Russian GPS near complete
The Russian government is reviving its Soviet-era project to create a navigation system that completes with the US GPS.
Three sputniks of the global GLONASS navigation system were successfully put into a pre-calculated orbit on Wednesday [26 December 2007].
The GLONASS system was put into operation for the Russian Defence Ministry in September 1993. It had a limited number of twelve sputniks. The system creates a continuous navigation signals space, allowing the most accurately determination of the coordinates and speed of seagoing vessels, air, land and other vehicles, provided with system receivers.
The orbital group was increased to the initially planned number of 24 sputniks in December 1995. However, due to shortage of finances, it was again reduced to a limited proportion. The GLONASS was declared as a dual-purpose system by the president’s order of February 18, 1999. President Putin instructed Roskosmos and the Defence Ministry in December 2005 to accelerate their work to restore the orbital group of the GLONASS system in order to make it even more applicable on the entire territory of Russia by the beginning of 2008 and to turn it into a global system by the end of 2009…
According to Engadget, we should expect to see the first compatible consumer device in mid-2008. By 2010, Russia will open the system up to the outside nations as well.
Given the growing importance of location-based systems in the future, governments around the world are trying to create systems to either compete or complement with the widely used GPS system — the EU develops the Galileo system, China pushes for the Beidou navigation system, and Russia builds GLONASS.
In a market-driven economy, competitions are usually for the consumers. But, I’m uncertain about the development of multiple navigation systems with isolated technology solutions. There is no doubt that governments pushing for their own systems are in the best interest of their national security and national pride. But, I’m worried that multiple incompatible systems will only create confusions in commercial product developments and hinder the speedy development of location-based technology.
Why do you think they are imcompatible? To me they are complimentary. The frequencies has been chosen so that they can all be received using the same antenna, so it’s no problem creating a receiver that supports for instance NAVSTAR, Galileo and GLONASS at the same time (handheld dual navstar/glonass recievers already exist). With such a receiver we will almost never have worry about poor PDOPs.
Comment by Morten — December 26, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
One of the reasons the EU (like the Russians) wanted its own GPS technology is that European governments did not necessarily want to be utterly dependent on technology controlled by the US government, and they also wanted to encourage technological innovation in their own IT industries. As Morten says, compatibility is not a huge problem, and who knows - maybe a non-US system will turn out to be the best solution in the long run, although the massive dominance of US technology and its near-monopolies in some sectors will certainly by a tough nut for competitors to crack. But satellite and space technology generally seem to have benefited from having more than one global player in recent years, so let’s see what happens with GPS/Galileo/GLONASS etc.
Comment by Chris — January 3, 2008 @ 5:12 am
One more thought: Mobile phone technology is developing rapidly, despite the “handicap” of multiple standards globally - with some countries sticking to standards that other countries have abandoned. But I can buy a quad-band phone that will work pretty much anywhere, so why not apply the same approach to GPS etc?
Comment by Chris — January 3, 2008 @ 5:19 am