Locata Corporation: Location hot spots -- beyond GPS

at the speed of light it takes a couple thousandths of a second to cover those 22,000 kilometers. Now importantly, one of the few things that people don’t understand is that for GPS to work, one of the absolutely essential requirements, is that all of the signals - think of them as a bar code, every satellite is transmitting its own unique bar code - those signals have to leave every satellite at exactly the same time, and were talking about the speed of light, so if 2 satellites are out of sync with one another by a millionth of a second, that means a 300 meter - nearly a thousand foot  - error for your receiver.

This has consequences in the locating capability. Let me provide an example.

The U.S. FCC mandated many years ago that anyone that supplied a mobile phone service in the USA had to be able to find their customers within a 300-meter radius. To put this into perspective, 2 or 3 city blocks covers about 900-meter radius in downtown Manhattan. Well the reality is — that when you dial 911 with your mobile phone, 70 percent of the time, they can’t find you within those 300 meters. This is confirmed in an Emergency Services Association report from late last year about 911 functionality in the U.S.

Poor GPS signals also affect indoor and below ground penetrating capabilities.

Newmark Mining, the world’s largest gold miner has a mine in Western Australia that is 7 kilometers in diameter and over 400 meters deep. GPS in this industry is traditionally used to control the positioning of their various machines, bulldozers, drills, and rock depots. With open cut mining close to the surface this works fine, but with the mine mentioned above, 40 percent of the time they cannot see enough information to position their equipment. This exposes the limitation of traditional GPS. The investment in machines automated for GPS goes out the window when they have to revert to ancient technology and send a human to direct the situation on the ground while the machines are waiting. Efficiency suffers.

HSNW: How did you resolve these problems?

NG: We have invented a small device, the size of a VHS cassette, that we call LocataLite. It is effectively an on-ground satellite and it actually does the same job as a multi-million dollar GPS satellite, and in-fact, if I could be a little coy, it actually does a lot