HNY, I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units.
Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE per unit. However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the NRE is $10. I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million quantities. Ditto with the SW. The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors. YMMV, -John ================== > Hi, > > first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. > > I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a > $150 Dollar car navigator should do, > I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was > designed to do. > > It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies > toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. > > It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified > designation. preferably when used in a motor car > > This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact > house number, but it got you there without you having > to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and > navigate you). > > It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often > don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl > with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. > > The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% > accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the > house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. > What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. > > To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it > to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more > and nobody > except a few government institutions can afford it. > > Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive > to the normal punter. > > Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to > read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave > you. > > Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount > of effort and a lot saver than before. > > Regards, Horst > > > > > > > > >> gonzo- >> "A GPS is a precision device. >> A Navigator is a consumer device. >> To confuse the two is to fail to understand either." >> >> A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or >> whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for >> navigation >> instead >> >> of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a >> navigator >> isn't a GPS. >> >> Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. >> Also >> some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the >> data in >> case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I >> owned >> had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: "***** Institute Of >> Technology" >> >> even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually >> closed gas >> >> station. >> >> -Arthur >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] >> To unsubscribe, go to >> https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts >> and follow the instructions there. >> > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to > https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
