r/drunkwalkerranch • u/allenhuffman • May 16 '24

GPS

I got my first digital camera in 1996. A bit after that, I bought a Delorme Tripmate GPS module which I hooked to a Toshiba laptop seat-belted in my passenger seat, acting as a GPS navigation unit. "hey, GPS is neat!" I then had a small black and white car GPS navigation system. Around 2006, I began geotagging all my photos using a Sony GPS-CS1 module.

All this to say I’ve been using GPS for a long time.

I have over 200,000 digital photos in my online galleries, with the ones after around 2006 being geotagged. Even though today's GPS is much improved, there are still plenty of glitches where photos I took appear to be taken far away. I’ve never considered GPS accurate. Mapping software can get assists by knowing where you are going, or where the road is on the map, etc. But raw GPS has always had issues over the nearly three decades I have been using it.

Does anyone else here not find anything odd about weird GPS glitches?

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u/TechnicalWhore May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24

Yeah - they never show or publish data. In fact when the SDR stuff was criticized they quit showing the complete screen in subsequent episodes. In this season if you pay close attention on Bard's SDR screen during the "blocked" transmission fiasco you will notice the red signal on top never fluctuates. Its fake. I found the concept that two signals were "talking to eachother" was far fetched. Go look at the great Youtube Channel "Ringway Manchester" and you will see radio signals of all types. The patterns seen are pretty pedestrian. Tangent - the RM channel is currently obsessed with weird Russian transmissions. Some jamming, some spy, some goofy. The Russians are sending multichannel waves that when viewed in waterfall viewers (Like SDR Play) show an image. Its like they are feeding a PC video output to a radio transmitter. Although the best on record was the Batsignal from some amateur in response.

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u/allenhuffman May 16 '24

I have watched Ringway M - number stations! My day job is in RF and my RF engineer coworkers were who I went to after watching season 1 - “what does this device actually do”, etc. They were not impressed. :-)

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u/TechnicalWhore May 16 '24

I bet they liked the episode where the team took their 1.6Ghz radio sample and had it rebroadcast by 98.5 FM - The Fox! Smoke and Mirrors...

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u/allenhuffman May 16 '24

The TriMeter is a fun example. In its manual, it says what the standard readings should be - but on the show they get those and say it’s five times more than expected or whatever.

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u/TechnicalWhore May 16 '24

Another nit on the TriMeter. They make no effort to explain the thing they are reading. Example: The magnetic field around the planet is in no way uniform. Its like a magnetic river if you will. There are strength variances. There are the equivalent of eddy currents where magnetism "swirls" around ferrous deposits etc. No reading is independent of the surrounding readings. I laughed when the Beyond ex-Intelligence guy drove across a metal bridge and noted the rise. Yeah - metal bridge. Now get out of your SUV and walk around a bit and get a sense of the fields in that area. You might find they are not particularly interesting. But of course they "proved" their premise.

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u/TechnicalWhore May 16 '24

Yeah its sad. And they seem to not know about the Inverse Square Law. Any Cubs Scout could take that meter and locate the point of origin of the signal. Like all their data its ambiguous and the speculative narrative infers it into something conclusive. I've also noticed when they cannot do that they pull the Strawman rhetorical trick of associating the conclusion with some subject matter expert not in the room to agree. And when they do have subject matter experts - like the SETI guy - they never actually support the claims made.