Gps navigation how does it work

The future of GPS tracking will likely be far more accurate and effective for both personal and business use. Debunking the top 10 vehicle tracking myths.

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Learn all about the Geotab Drive app for Hours of Service, electronic logging and vehicle inspection. Skip to main content. What are the three elements of GPS? The three segments of GPS are: Space Satellites — The satellites circling the Earth, transmitting signals to users on geographical position and time of day.

Ground control — The Control Segment is made up of Earth-based monitor stations, master control stations and ground antenna. Control activities include tracking and operating the satellites in space and monitoring transmissions.

There are monitoring stations on almost every continent in the world, including North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

User equipment — GPS receivers and transmitters including items like watches, smartphones and telematic devices. How does GPS technology work? Here is an illustration of satellite ranging: As a device moves, the radius distance to the satellite changes.

What are the uses of GPS? Navigation — Getting from one location to another. Tracking — Monitoring object or personal movement. Mapping — Creating maps of the world. Timing — Making it possible to take precise time measurements. Some specific examples of GPS use cases include: Emergency Response: During an emergency or natural disaster , first responders use GPS for mapping, following and predicting weather, and keeping track of emergency personnel.

Read more about GPS tracking for first responders. Health and fitness: Smartwatches and wearable technology can track fitness activity such as running distance and benchmark it against a similar demographic. Construction, mining and off-road trucking: From locating equipment, to measuring and improving asset allocation, GPS enables companies to increase return on their assets. Another big benefit of GPS technology is you can use it to keep an eye on the elderly or disabled loved ones.

There is a small button on these devices that seniors can press to make emergency calls for immediate medical help.

SOS alarm notifies you when your loved one pressed it. It is also ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. In fact, statisticians also predict that in the next thirty years, So if you have a loved one in your home that needs special care, you can use a GPS Tracker for peace of mind.

Today there are tons of GPS enabled devices you can add into the clothes or footwear of the elderly to track them. Owners of valuable paintings and artwork protect their assets by installing a small GPS device in them. The moment it moves away from their location, it sends an email or text message to the owner to trace the location and get the artistic piece back. GPS saves lives and ensures speedy recovery of victims in case of global disaster.

Location information coupled with automation effectively lowers delay in dispatch of emergency services and supplies. In fact, it operates in any kind of weather, anytime and anywhere. Meteorologists use this modern technology for the prediction of storm and flood. They use GPS to assess water vapor content by analyzing data transmissions via the atmosphere. You can even link your vehicle tracking system to your tablet, mobile, or PC to monitor location in real-time.

Satellite navigation or Satnav means the use of a portable radio receiver that picks up the GPS signals from orbiting satellites. It is usually more accurate than other forms of navigation. Navstar Global Positioning System is the popular Satnav system that uses 31 active satellites. A GPS Tracker is a system used to track the precise position of any person or vehicle in a real-time scenario. It must be in direct line of sight to at least three different satellites to triangulate the exact position.

That is why most of the GPS trackers use Wi-Fi routers for the massively dense regions and indoor tracking. However, to obtain a precise location from the Wi-Fi router, you require a Wi-Fi chipset in the tracker. These Wi-Fi routers work in the same way as satellites. Cars can contain many products that have GPS inside them. So, even if the car is moving fast, as long as these devices can receive GPS signals, they will work fine.

There are things that will prevent the GPS signals from being received in a car, like bad weather, and clouds can block GPS signals. Data pushers are GPS tracking units that are used for tracking any vehicle, person, or asset. In asset and personal tracking, the location of a particular person or vehicle is sent to the server over short time intervals. Data Pullers track location the same as data pushers.

However, the main difference is that data pushers do not send any data to the server. Instead, it requests to send the information. On the other hand, data pullers are always switched on and can be used to extract information at any time.

Data Loggers store the position of vehicle, speed, and heading in its internal memory. Personal trackers track people or even pets. They work via their own devices such as a bracelet or pocket chip. They are pocket-sized and can be added to the pet collar or backpack of a person for easy tracking.

But you need to activate them to locate and follow the device remotely. Asset trackers are used to track non-vehicular things, like boxes, crates, etc. GPS Car Trackers use cell-based racking. Cell-based trackers are most common. They collect data from a vehicle using the internet and then send it using cell towers. Remoter users can access tracking information using a secure web connection or smartphone application. Plug-in GPS trackers are easy to install into the port of a car.

The port offers power and information to GPS trackers. They alert the owner of the vehicle is turned on or off. They are ideal for both business and personal use.

These monitoring stations help in tracking signals from the GPS satellites that are continuously orbiting the earth. Space vehicles transmit microwave carrier signals.

The users of Global Positioning Systems have GPS receivers that convert these satellite signals so that one can estimate the actual position, velocity and time. The development of communications technology has long since surpassed the sole ability to access others when they are mobile.

Today, mobile communication devices are becoming much more advanced and offer more than the ability to just carry on a conversation. Cell phone GPS tracking is one of those advances.

All cell phones constantly broadcast a radio signal, even when not on a call. The cell phone companies have been able to estimate the location of a cell phone for many years using triangulation information from the towers receiving the signal. However, the introduction of GPS technology into cell phones has meant that cell phone GPS tracking now makes this information a lot more accurate.

With GPS technology now more commonplace in many new smartphones, this means that the location of anyone carrying a GPS enabled smartphone can be accurately tracked at any time. You ask somebody else where you are, and she says, "You are miles from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If you combine this information with the Boise information, you have two circles that intersect. You now know that you must be at one of these two intersection points, if you are miles from Boise and miles from Minneapolis. If a third person tells you that you are miles from Tucson, Arizona, you can eliminate one of the possibilities, because the third circle will only intersect with one of these points.

You now know exactly where you are -- Denver, Colorado. This same concept works in three-dimensional space, as well, but you're dealing with spheres instead of circles. In the next section, we'll look at this type of trilateration.

Fundamentally, three-dimensional trilateration isn't much different from two-dimensional trilateration, but it's a little trickier to visualize. Imagine the radii from the previous examples going off in all directions.

So instead of a series of circles, you get a series of spheres. If you know you are 10 miles from satellite A in the sky, you could be anywhere on the surface of a huge, imaginary sphere with a mile radius.

If you also know you are 15 miles from satellite B, you can overlap the first sphere with another, larger sphere. The spheres intersect in a perfect circle. If you know the distance to a third satellite, you get a third sphere, which intersects with this circle at two points.

The Earth itself can act as a fourth sphere -- only one of the two possible points will actually be on the surface of the planet, so you can eliminate the one in space. Receivers generally look to four or more satellites, however, to improve accuracy and provide precise altitude information. The GPS receiver figures both of these things out by analyzing high-frequency, low-power radio signals from the GPS satellites. Better units have multiple receivers, so they can pick up signals from several satellites simultaneously.

Radio waves are electromagnetic energy, which means they travel at the speed of light about , miles per second, , km per second in a vacuum. The receiver can figure out how far the signal has traveled by timing how long it took the signal to arrive. In the next section, we'll see how the receiver and satellite work together to make this measurement.

On the previous page, we saw that a GPS receiver calculates the distance to GPS satellites by timing a signal's journey from satellite to receiver. As it turns out, this is a fairly elaborate process. At a particular time let's say midnight , the satellite begins transmitting a long, digital pattern called a pseudo-random code. The receiver begins running the same digital pattern also exactly at midnight.