One of our big concerns back then, though, was that US Military would degrade the SA (Selective Availability) signal - it had happened in the Gulf War, and our tracks, which were normally accurate to within 3-4 meters, went wacky and were almost 50 meters off at times.
The solution was to mount a radio antenna, have it calculate it's "True" location by averaging a couple days worth of GPS signals, and then, continually transmit the difference between a current GPS signal and it's known location. This Differential GPS let us calculate paths to within 1m of accuracy.
When I asked what prevented a military opponent from doing the same thing, I was told that the first thing in the battlefield that gets hit as a command center would be anything transmitting RF, particularly if it was believed to be for D-GPS. Also, D-GPS isn't that effective for missile tracking, as you need to get differential signals in areas outside of your zone of control.
> To put it simply, with QZSS it is like the number of GPS satellites has been increased. Because QZSS has interoperability with GPS, the number of satellites that can transmit satellite signals at the same time is increased, which makes stable positioning possible. This also decreases the positioning errors as described. [1]
With L1 and L5 carriers on GPS now, you can definitely get down to cm-level positioning already. I think they are just launching more satellites in Japan-specific orbits so they have better, faster GPS coverage above Japan, and especially in dense cities where you need a high angle of elevation for positioning satellites.
The farming systems are more real-time kinematic GPS, which broadcast local corrections from a dedicated reference statiion. [2]