Customer Reviews

Understanding GPS: Principles and Applications, Second Edition

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[A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2005.]

In the last 15 years, GPS has moved from an expensive and specialised application to a mass consumer market. There are numerous books on GPS; mostly directly at that mass readership. These typically concern how to use a device with a GPS receiver.

By contrast, this book is meant for the engineer who has to design such a device. It is a compendium of technical papers covering many aspects you are likely to need. And undoubtedly some you won't, which should be reassuring. Because it means that you do not have to read all of this book for it to be useful.

The sensitivity of the GPS satellites and the resultant GPS ground resolution is amazing, as can be appreciated from some of the papers in the book. Due mostly to the stability of the satellites' orbits and their onboard atomic clocks. Chapter 7 describes how GPS requires corrections due to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity! Not just Special Relativity. As a physicist, I found this fascinating. GPS is perhaps the first field where General Relativity is used, not to be tested, but as providing a necessary quantitative model for getting correct results. Akin to how Newton's Equations have been used for 300 years in ballistics. Granted, most readers will be engineers, who might find GR a trifle exotic.

The book also has good coverage of the Russian GLONASS system. Perhaps for those who also want to use this for redundancy. Or to combine the signals from this with GPS for enhanced resolution.

Great reference not sure about it serving as a good text book as the section on Modulation, for instance, is not very detailed and not all that well put together. For instance, equations 4.7 does not follow from figure 4.5 if you use a repeating input sequence of +1, -1, +1 , -1, etc. Also equation 4.5 is itself as defined an average, not an absolute value.