<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/6/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Lars Aronsson</b> <<a href="mailto:lars@aronsson.se">lars@aronsson.se</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
Nick Black wrote:<br><br>> <a href="http://www.sirf.com/Downloads/Collateral/GSC3(f)_6.20.05.pdf">http://www.sirf.com/Downloads/Collateral/GSC3(f)_6.20.05.pdf</a><br><br>If you look at the block diagram, there is nowhere that GSM
<br>signals are received or processed. And judging from the<br>commercial shrewdness of the telephone industry, I doubt you can<br>get any useful information out of the GSM network without having a<br>transmitter and a subscription (SIM card holder) too. A GSM chip
<br>(receiver + transmitter) is probably more complicated than the GPS<br>chip, and it would be magic if SiRF could hide all that<br>functionality inside the chip which is only marginally larger than<br>the old SiRFstar II. What "GSM aided navigation" means is that a
<br>separate GSM unit somehow receives an approximate location and<br>then enters that over the serial data line coming into the<br>SiRFstar III chip. Apparently the new chip has a new (NMEA or<br>Garmin protocol) command for receiving an outside estimate of the
<br>location. I think TomTom's units solve this by letting the unit<br>talk to your cell phone over Bluetooth.<br><br>The GPS-GSM connection is very interesting and a bit worrying.<br>It means navigation is moving from the gadget market (buy a gadget
<br>once, use it for free) towards the subscription market (pay per<br>view). It's the same trend as when people are scrapping their<br>PDAs (gadgets) and go for more advanced cell phones (tied to<br>subscriptions). We are used to buying a GPS receiver, paying for
<br>it once, and then receiving the service for free, any day we want.<br>But now if we want this new faster tune-in (and who wouldn't want<br>that?), we need to pay mobile phone subscription charges every<br>time we turn on our navigators. The GPS system was designed by
<br>the same U.S. military that gave us the Internet. If these<br>systems had been designed by European telephone companies or<br>indeed our national land surveys, the service (navigation and<br>Internet) would not be free of charge or have flat-rate
<br>subscription fees.</blockquote><div><br>Yeah, its kind of ironic that the new Galileo system is being touted as "liberating" Europe from the tyranny of American control, when the <br>ESA are giving no garuantees that we won't have to pay subscruptions for some services. Supposedly one of the key motivations for Gallileo is vehicle charging - could it turn out to be a false dawn? (Not if you have a bike). At
</div> least Navastar will still be there, and that's the difference between GPS and GSM: how much will people pay for 1m accuracy from Gallileo when they can get 5m accuracy (ever increasing) with Navstar?<br><br>RE GSM/Sirf II - I stand corrected! I've emailed Sirf to see what they have to say about it, but it does seem to mean that the chips *can* be used with GSM signals. I don't think that this is A-GPS though.
<br><br>Nick<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
--<br> Lars Aronsson (<a href="mailto:lars@aronsson.se">lars@aronsson.se</a>)<br> Aronsson Datateknik - <a href="http://aronsson.se">http://aronsson.se</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>talk mailing list
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