GPS has a variety of applications on land,
at sea, and in the air.
Basically, GPS is usable everywhere except where it's impossible to receive the signal such as inside most buildings, in caves and other subterranean locations, and underwater. The most common airborne applications are for navigation by general aviation and commercial aircraft. At sea, GPS is also typically used for navigation by recreational boaters, commercial fishermen, and professional mariners. Land-based applications are more diverse. The scientific community uses GPS for its precision timing capability and position information.
Surveyors use GPS for an increasing portion of their work. GPS offers cost savings by drastically reducing setup time at the survey site and providing incredible accuracy. Basic survey units, costing thousands of dollars, can offer accuracies down to one meter. More expensive systems are available that can provide accuracies to within a centimeter.
Recreational uses of GPS are almost as varied as the number of recreational sports available. GPS is popular among hikers, hunters, snowmobilers, mountain bikers, and cross-country skiers, just to name a few. Anyone who needs to keep track of where he or she is, to find his or her way to a specified location, or know what direction and how fast he or she is going can utilize the benefits of the global positioning system.
GPS is now commonplace in automobiles as well. Some basic systems are in place and provide emergency roadside assistance at the push of a button (by transmitting your current position to a dispatch center). More sophisticated systems that show your position on a street map are also available. Currently these systems allow a driver to keep track of where he or she is and suggest the best route to follow to reach a designated location.
An irresistible force is moving across our quiet landscape, a force that is expected to increase demand for GPS by over one hundredfold, from a few million to hundreds of millions of units per year. This force is the demand for location capability in cell phones, driven in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirement that cell phones be able to identify their location automatically with GPS-like accuracy.
Successful adoption of GPS into cell phones requires that the technology meet new demands, including indoor operation, near-instantaneous time to first fix, and very low power consumption. Feedback from some phone manufacturers suggests that incorporating GPS should add no more than $10 to the parts cost of a wireless handset.
Conventional wisdom holds that the natural evolution of GPS technology is moving toward a single-chip solution encompassing everything from the antenna connection to a formatted serial output stream. Emerging silicon technologies, allowing integration of RF and digital circuits, are reaching the point where a single chip, performing all the functions of a conventional GPS receiver, may soon be feasible. Although this represents a possible path to integration in cell phones, a single-chip GPS may not offer the best solution.
Even ice-fishing is using GPS and other technologies
With ice-fishing, modern technology has advanced the equipment for the sport. Cell phones and hand-held Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are commonplace. Some shanties are equipped with sonar devices that monitor both bait and potential catches. In addition to sonar, underwater video surveillance cameras are used as an eye beneath the ice.
One fisherman said, "We call it video fishing. We're using better technology now to hunt for fish than they had in World War II for hunting submarines. The fish aren't real aggressive in the winter. You have to learn to feel a light touch. It's a more intimate way to fish and it's addicting when you get used to it."