[OSM-talk] Good deal on Garmin GPS unit

[Nick Black]

On 7/6/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> Nick Black wrote:
>
> > http://www.sirf.com/Downloads/Collateral/GSC3(f)_6.20.05.pdf
>
> If you look at the block diagram, there is nowhere that GSM
> signals are received or processed.  And judging from the
> commercial shrewdness of the telephone industry, I doubt you can
> get any useful information out of the GSM network without having a
> transmitter and a subscription (SIM card holder) too.  A GSM chip
> (receiver + transmitter) is probably more complicated than the GPS
> chip, and it would be magic if SiRF could hide all that
> functionality inside the chip which is only marginally larger than
> the old SiRFstar II.  What "GSM aided navigation" means is that a
> separate GSM unit somehow receives an approximate location and
> then enters that over the serial data line coming into the
> SiRFstar III chip.  Apparently the new chip has a new (NMEA or
> Garmin protocol) command for receiving an outside estimate of the
> location.  I think TomTom's units solve this by letting the unit
> talk to your cell phone over Bluetooth.
>
> The GPS-GSM connection is very interesting and a bit worrying.
> It means navigation is moving from the gadget market (buy a gadget
> once, use it for free) towards the subscription market (pay per
> view).  It's the same trend as when people are scrapping their
> PDAs (gadgets) and go for more advanced cell phones (tied to
> subscriptions).  We are used to buying a GPS receiver, paying for
> it once, and then receiving the service for free, any day we want.
> But now if we want this new faster tune-in (and who wouldn't want
> that?), we need to pay mobile phone subscription charges every
> time we turn on our navigators.  The GPS system was designed by
> the same U.S. military that gave us the Internet.  If these
> systems had been designed by European telephone companies or
> indeed our national land surveys, the service (navigation and
> Internet) would not be free of charge or have flat-rate
> subscription fees.


Yeah, its kind of ironic that the new Galileo system is being touted
as "liberating" Europe from the tyranny of American control, when the
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
 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?

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.

Nick

> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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