NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Dip-meter again
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Apr 11, 13:54 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Apr 11, 13:54 -0700
If you read the history of GPS, soon after Sputnik's launch American scientists figured one could get positional data (maybe only a line-of-position, not a fix) from the Doppler shift in a satellite's signals. This resulted in a very hush-hush project that resulted in the Transit system. Multiple US defense projects then looked for a next-generation follow-up. Fortunately (at least for the modern world) the projects were merged with the best ideas from each being selected as the projects consolidated and moved forward. One specific I remember is that one of the projects proposed that the receivers contain an atomic clock! For 1960s or early 1970s technology, not unreasonable -- we had not
seen the dramatic effects of shrinking semiconductor technology. Fortunately, that got changed. There's a wonderful picture of a soldier wearing a full backpack with a large antenna sticking out of it. It's a single-channel GPS receiver! (wish I could find a copy to attach, but I can't)
From: Alexandre E Eremenko <eremenko@math.purdue.edu>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 11:14 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Dip-meter again
Richard,
Thanks.
Do you know how accurate it was?
> The first TRANSIT satellite was launched in 1961. The system was
> declared operational in 1964 and became classified. In 1967 it was
> declassified and became available for civilian use.
Alex.