GPS Declassified by Richard D. Easton & Eric F. Frazier & Rick W. Sturdevant

Author:Richard D. Easton & Eric F. Frazier & Rick W. Sturdevant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

9

Where Are We? GPS and GNSS Today

I once was lost but now am found.

John Newton, “Amazing Grace ,” 1779

Like millions of motorists, thirty-two-year-old Jeramie Griffin, a construction worker in Lebanon, Oregon, received a GPS portable navigation device for Christmas in 2009.1 Black Friday price wars heralded the holiday shopping season with a model from Garmin for eighty-nine dollars, while TomTom undercut its rival with a fifty-nine-dollar loss leader, making its PNDs the most heavily purchased electronics item online that day.2 What came unexpectedly with Griffin’s gift was fifteen minutes of fame. He tried his new GPS unit for the first time Christmas Eve, discovering a shortcut he believed would trim forty minutes off the four-hour trek to his fiancée’s relatives, who lived about two hundred miles away, on the other side of the Cascade Range from the couple’s home in the Willamette Valley.3 They packed their silver Dodge Durango, bundled up their eleven-month old daughter, and departed about 3:30 p.m. Their GPS guidance took them east into the mountains on a state highway, then northeast along a local road, and finally onto one of numerous unplowed logging roads that crisscross the national forests, where they got stuck in deep snow.4 Satellite navigation carried them beyond cell phone coverage. They spent a harrowing night in the car, even making a farewell video.5 Frantic relatives contacted two close friends, who found the stranded family about twenty-four hours after they drove into the snow bank. The friends borrowed a GPS unit identical to Griffin’s and duplicated the route he used.6 Griffin’s family was one of three groups of travelers stranded that holiday weekend after using GPS to plot routes across remote, snow-clogged Oregon roads. They drew the attention of the Associated Press and then CNN.7 Soon their stories went viral on the Internet. The Air Force felt compelled afterward to issue a statement reminding the public that it operates the satellites that emit GPS signals but neither creates nor updates the maps in devices, nor is it involved in calculating routes between destinations.8

Since GPS navigation devices became mass consumer products many have misused them, placed too much faith in them, or blamed them for unexpected outcomes. Stories abound of people driving into swamps or onto railroad tracks because, they say, the GPS unit directed them to do so. One of the first television commercials to tap this trend showed a driver crashing into a storefront as the GPS voice said, “Turn right [pause] in two hundred feet. ” The popular sitcom The Office had its main character robotically chant, “The machine knows ,” as he turned off a road—and into a lake.9 Allstate Insurance commercials featured the personified “Mayhem ” posing as a GPS unit giving incorrect instructions because “you never update me, so now I just have to wing it. ” By 2008 more than eight thousand visitors annually showed up in vehicles at the front door to Ireland’s famous Stone Age monument Newgrange after entering the landmark into GPS units.10 Ignoring

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