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Comment by stevenrace | Hacker News Reader

So I've worked in this space before (realtime GPS tracking for a Fortune 100) - reducing GPS battery drain is great...but getting the signal back to 'The Cloud' (ie cellular) to be processed is what sucks.

And if you do barf out the data via cellular and are in cahoots with your cellular provider - you get tower information that helps estimate/verify location. But again, all of this eats away at whatever savings from being impatient with the GPS signal.

With cellular and a modern LiPo, the battery life is, at best, measured in weeks.

The 'Future' of GPS will come ~2015 when the last of the 'GPS Block-IIIA' satellites are in orbit and we move from 50bps to 500,000bps. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIIA

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Is this going to require new GPS receivers? I don't really see it addressed on the wikipedia page.

Yup, it operates on a new range of frequencies.

Using the new L2C signal will require a new receiver, but the current L1 (C/A) signal will continue to be broadcast. So you will not need a new receiver to continue the same level of service.

If we're talking animal tracking, as the author mentioned as a possible use case, could the data be stored on-chip and processed upon recovery? I imagine that would handily beat out any cloud-based processing in terms of battery life, but of course assumes that we only eventually want the data.

From what I understood, that's exactly what the paper proposes. You store the raw data, and only correlate it with the ephemeris later. I don't know why the author involved the cloud into it, it sounds like it can be done very easily on any Internet-connected device.

Sure, but even in the domain of animal tracking I imagine very few cases involve capturing the animals afterwards. That seems labor intensive (and prone to biting, scratching, etc).

If 'afterwards' is when it hits a certain geofence or known network - you still are still stuck with waking up the device and querying the network interface...or doing some non-C friendly code to interpret a geofence coordinate.

How is it compared to the Russian 3rd generation GLONASS-K satellite?

What benefits do the new satellites bring?

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