global positioning system

Today’s Global Positioning System is great for tracking tanks in the desert, but turn on your Garmin in New York City or inside virtually any building, and you’ll be staring at satellite static—GPS doesn’t perform well indoors or in urban canyons. Now a new technology is poised to pick up where GPS satellite signals cut out.

Developed by Rosum Corporation in Redwood City, California, TV-GPS, as the system is known, triangulates positions using television signals that are 2,000 times as strong as GPS satellite transmissions.

They fell for each other in grade school, in the sweetest of ways. In fifth-grade music class, she played saxophone; he played the snare drum. In high school biology, she held the frog while he wielded the scalpel. It was the sort of love story immortalized endlessly in romance novels and Top 40 long-distance dedications. “I thought when I married him it really would be ’till death do us part,’ ” she says now, still surprised that the marriage ended after 19 years. Ultimately, the romance had sputtered to a close, as so many love stories do.

Radar. The Internet. The Jeep. The Global Positioning System. Technologies developed for the military often cross over to the civilian world-subtly or still in character. A Hummer, even painted lemon yellow and parked downtown, still looks battle-ready. And technology crosses back too. The Marines´ Dragon Runner surveillance vehicle was inspired by the radio-controlled car industry; the controller was copped from a PlayStation 2.

A typical scene from the conflict in Afghanistan, where for the first time space-specifically, more than one hundred orbiting military satellites-has been a centerpiece of the war machine: A soldier on the ground spots a Taliban target. With a lightweight, handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver known as a "plugger," he uses the constellation of GPS satellites to calculate the longitude and latitude of his mark and phones in the coordinates, via satellite, to an air base in Florida.

In February 2001, while driving on the state turnpike to her home in Miramar, Florida, 32-year-old Karla Gutierrez lost control of her BMW 328i and skidded into a canal. She dialed 911 on a cellphone and explained her predicament as the vehicle slowly sank. But since Gutierrez couldn't describe her precise location-"I'm not sure where I am," she told the operator-Miami-Dade County rescue units didn't know where to go to save her. By the time a passing patrolman noticed a busted fence by the accident site and found Gutierrez, she was dead.

Erik Lindbergh, the 36-year-old grandson of the legendary "Lone Eagle," took
off at about 12:16 p.m. Eastern time from Farmingdale, Long Island, on
Wednesday May 1, slightly east of the Roosevelt Field shopping mall that now
stands where his 25-year-old grandfather departed on May 20, 1927. Erik
Lindbergh arrived at the same Le Bourget airfield near Paris where a
throng of 100,000 people greeted his grandfather. While Charles´ flight took
about 33 hours, Erik´s took about 17 hours. He touched down at 11:30 local time on Thursday, May 2.

The love child of two-way Family Radio Service (FRS) and Global Positioning System technology, the Rino 110 ($169) from Garmin does more than simply keep track of your location: It beams your position to others in your group who are using the same radio, and plots everyone's whereabouts on its LCD. It's also completely waterproof,
a first
for FRS radios.

A higher-end Rino 120 model ($249) is also available. It has the same features, but adds 8MB of internal memory
and additional mapping capabilities.

>Edited by Suzanne Kantra Kirschner with Jenny Everett