I would like to point out the insanely good design of the GPS radio layer (the L1+L2 signals).
Even 46 years on, the radio layer is fully forwards and backwards compatible, and a bunch of important metrics like time to first fix and user equivalent range errors have both improved by factors of 10-1000, with no incompatible change needed to the protocol.
The total RF transmit power to provide service to the whole earth is less than the electricity consumption of a typical US house (far less than 5G or TV or AM/FM radio), and well below the noise floor. That's possible due to clever use of stacked gold codes.
The design has allowed frequency-sharing with competing systems (eg. Galileo) - you don't see mobile phone networks doing that!
The actual signal sent has allowed things like carrier phase decoding, due to the locking of the phase between the modulated data and the carrier, which in turn gives far better pseudoranges and accuracy.
Overall, the designers either had incredible forethought, or incredible luck, or some combination of the two.
I would like to point out the insanely good design of the GPS radio layer (the L1+L2 signals).
Even 46 years on, the radio layer is fully forwards and backwards compatible, and a bunch of important metrics like time to first fix and user equivalent range errors have both improved by factors of 10-1000, with no incompatible change needed to the protocol.
The total RF transmit power to provide service to the whole earth is less than the electricity consumption of a typical US house (far less than 5G or TV or AM/FM radio), and well below the noise floor. That's possible due to clever use of stacked gold codes.
The design has allowed frequency-sharing with competing systems (eg. Galileo) - you don't see mobile phone networks doing that!
The actual signal sent has allowed things like carrier phase decoding, due to the locking of the phase between the modulated data and the carrier, which in turn gives far better pseudoranges and accuracy.
Overall, the designers either had incredible forethought, or incredible luck, or some combination of the two.