What’s the Frequency, Jacques?

The Space Review ^ | Monday, March 1, 2004 | Taylor Dinerman

[anymouse]

Once again President Bush out-foxes the Frogs. :)

[gr8eman]

I really do not get this! Why would the Euroweens spend millions, perhaps billions for a service they can get for free? I was shocked when they declassified the P(recision)-code. It used to be encrypted until about 5 years ago. But then you could still get the C/A (Coarse Acquisition) anyway. The P-code can surely be used by anybody for weapons...and being a good receiver costs a whopping $300 it really makes no sense unless it is just a way for the Euro freaks to waste taxpayers money for bragging rights of some sort.

[Fiddlstix]

Ping

[GregB]

She love me she loves me not oops..thay love us...etc...

[BigSkyFreeper]

It's all about one-upmanship.

[Sacajaweau]

It'll take us about a week to tap their system. Geez...

[ScaniaBoy]

...but it would be FRENCH..uh, sorry, European, I mean.

(...and actually I think the French have for years considered the possibility that the "European" - US relationship would go from bad to worse.)

[JeeperFreeper]

Great post. This is the stuff that, in real terms, illustrates one of the the differences between Dims and Repubs. Ever hear of "the devil is in the details"?? (I'm sure you have, just trying to score a rhetorical point here.) This is a "detail". Take of details, the big picture takes care of itself. In this case, the Dims would have sold these matters for campaign contributions, laundered somehow into plausible legitimacy, with full knowledge that the mainstream media would use blindfolds and ear plugs about the entire sordid mess.

[Bonaparte]

Europe's Achilles heel is its socialist economic system. france is clearly embarking on an arms race with us. The way to defeat them is the same way Ronald Reagan defeated the USSR. Hopefully, france will follow through with this latest project. It will guarantee the collapse and break-up of the EU. Neither france nor Germany has been able to live up to its GDP/debt commitments. With this latest anticipated outlay, they will fall even further behind. Excellent.

[NonValueAdded]

"Zut alors, we have been outfoxed again," said a deeply, deeply saddened Jacques ChIRAQ.

[Blue Screen of Death]

I spent five years cruising in my sailboat. I remember reading about another cruising sailor who had charts for the areas in the Red Sea. He took a fix (this was in the days before GPS) with his sextant and went to apply it to his chart. He discovered that he was something like 85 miles inland sailing across a sand dune according to the chart.

He shot the sun again and plotted his position again. Same result. After quite a frustrating time, he noticed he had a French chart and it considered the prime meridian to be Paris.

By standard every other navigation system uses Greenwich, England as the prime meridian, but the French could not stand that, so they replaced Greenwich with Paris, throwing all of the French charts off by about 180 miles. Ya gotta love em.

[Cold Heat]

Why would the Euroweens spend millions,

Why do Frogs jump when you poke them in the butt?

[Ditto]

Of course, this would require the development of simple electronic receiver/mapper/calculators for precision agriculture...

What the hell is precision agriculture? Do you need 1 meter resolution on a corn field?

This lost me ---- I need some GPS co-rds.

[narby]

What they did with the C code was end SA (Selective Availability), where the C code was deliberatly degraded to give about a 100 foot position.

The problem was, all you had to do was stick a fixed GPS receiver down, survey it's exact location, and then broadcast the observed deliberate errors on a second radio frequency. GPS receivers getting this error correction are called DGPS, Differential GPS. It's accurate to about 1 meter.

Bottom line, SA was useless militarily.

What's going on now are new "dual frequency" receivers that recieve the military frequency. They don't actually decode the data (it's still encripted), but they do lock onto the carrier frequency and track it, increasing DGPS to about 10 inch resolution.

And THEN... You analyse the signal over a short time, and compute a more precise location, and lock onto both C and P carrier frequencies (which are affected differently by disturbances in the ionosphere) and track their changes, and you've got RTK (Real Time Kenimatic) that does about 2cm accuracy.

Or, something like that.....

That 2cm was doable several years before they did away with SA, so the deliberate error in C code was pretty useless.

[Phsstpok]

You stated

I really do not get this! Why would the Euroweens spend millions, perhaps billions for a service they can get for free? I was shocked when they declassified the P(recision)-code. It used to be encrypted until about 5 years ago. But then you could still get the C/A (Coarse Acquisition) anyway. The P-code can surely be used by anybody for weapons...and being a good receiver costs a whopping $300 it really makes no sense unless it is just a way for the Euro freaks to waste taxpayers money for bragging rights of some sort.

Your answer is in the article:

France was counting on the so-called “frequency overlay,” to force the US to either jam its own GPS signal in order to deny its use to an enemy or to have to ask permission from a European Commission body in order to conduct military operations anywhere in the world. The frequency overlay would have given the French a sort of a veto over US national security policy.

It's not about one upsmanship. It's about screwing with our critical systems to try and damage us. France sees themselves as our enemies and wishes to damage us so that they can reclaim their "rightful place" as a world superpower.

"Oh, but France is America's friend. Remember, we saved you in your Revolutionary war!" Wrong. The French monarchy wished to damage their rivals, the British. Helping us hurt them. They (and the British) also sought to help the Confederacy to stymie what they saw as an upstart rival. Classic European Machiavellian politics   The same politics that gave us both World Wars, the Middle East, The lovely situation between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian sub-continent, all of the joy that is Africa, etc.  Oh, and they have infected the UN, as well.  Oh goody.  I say we pull a Lucrizia Borgia on them and be done with them.  Anybody got a ring handy?

[rudypoot]

The EU can't afford for what they are paying for now. It'll be like the US creating a prescription drug plan when they can't afford Social Secur...HEY WAIT A MINUTE!!11!!1

[SF Republican]

What the hell is precision agriculture? Do you need 1 meter resolution on a corn field? Precision ag. can be used taking photographs of a field to determine where one needs to fetilize or apply pesticides bassed on the photos; you then take those readings and use them to spray the crops with great percision avoiding over or under using of the fertilizer or pesticide down to each individual plant

[narby]

What the hell is precision agriculture? Do you need 1 meter resolution on a corn field?

That's what I do for a living. Write software to guide drivers with GPS, or actually drive farm vehicles with GPS. Even with only 1meter resolution, it's awfully handy during fertlizing with liquid spray or dry fertilizer, because you can't see the track of where you've been in a huge field. It's very easy to get "lost".

You can use GPS to generate field "perscriptions" that vary the amount of fertilizer, saving money and reducing fertilizer runnoff.

John Deere actually has the best justification for GPS auto-steer. They document that you can drive faster in a field, which saves labor money, reduces the number of tractors required, and even saves fuel costs.

Lookup our competitor here: http://www.beeline.com.au/

[gr8eman]

Okay...great! What a stupid idea! France is going to spend all that money to screw with us? Sorry, but this doesn't sound credible. I know a little about electronic warfare and there would be no way it would happen. You know...troubles with the Ionosphere and all.

[Phsstpok]

troubles with the Ionosphere and all.

It's not that kind of radio signal. It's not using ionosphere bounce or scatter. It's a direct line of sight signal multiple birds for your local computer to do the calculations. If the Galileo system overlaps our frequencies they have the ability to screw with our frequencies. They were primarily hoping to occupy the new frequency spectrum that our 3rd generation military GPS was meant to use. They wanted squatter's rights to screw with us.