6 ms·
A 6 channel GPS receiver from 1993
- thomasfl 3y agoThat's cute!
- roland35 3y agoAdorable! As a former EE we often put little jokes and Easter eggs in prototype PCB designs. Sometimes they made it to production!
- dan-robertson 3y agoMore on gps: https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html
- microtonal 3y agoAnother great explanatory page I have seen is: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ Comes with a lot of animations and interactive elements. Admittedly, I haven't gone through all of it yet since it so detailed, but it is marvelous. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36180316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36180316
- agumonkey 3y agoarchived link for image links seem dead https://web.archive.org/web/20060711045257/https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060711045257/https://lea.hamra...
- tpmx 3y agoIt sold for just $12 yesterday. (Some more shots here, too.) https://www.ebay.com/itm/274506300217 https://www.ebay.com/itm/274506300217
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI don't think it sold. The listing ended. Also add $6.50 shipping. Still worth it.
- tpmx 3y agoBut it literally says: "Sold for: US $12.00"?
- kebman 3y agoIt's a bit on the side, but I remember my father telling me that the PCB's he sold to the Eastern Bloc were often adorned with microscopic greetings in Cyrillic, though the Russian spelling was often pretty bad. Just like now, the Soviet Union was under heavy sanctions, and they weren't allowed to receive the latest computer tech. The various companies had ways around this, though, and the saying was that they'd purposefully design their boards so that Russian engineers could "tamper" with them in order to achieve higher than allowed clock speeds. Anyway this cute board just made me think of that, so thought I'd share it.
- secondcoming 3y ago[flagged]
- gambiting 3y agoIt's incredibly racist, offensive and ignorant to assume that "Eastern Block" means just Russia. Many former "eastern block" countries nowadays are firmly with the west and oppose Russia and their stupid invasion with all their might. Being bundled together with the Russians is the most personally offensive thing I've ever read on HN.
- assusdan 3y agoCould you please also stop bundling all russians together? Not all of us oppose "the west" and support our stupid invasion.
- gambiting 3y agoI didn't say either thing though? I said many of us here in the former Eastern Block oppose Russia - and I personally find being bundled with the Russians offensive, as I am not a Russian. Anything you read into it beyond this point is your own interpretation.
- 3y ago
- ck2 3y agoGarmin had the 100 series in 1990 Neat history of GPS units http://retro-gps.info/page33/index.html http://retro-gps.info/page33/index.html But what's really interesting is the first GPS watch, the Forerunner 101 in 2003 https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/231 https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/231
- ShamelessC 3y ago> Why is it shaped like an ambulance? Good question. Was hoping there was an actual answer for that question. Or am I missing something? Otherwise reads like "good question, who fucking knows!? certainly not me the person making the assertion!"
- skhr0680 3y agoAm I missing some sarcasm, or do you honestly think that the board in question doesn't look like an ambulance?
- InCityDreams 3y agoBut why is it shaoed so?
- skhr0680 3y agoWhy would someone in 1993 have had the foresight to think that they might need to know their location to within a hundred meters or so?
- ShamelessC 3y agoNo sarcasm. Yes, it looks like an ambulance (seemingly deliberately). The tweet/fart/whatevertheyrecalled just has strange choice of phrasing implying they will follow up on this, then they don't. _Why_ is it an ambulance? Well who cares, I guess - but the author of the poof/squirt/whatevertheyrecalled is the one who draws attention to it in the first place.
- skhr0680 3y agoWhoever designed the board may have just done it as a joke, but I think giving the coastguard etc. an idea of your general location when in distress would have been a good civilian use of GPS in 1993
- makomk 3y agoIt's a several decade old piece of hardware that was likely produced in extremely limited quantity, so finding the answer to that is probably not going to be easy. Presumably it was produced as a promotional item made to promote their GPS receivers for some kind of safety application that the ambulance shape is a reference to, but good luck confirming that in 2023.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoThe original GPS receivers in the late 80s and early 90s did not have maps. And they used LCD screens. The one I owned by Lowrance required 6 AA batteries. Not AAA. Not rechargeable. Optional power through a cigarette-auto cable, but that's not helpful when on foot. It burned through batteries like crazy. I owned this one: https://web.archive.org/web/20231104153749/http://retro-gps.info/photos/files/page2-1023-full.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20231104153749/http://retro-gps.... (Lowrance GlobalNav Sport) 160 x 160 pixel display. It weighed 2 pounds with batteries. It provided latitude, longitude, and heading. Thought I would use it hiking but it was just too big to be anything but a toy. You inserted a cartridge, specific to your geographic area, if you wanted it to display names of towns/cities (data on the cartridges): https://www.ebay.com/itm/314936082464 https://www.ebay.com/itm/314936082464 It did have "waypoints" (lat/long bookmarks, essentially) that allowed you to plot a line as you traveled. It could tell you how far you were to different waypoints you'd previously entered. IIRC, it had a serial connection for waypoint download to a PC. People tried sharing waypoint series -- "routes" -- but it just never really had much success as I recall. It was just too cumbersome.
- metadat 3y agoWhich model was yours? This page appears to show every model of handheld GPS ever made, and Lowrance has 4 entries. Thanks for sharing this, I never had the chance to see one of these units. It's so weird now to imagine GPS with no map! P.s. What does a six-channel GPS receiver even mean? Is more channels more better?
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoHere's a better picture of what I owned. It had a huge hard-plastic case: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314936082464 https://www.ebay.com/itm/314936082464 The antenna flipped up and doubled as a screen protector: http://retro-gps.info/photos/files/page2-1023-full.jpg http://retro-gps.info/photos/files/page2-1023-full.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/zxUAAOSwDspimA3F/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/zxUAAOSwDspimA3F/s-l1600.jpg Sorry, I don't remember what 6-channel means. I would guess it could receive data from up to 6 satellites? Don't know. IIRC, this cost about $700 but cartridges were extra. Very expensive for the time. It worked without the cartridges, but I think it only displayed lat/long then, or in any case much more limited info. The carts added more info like town/city/state. Unfortunately, I could not find any YouTube videos of early GPS receivers.
- thom 3y agoGPS seems fairly pedestrian now but my dad had one of the early Garmin models in the 90s and it was a kind of magic back then. Even outside of the actual location info, just seeing this thing in your hand listening to satellites up in space felt incredibly powerful. Later on you could get units compatible with Windows CE and mobile devices and it was easy to see why it would be a killer app on smartphones. It’s sad that the complexity and cleverness is all hidden now.
- tpmx 3y agoI mean, both GPS and WiFi was super exciting stuff in the early 2000s. There was a GPS magazine for GPS terminal enthusiasts (!). It's still sort of around: https://www.gpsworld.com/ https://www.gpsworld.com/.
- callalex 3y agoAlso kids these days don’t know the pain of GPS taking 3-10 minutes to get a position fix without almanac data.
- thom 3y agoYeah, navigating a big city meant finding a crossroads where you might be able to see a bit of sky. I used to wear a shoulder bag and attach the antenna to the strap to stay locked on.
- mareko 3y agoOr the days before GPS where taking a road trip inevitably resulted in a big argument with your partner about directions
- spookthesunset 3y agoBack then even light tree cover would sometimes trash the signal enough to lose position. While modern GPS can get a position fix pretty quick, a cold start on standalone units can still take a while before it discovers enough satellites. The crazy thing to me is now days my little tiny watch can do Wifi, Several Bluetooth protocols, 5G, NFC, Wireless charging and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting about. Oh and it supports a variety of global navigation satellite systems. Don't forget the high-res OLED display too. And the fact it is fully watertight. All that while having a fairly impressive battery life.
- 3760451 3y ago3760451
- 3760451 3y agoHos
- mattew 3y agoThe interesting thing about GPS back then was that the location data you got back were randomly slightly incorrect every time you got a reading. I’m pretty sure this was so it wasn’t useful for military purposes. I think it was called differential post correction but if you had a base station with a known location you could snap your incorrect points to the difference generated at that correction level and get the true location after the fact. Source: GIS major in late 90s when this stuff was a lot more magical
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/ https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/ Selective Availability?
- mattew 3y agoThat’s right. It was selective availability and you used differential post correction to clean the data up and get accurate locations for the data you were capturing. Thanks for the correction!
- rtkgps 3y agoSo cool to see how the technology has evolved over the years, now we can achieve accuracies down to one centimeter with GPS. Check out what Emlid has been building in this space. http://emlid.com http://emlid.com
- matheusmoreira 3y agoCentimeter precision still requires a base station. Gotta leave a GPS receiver stationary for days so it can average out the errors and compute its own position precisely. With that accurate receiver it's possible to correct the measurements of other receivers nearby up to some maximum range. This requires raw GNSS measurement data support which is not available in most consumer units and is an incredibly proprietary mess in the professional surveying equipment space. It was actually Google who improved the status quo by mandating pseudorange support in Android.
- 23B1 3y agoAll the real OGs remember having to haul the PLGR around Ft. Bragg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Lightweight_GPS_Receiver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Lightweight_GPS_Rece...
- RecycledEle 3y agoIIRC, there were ambulance-shaped advertising gimmicks given away that looked like functional GPS receivers, but did not function for some reason. I never figured out if all the chips on them were bad or if just some of the chips were bad. I would not assume that GPS receiver was ever designed to work. It may have been just for looks despite having a lot of expensive parts on it.