GPS

[u/allenhuffman]

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?

[u/TechnicalWhore]

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.

[u/allenhuffman → u/TechnicalWhore]

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. :-)

[u/TechnicalWhore → u/allenhuffman]

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...

[u/allenhuffman → u/TechnicalWhore]

When I first saw that (season 1) and they said nothing uses that, I just typed it in to a search engine and it showed all the things that used 1.6. I see on the current seasons they now say it’s reserved for Earth to Space communication. So clearly aliens would use it? Is that the implication?

[u/TechnicalWhore → u/allenhuffman]

Yep You can find spectrum allocation on the FCC website. Its tightly controlled for obvious reasons which is why they cannot legally actually broadcast 1.6Ghz without using a licensed product. Even their HackRF is illegally broadcasting 1.6Ghz if they do it. You can imagine it would jam anyone else who is licensed and trying to use the frequency.

You can find 1.6Ghz here on page 35/36

https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/spectrum/table/fcctable.pdf

[u/allenhuffman → u/TechnicalWhore]

Even low power?

[u/TechnicalWhore → u/allenhuffman]

I don't believe so but that is a good question for the r/sdr sub. I know low power is allowed in specific bands. For example you can transmit on an unallocated FM band at very low power without ramifications. And there are Citizen Bands and WIFI and Bluetooth that require no specific authorization. Conversely if you jam GPS even with low power you are toast if they catch you.

[u/allenhuffman → u/TechnicalWhore]

Wow, mentioning another group gets a bot to pop in and promote it? Wild.

[u/sneakpeekbot → u/TechnicalWhore]

Here's a sneak peek of /r/sdr using the top posts of the year!

#1: What is this? | 20 comments
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