GPS Navigation Devices Origins
GPS navigation devices work off the program of U.S. satellites to pinpoint geographic location. GPS stands for Global Positioning System, and was first employed by the American military as a nuclear deterrent during the Cold War arms race. Ironically, it was during the Cold War that President Ronald Reagan, the epitome of your Cold Warrior, directed that GPS be made accessible for civilian applications following the Korean Airlines Flight 007 tragedy, one of the tensest moments within the whole Cold War. This incident occurred when a Boeing 747 strayed into the airspace with the now-defunct Soviet Union and was shot down, killing all aboard, including a sitting United States Congressman. Investigations concluded that a navigational error was to blame, and tracking procedures were changed to be able to avert similar accidents within the future.
GPS navigation devices can actually be traced back to World War II as well as the ground-based radio navigation systems developed in the course of that time, for instance LORAN and Decca. Today’s GPS allows soldiers get their bearings inside the dark too as unfamiliar territory, provides tracking data on potential targets, guides missiles and bombs, and even helps within the creation of reconnaissance maps. Civilian applications contain land surveying and time transfer (synchronization of clocks). Generally speaking, GPS navigation devices are classified as civilian if it cannot be considered munitions, or weapons, through the U.S. government. For example, those capable of operating above sixty thousand feet at speeds of the thousand knots can not be exported without having special licenses. Otherwise, such GPS navigation devices can be very easily installed in a ballistic missile.
The technology behind GPS navigation devices is made up of three parts. Most obviously, the satellite method requirements to be in place. This comprises some twenty-four to thirty satellites in medium earth orbit. Then there’s the manage system, which is in turn composed of the master control station and an alternate master control station plus any number of shared and dedicated ground antennae and monitoring stations. Finally, the user component is simply all the individual end-users around the planet, military and civilian.
GPS has become a global tool for the common excellent despite its military origins. Just like the web, also originally conceived in response to war and also the threat of war, GPS has grown beyond such narrow applications in death and destruction for the myriad of commercial, scientific, and recreational uses now obtainable. Almost no aspect of our modern 21st Century lives are not touched by it, from the emergency rescue personnel dispatched towards the conversations transmitted over cellular networks.