Taiwan GPS Receiver Market

In Taiwan, GPS suppliers besides taking over most international companies’ orders, also successfully develop GPS watches for hiking, golfing and cycling.  GPS receiver navigation devices have developed rapidly in recent years and are now much more than talking maps. Auto electronics, consumer electronics, home appliances, information and communications technology (ICT), and telecoms companies have worked together to give them a much more diverse range of functions including use in those of MP3 players, digital photo albums, movie players, and real-time road-condition receivers. They now provide information on navigation, recreation, and entertainment, all in a single unit.

Taiwan’s GPS industry started to take off in 2007. After MiTAC bought Navman, they’ve become the second biggest GPS company in Europe. Also, their sales of 800 million of PND has made them become the third largest GPS supplier in the world. At the same time, TomTom and Garmin have expended their ordering to Taiwan OEM’s from components to fabrication products. The global leader in satellite navigation, Garmin Ltd. and its subsidiaries have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold navigation, communication and information devices and applications since 1989 – most of which are enabled byGPS technology. One of their principal subsidiaries is located in Taiwan. Including Japanese and European orders, Taiwan’s GPS sales were around NT$171 billion. The total growth rate was 70%, which makes its growth very noticeable compared to the 2007 ICT industry growth rate of 4.6%, or 730 billion dollars.

Even though this year, European and U.S. consumer electronic product sales are still being effected by the current economy situation, IEK is still very pretty positive about the GPS market in Taiwan. The Taiwan GPS industry market will grow strongly once the market moves from Europe and the, U.S. to the newly developed countries.

GPS for Hiking

What’s a suitable GPS for cycling? Color mapping, long life battery or replaceable batteries, topo, street/road, & bike trail mapping, text-to-speech (gives me the street name), prefer selectable car vs bicycle mode, a way to pick future routes, possibly software that would use steet & topo to avoid large hilly areas on long distance biking, large SD card, fairly waterproof, screen can be seen in sunlight. One of the Taiwan GPS receiver suppliers announced their product as an all-in-one GPS receiver.

Dedicated massive-correlator signal parameter search engine within the baseband enables rapid search of all the available satellites and acquisition of very weak signal. An advanced track engine allows weak signal tracking and positioning in harsh environments such as urban canyons and under deep foliage.

With very fast signal acquisition speed, it has very low average power consumption for locate on demand type of applications.

GPS for Golfing

Golf GPS systems are rapidly evolving from only player enhancement to complete course management systems. The primary goal of a golf GPS system is to provide players with distances to all kind of features on the course and especially to the green they are playing. Some courses are better fit to use the capabilities of GPS than others. In order to obtain a satisfactory accuracy the GPS receiver must have a non-obstructed view of the sky. This makes that courses with lots of trees are less suitable for golf GPS.

Golf GPS system should contain the following:

Provides you with GPS distances from “any” location on the hole to the 200, 150, 100 yard / meter markers, to the front, centre, and back of the Green.

Record the GPS distance, club used and landing position for every stroke you make.

Stroke length Statistics: tells you the average and longest distance you hit each club in your bag. You know exactly how far you drive the ball.

Club Selector! Suggest which club to use for your next stroke based on the historical stroke data already stored from previous scorecards!

Taiwan GPS suppliers, Mobile Action Technology Inc and Polar have released their new GSP products for sport.

GPS for Cycling

Whether you are a road biker or a mountain biker, there’s a GPS that will work well for you, and it can mount right on your handlebars. All of them have high-sensitivity chipsets for superior satellite reception in urban canyons and under canopy. While they are excellent cyclometers, they aren’t all that great as navigation devices. If you are primarily wanting to track your performance though, Taiwan suppliers who make sporting GPS receivers would be your excellent choice. They are suitable for whoever wants data acquisition and a dashboard lap timer.

To get a complete report on Taiwan GPS, please go to http://gps-receiver.ready-online.com/index.html

GPS reviews are definitely helpful for those who are going to purchase GPS handheld or car navigation systems. However, even before that, it’s very important to know the requirements of the GPS. If you are one of those who travel a lot due to work or simply for pleasure and often face the trouble of reading maps or asking for directions, then global positioning system (GPS) based navigator for your car is a handy solution for you. GPS navigation systems guide you through unfamiliar areas by giving turn-by-turn spoken directions, and even suggest an alternative route around rush hour traffic. Most of the portable units give info on the shortest distance and provide special routing options for walkers or bicyclists to avoid highways and one-way traffic. No wonder the GPS based navigator is the preferred choice of many jetsetters, campers, sports enthusiasts, and motorists these days.

With GPS becoming a very important part of everyday life, the significance of GPS reviews has grown manifolds. People turn to GPS Reviews to know the benefits and performance of these portable devices. Many prominent GPS review sites also have narratives of customers regarding the benefits they have got from the GPS systems which can be very helpful for newbie GPS customers.

GPS reviews will guide you properly in choosing a suitable GPS unit. Often, we tend to overlook certain basic aspects while looking for higher features. For instance, some basic yet most fundamental points to consider in a GPS car navigator are the ease to upgrade roadmaps, battery charging time and battery life between charges. Car GPS reviews gives good ideas about these points.

Tips on Car GPS Reviews

If you go through car GPS reviews, many offer tips on choosing GPS navigator for vehicles. Some major GPS review tips are discussed as follows.

You need to have a clear idea about your requirement that matches with that of the features of a specific GPS unit. For instance, now many GPS units come with visual monitors that display maps. The monitors are commonly installed on the dashboard of cars. In some cars, such installation may block air vents or make it somewhat uncomfortable for the driver to enter or exit. All GPS navigators on the market today include pre-loaded area maps and offer spoken directions and automatic rerouting incase the driver misses a turn. Choose a GPS system that offers updated point-of-interest data. Features such as multiple ways of getting to your destination via address, intersection, a location selected directly from the map or even by personal address book will provide more feasible and practical feature. Many high-end GPS car navigators are available today featuring latest advanced technologies such as Bluetooth and Multimedia playback. With the built-in Bluetooth, you can talk through the GPS unit’s external speaker without a headset. And the multimedia playback feature lets you listen to your favorite MP3 music, watch video clips or even view JPG photos. Watch out for handy features such as real-time traffic alerts and text-to-speech translation in GPS reviews. These features are very useful while driving through the cities as the GPS units provide timely info to avoid congested traffic areas.

Motorola is leading the gps technology field, with Motorola cellular gps phone. Motorola has integrated their gps technology with the technology of cell phone to enable you to directly receive gps signals to your Motorola phone so long as your vehicle is fitted with a gps navigation device or a vehicle tracking gps system. Most of the other gps devices are not equipped with screens facilitating navigation aids that you need everyday. That is the reason why your Motorola cellular gps phone can prove to be a great asset.

Cellular phones fitted with gps technology are not common. Motorola is keen to ensure the gps friendly attribute for all its new equipment and to make all its phones necessarily equipped with the newest systems of gps. It is very easy for you to acquire this best friend in the form of Motorola cellular gps phone. You just have to download software from the disk to your phone and your Motorola cellular gps phone is ready to receive the gps signals.

There are 27 gps dedicated satellites orbiting the Earth at all times. You just have to input a destination in the gps device and it will send a signal to one of these satellites which are specifically gps dedicated. When this signal is received by the satellite, it will locate the gps device and send back another signal to it. Immediately thereafter, you can receive directions to your destination from your Motorola cellular gps phone. You can trace your vehicle even though you are not sitting in it. That is what gps technology does for you.

Isn’t this a great theft deterrent? You can even use gps to track your vehicle when your teen driver or somebody else has possession of your car. Even if the gps system you have has no LCD screen, your Motorola cellular gps phone can put the system to work to its maximum capacity.

You must take full advantage of the advancement made in various fields of gps cell phone technology by turning your cell phone into a multi-tasking gps tracking device. Why not ensure the safety and security of your vehicle using your every day cell phone gps device? You can always rest assured that your property is safe. All cell phone makers are waking up to the advantages of new aspects of gps cellular advancements. Your Motorola cellular gps phone can prove to be a great tool for you to work with, at the same time, ensuring your peace of mind all the way.

What is GPS? The acronym stands for Global Positioning System. It is the new “Polaris” that aids in navigating, positioning and tracking with the use of a satellite-controlled system that broadcasts signals to the equipment on the ground. With receivers hand carried by users, GPS determines the exact location of a vehicle, person or assets and other things useful and valuable to which it is attached and records the position at regular intervals. It is a powerful tracking system that has provided the world with diverse applications for the military and civilian users.

What is GPS? The GPS is a space-based radionavigation system controlled and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by the U.S. Military. This is the GPS Operational Constellation. The tracking system has space segments consisting of GPS satellites sending signals coming from space. There can be at least 24 operational satellites orbiting in 12 hours that recapitulate the same ground track as the earth turns underneath them. The GPS satellites then transmit the data in a very precise time reference plied by what is called “atomic clocks” onboard the satellite. These atomic clocks then passively transmit the navigation messages in specially coded signals, enabling the equipment on the ground called “receivers” to compute position, time, direction and velocity in three-dimensional locations known as latitude, longitude and altitude.

What is GPS? Your Most Reliable and Most Precise Assistant

The GPS was primarily for the use of the military. However, after the Korean Flight 007 in 1983 tragedy, which would have been prevented had its crew only had access to better navigational tools, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive which would guarantee that GPS signals be made available to the world for free or without restrictions. Though it was intended for civilians as well as military applications at first, from its design, civilian users would not be getting the same accuracy that the military could.

Going public, what is GPS serving the commercial market? GPS became the new powerful tool that improved efficient routing of vessels at sea. It has saved a ship’s navigator hours of celestial inference and calculation. GPS enhanced safety at sea made it possible to report precise position to rescuers in case of disasters.

What is GPS navigating the land? GPS also improved efficiency on land: delivery trucks can now receive GPS signals and easily transmit their position back to a central dispatcher; police and fire departments use GPS to efficiently dispatch their vehicles and reduced response time; GPS keeps motorists from getting lost by showing their position and intended route on dashboard displays; railroads now use GPS technology in replacing older maintenance-intensive mechanical signals.

What is GPS navigating the air? Long before the GPS, aircrafts typically fly from one waypoint to another and pilots on long-distance flights relied on navigational beacons situated across the country. The dawning of GPS supplemented existing navigational techniques for aircrafts inexpensively. With GPS navigating the air, airplanes can now fly a direct route to a destination that save significant amount in consumption of fuel and time, the methods of guiding planes to a safe landing in a poor weather or visibility has been improved and simplified and aided pilots with a precise position data to keep the plane on course.

What is GPS surveying, mapping the earth, managing the land and agriculture? GPS is used by surveyors and map makers for precision positioning; map locations of such facilities as telephone poles, sewer lines, and fire hydrants; map construction sites and property lines in minutes. In mapping the earth, GPS points have assigned codes in order to identify roads, streams, or other objects during data collection for analyses and comparison through a computer program called “Geographic Information Systems (GIS).”

GPS can be used in forestry, for mineral exploration, and wildlife habitat management to define positions of important assets precisely and identify their changes. In agriculture, a farm equipment with GPS receivers can provide precise position information and it also gives farmers great accuracy in the application of fertilizers and harvesting crops.

Agricultural GPS systems can be used to create crop yield maps during harvesting, making it easy for farmers to plan exactly how the fields should be used and fertilized for future crops.

So, what is GPS? It is a powerful navigational tool acting as your most reliable and most precise assistant that is transforming the way nations operate in space.

Jeff Sanders
Garmin GPS Navigation Systems
www.GpsFrontier.com
04/05/09

WAAS-Enabled GPS System

WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) was developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System to improve its accuracy, integrity, and availability. WAAS was originally intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including the precision approach to airport’s within its coverage area. The WAAS system typically provides better than 1.0 meters laterally and 1.5 meters vertically throughout most of the contiguous United States and large parts of Canada and Alaska. This accuracy is capable of provideing aircraft with the precision needed for safe approaches and inflight navigation for all weather conditions. Integrity of the WAAS information is no more than 3 seconds of bad data per year allowing the system to be considerd safe by the FAA for instrument flight rules.

Although orignally developed for aviation, WAAS is not just limited to the aviation industry, any GPS receiver that is capable of receiving the WAAS signal will be able to benefit from it’s correction data, making the GPS positioning more accurate. In fact a WAAS-enabled GPS receiver can even give you directions right down to the lane your car is traveling in (as long as the maping program supports “lane assist” directions). Because the Wide Area Augmentation System is quickly becoming standard in the GPS industry, most new GPS receivers today are WAAS-enabled. Just like with the conventinal GPS, the WAAS system doesn’t come with any extra cost or fees to use. All that is required is that the GPS receiver be WAAS-enabled so it can receive and decode the data then be able to apply corrections to it’s position. Currently the WAAS service is limited to the U.S.A., Canada, Alaska and Hawaii. Although independant from WAAS, Europe and Asia are working on their own supplemental GPS correction systems. Europe has the “Euro Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service” (EGNOS) and Japan is working on their “Multi-Functional Satellite Augmentation System” (MSAS) .

How The WAAS System Works

WAAS uses a network of approximately 25 ground based Wide-area Reference Stations (WRS) in North America and Hawaii, to measure small variations in GPS satellite signals in the western hemisphere. These precisely surveyed ground stations monitor and collect information on the GPS signals and send their data to the three Wide-area Master Stations (WMS). The WMS’s generate two different sets of corrections: fast and slow. The fast corrections are for errors that are changing rapidly and are a primary concern to the GPS satellites instantaneous positions and clock errors. These corrections are user position independent, which means they can be applied instantly by any receiver in the WAAS broadcasting area. The slow corrections are for long-term ephemeric and clock error estimates and ionospheric delay information.

Once these corrections are generated, the Master Stations sends them to two pairs of Ground Uplink Stations (GUS) that transmit the correction messages to a series of geostationary satellites that broadcast their correction data back to earth. Then WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use this information to make corrections to the original GPS signial, giving WAAS-enabled GPS receiver a more accurate position. GPS receiver’s use the information broadcast from each GPS satellite to determine their location and the current time. Depending on the GPS device, a GPS receiver only needs to receive a signal from 3-4 satellites (out of the 31 satellites currently transmiting a signal for civilan users) to be able to calculate it’s position. In addition to the GPS signal, a WAAS-enabled GPS receiver can also receive the geostationary WAAS satellite signal.

The two different types of correction messages from the WAAS system (fast and slow) are used by the GPS receiver in different ways. The fast type of correction data includes the corrected satellite position and clock data to determine its current location using normal GPS calculations. Once an approximate position fix is obtained the GPS receiver begins to use the slow corrections to improve its accuracy. Slow correction data Includes the ionospheric delay. When the GPS signal travels from the satellite to the receiver, it passes through the ionosphere. The receiver calculates the location where the signal pierced the ionosphere and, if it has received an ionospheric delay value for that location, it corrects for the error that the ionosphere created. Unlike the fast data, the slow data doesn’t need to be updated frequently because the ionosphere conditions don’t change rapidly. While the slow data can be updated every minute if necessary, they are only updated every two minutes and are considered valid for up to six minutes.

Limitations of the WAAS System

(1) The WAAS system is currently only available to United States and large parts of Canada and Alaska but there plans to expand the system to other countries and continents. (2) Because the WAAS broadcasting satellites are geostationary causes them to be less than 10° above the horizon for locations north of 71.4° latitude. This means aircraft in areas of Alaska or northern Canada may have difficulty maintaining a lock on the WAAS signal. (3) In order to calculate an ionospheric grid point’s delay, that point must be located between a satellite and a reference station. The low number of satellites and ground stations limit the number of points which can be calculated. (4) Aircraft conducting WAAS approaches must possess certified GPS receivers.

Jeff Sanders
Garmin GPS Navigation Systems
www.GpsFrontier.com
04/05/09