Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Navsop A ‘Could Be’ Successor Of GPS



NAVSOP has been developed by UK defense firm BAE SYSTEMS with a view of complementing rather than replacing the GPS technology. But the way it would work endorses that it will be a better piece of positioning system that might lower the value of GPS for the western world in the forthcoming time.
This new positioning system would work by getting Wi-Fi, Radio and TV broadcast signals from surroundings instead of relying upon satellite signals only that get weaken by the time they hit on planet earth. It has also been said that, the use of radio technology particularly medium waves would enable NAVSOP to work at places where even GPS fails. BAE SYSTEMS also claims that NAVSOP could also work in remote locations of planet earth by picking up signals from satellites in earth’s lower orbit. Hence, it would be an amalgamation of satellite signal and radio wave concepts but it will heavily rely upon medium wave radio frequencies to work effectively and that is what would enhance its scope. Moreover, it is also said that no additional infrastructure is required to use this new system because it already exists.
The prototype of NAVSOP is a big box like piece of hardware which has been placed at the back of BAE’s car which has a radio antenna at the roof. The makers also said that once the system is out in the market it would be as tiny as a GPS dongle – slight bigger than a coin – However, BAE SYSTEM’s does not consider this new technology a rival of GPS rather they take it as a technology which would compliment the existing system as said by BAE’s Dr. Ramsey Faragher to BBC “Let’s be clear – for NAVSOP to start learning, you have to have a GPS signal, to know where you are on the face of the Earth”.  Whatever they say it cannot be denied that NAVSOP could be revolutionary, once out in the market, may be even more than the GPS.

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