The GPS wars have begun
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The good news: There will be four competing global positioning systems available to consumers. They're motivated to operate their systems out of strategic military and economic reasons.
To call this a war is uncalled for. It's an arms-race with civilian benefits. It would be a war if they jammed or destroyed each other's satellites.
Agreed. It reminds me of a saying:
"To those accustomed to privilege, equality seems like an attack."
This isn't exactly privilege, but same principle. The US has been used to defining the category. Now they don't. To the insecure that seems like a threat, not a move toward the federated kind of system it should always have been.
Besides, I would consider relying totally on any one country's GNSS (especially when several are available at very little additional cost) to be a rather poor decision.
The actual USML[2] is a bit...verbose.
[1] http://insidegnss.com/u-s-eases-export-regulations-for-gps-r...
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=pt22.1.121#se22.1...
But that would apply whether they are multi-system capable, or just that they can read the other systems, and are not entirely dependent on GPS.
The company had no problems selling in the US abd Russia. And even had multiple competitors.
Hence, expert/import laws are not a problem. At least for professional equipment.
As for military receivers, apparently they are unclassified but plug into a separate system that works like a TPM and provides the decryption keys, which have to be refreshed at least once a year.
This is in a $250 unit so clearly neither cost nor geopolitics seem to be obstacles.
But seriously, "war"? Positioning has turned out to be such a vital economic factor that having multiple suppliers seems such an obvious Good Thing™ that it shouldn't need explaining, and the article doesn't really offer any support for its "war" rhetoric apart from showing that there are multiple suppliers.
Despite the assurances that were made, even I as a citizen of an "ally" of the US am not comfortable with sole dependence on GPS and find Galileo a good project. And as we can see, it only takes one unhinged administration to make such assurances next to worthless. If you're higher up on the shitlist (unclear at this point how that's ordered), the need become greater.
A good read from 1998, Taking a “War of Words” Too Literally:
https://paradite.com/2014/01/23/good-articletaking-a-war-of-...
you can see some characteristics of devices here: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss
Its relatively simple to jam GNSS signals since they are so weak.
QZSS is a interesting formation since it is designed for urban environment (skyscrapers and canyons)
The USA has no solution for shipping positioning outside of GPS...
They are doing this because many civilian applications have emerged that need a more accurate signal (one is turn-by-turn navigation). When GPS was first developed, it was first envisioned as outputting coordinates and you looked up your location on a paper map, where 2m was better than most maps you could get.
The military is getting the ability to get a signal that is 100x more powerful in a small area.
It will be awhile before we see receivers using the new signal as the first of the new GPS sats launched today (some of the old ones are broadcasting the new signal, but not enough of them)
see this article for details https://medium.com/@sjbarbeau/dual-frequency-gnss-on-android...
Given they are going for low cost mass produced, I doubt they have the necessary hardware, especially the highly accurate clocks.
If you're speaking theoretically, yes, again the hardest would probably be the clocks, but there's no reason a private company can't produce them if needed. The bigger issue would be that they would have to compete against the free, government-subsidiesed networks, which seems really tough. Maybe if they target the really high accuracy only available to the military, but even then codeless is already good enough for most applications.
I had autonomous vehicles in mind, which would certainly benefit from a highly accurate, ubiquitous and reliable positioning system (esp. if companies like Tesla can be supplied directly by SpaceX).
Even 100 USD android phones use GPS and glonass and have done so for a while.
It decreases the time needed for a fix for example.