The Rise of Navigation Systems

Remember paper maps? You'd take them out of the glove compartment or boot, unfold them, flip them around, and it would take you some ten minutes to find where you are on the map, before you could find where you were going. Later map books were a small improvement, but really reading a map while driving was always for the birds.

Automotive navigation systems simply revolutionized driving - there was no other way to see it. Given turn-by-turn navigation, you can now go to a city you've never been to before, punch in your destination, and go straight there exactly as if you were a native! This miraculous system is the sum product of scientific advancement in communications, transportation, digital technology, and let us not forget space exploration (we had to get those satellites up there somehow!).

The history of modern automotive navigation systems actually goes back to the 1970s. Even before microprocessor technology emerged, there were attempts to make automated guidance systems. The first commercially available automotive navigation system was Etak, of Sunnyvale, California, USA. Other companies which were early to market with prototypes include Alpine, Honda, Mitsubishi Electric, Magellan, and Pioneer.

Oldsmobile introduced the first GPS navigation system available in a production car in 1995, calling it "GuideStar." Even then, it was another five years before GPS signals and navigation systems came into wide use.

Today's systems involve a symphony of technological advancements. There are visualization components, including maps in top view, bird's-eye view, and linear view. Sometimes they have voice prompts. There is always a road database, including a vector map of the area. A couple of map formats include CARiN, created by Philips Car Systems, and the S-Dal format published by NAVTEQ, as well as Physical Storage Format (PSF) created by an industry grouping of car manufacturers, navigation system suppliers and map data suppliers in an effort to standardize the data format used in car navigation systems.

In addition, new features are being integrated all the time. Newer navigation systems can receive and display information on traffic congestion and suggest alternate routes. They can supply data about parking places. They can even provide real-time data such as weather broadcasting and road conditions.

These sophisticated systems continue to improve and add features, building upon decades of work in various technology fields. We might yet see the day when cars can actually drive themselves, and when they do, they'll be building upon the rise of navigation systems!

Getting To Know GPS Technology

Once upon a time, this would have sounded like a science-fiction plot: We're going to put an array of machines up in space orbiting the Earth, and use them to navigate the globe. Such audacity would only have been found in a Jules Verne novel.

But today, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is a reality, and a working one at that. As of the year 2009, there are now 31 active satellites in the GPS constellation. With all this sophisticated technology up there, you should have no problem finding a signal! GPS systems are definitely here to stay. While these systems were originally deployed for military and commercial shipping and flying use, they've since become the standard for end user consumers to use for navigation as well, even to the point of trivial recreational use, such as with geocaching.

The way that GPS systems can be used for navigation is by triangulating on a signal from space and using the time it takes to receive the signal to determine the distance from the source of that signal. A signal from one satellite isn't very helpful - that could be an infinite number of points around a circle on the face of a globe. The signal from two satellites is somewhat useful, since there's only two points on the surface of a globe which can match the distance from two satellites.

With the exact distance from three visible satellites, you have a theoretically perfect pinpoint location, but such accuracy would require a highly accurate clock - we're talking nanosecond accurate. Thus, four or more satellites are used and the results can be easily averaged out to indicate the location of the received signals. That should help explain why we have so many redundant satellites up there, and remember also that you can't receive a signal which has to be traveling straight through the Earth.

The most typical use of a GPS receiver for private use is automotive navigation systems. These devices interpret the data from satellites and download maps from Internet servers or use built-in mapping software to display the current location of the device, and can easily be clipped to the visor of a car and used like a live, updated map.

Companies which rely on a mobile dispatch model are also increasingly turning to GPS systems for tracking their units. Companies such as mobile repair services and taxicab services use the devices both to dispatch the nearest unit and assist individual drivers with navigation. Police, fire, and paramedic units are dispatched in cities with the assistance of GPS. GPS tracking is even coming into use in package delivery - you just might be able to pinpoint the exact location of your package in the very near future when it's being handled by UPS or FedEx.

A typical GPS system is made up of GPS terminals, some form of mapping data service, and service centers. These systems typically tie together diverse technologies of Internet, mobile terminals and networks, and automotive and consumer electronics such as mobile phones. The market is rapidly developing, and each company has to keep coming up with new innovations and ways of providing their products cheaper in order to stay competitive.

Why You Should Take Tracking Your Loved Ones Seriously

The newest GPS technology and tracking devices has found a new purpose beyond tracking vehicles, to tracking people. Now, since this is still a new idea, one might be concerned about invading privacy, being too sheltering, or being a "helicopter parent," as the derogatory phrase has it.

But the fact remains that people get hurt and harmed through no fault of their own. Two people at risk for that are children and the elderly. Both of them will benefit from a simple tracking device.

In fact, one of our associates who lives in the United States near a wide wooded area told us recently that a neighbor of his had had an argument with his roommate while drunk and wandered off into the woods. Search parties scoured the area for a week. They found him, drowned in a local river. A GPS tracking device could have saved his life. And we're talking about a 30-year-old, fully capable man. This just goes to make a point, there is nothing wrong with attaching a monitor to a five-year-old child or an Alzheimer's patient.

Children can especially get into a variety of troubles:

* The big one every parent worries about is abduction. And the awful thing about it is that you never know where it will strike. Children today are better educated about not talking to strangers and reporting suspicious activity to an adult, but the fact that we need to do that just highlights the need for safety. Not to mention what might happen if the child is simply overpowered and has no choice.

* Wandering into danger. Swimming pools, busy streets, machinery, mine shafts, and natural hazards are just some of the kinds of distress a young child can unknowingly find themselves in. While it can't protect against everything, a GPS tracker can still make it so that a quick glance at a screen can tell whether a child is near an area known to be dangerous.

* Getting lost. Somewhere between learning to walk and acquiring middle-school skills, every child has that one occasion where a they just roam off. Children at that age have no concept of just how big the world is, and they get lost before they even realize it. And every parent knows that first moment of panic realization when their child is missing, and the increasingly frantic search.

In addition to the cases where just any child can be at risk, there is the case of children born with a handicap of some sort. Autism, ADD, learning and attention disorders can all give a child a greater tendency to roam or wander into danger. In all of these cases, using a GPS tracking device just makes good common sense.

Once upon the 20th century, we had the phreakers. Phreakers were phone hackers; they'd use various equipment and techniques to rig the public phone system, getting free calls, snooping on private calls, even running their own private network, and generally abusing the telephone system for naughty stuff. Then along came the computer age proper, and computer hackers used a technique called "wardialing", in which a programmed modem would be used to block-dial banks of phone numbers looking for a computer network online.

Our 21st century equivalent of these are wardrivers. Wardriving is the practice of driving around in heavily populated urban areas with a wireless laptop or other gear, with the purpose of sniffing out open, unprotected networks. This can be done with criminal intentions of penetrating them, or just for kicks. Note that we provide our information strictly for public education, and not for encouraging criminal activity.

How it's done:

It's surprisingly easy to do, and doesn't require much in the way of special equipment.

- A laptop, notebook, netbook, or UMPC.

- Some kind of wireless networking capability.

- An omnidirectional antenna.

- Software. 'Netstumbler' is a program with this purpose available for the Windows platform.

- A GPS unit, for mapping your hits.

- A car. No motorcycling for this trick!

Typically you will have a two-person team. One's driving and one's got the laptop open. Keeping the netstumbler (or other program open), you'll see that when you drive within range of a wireless access point, the software will display it on the screen, including such information as manufacturer, channel, AP name, GPS coordinates, and so on. That's it!

In practice, you will likely encounter hundreds of wide open points. A lot of 802.11 set-ups will just let anyone within broadcast range have access because it's just easier that way. A sizable number of 802.11 set-ups will just have WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) turned on and think they're protected. They are not; standard software tools can crack WEP in seconds. A handful will use WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and WPA2. If anybody you encounter is serious enough about their security to use WPA2, you'd best not fool around with them. They'll also likely have somebody watching for mischief.

How to protect your own network:

In the case where you don't intentionally want to provide public access for the world, you'll want to secure your wireless network. Some steps:

- Even though it's easily cracked, you can use WEP anyway. It's a small step, and any step is a deterrent.

- Enable WPA. WPA provides far better protection and is even easier to use. Windows XP has it built-in, as does most wireless hardware these days. Full support of WPA2 is not yet there, but some day you'll have WPA2 accessible everywhere.

- Don't broadcast your Service Set ID (SSID). Just use it to set up your devices, but once that's done, turn off broadcasting.

- Reduce your wireless transmitter power! Nobody thinks of this, but if your wireless network only needs to encompass your office building, then why send the signal all the way across town? If you lower the power of your WLAN transmitter, you will reduce the range of the signal. Even if you can't control it so finely that its range perfectly fits your floor plan, you can at least minimize the chance that a wardriver will stumble upon it.

In any case, don't wring your hands over the insecurity of wireless networks. The Internet itself in insecure, and you're using that, aren't you?