and you can't follow it and have to detour. You'd think it's common sense that sometimes you don't follow the GPS.