Q: Did the Earth Move Darling?

[German_EE]

A: Only if you are in Australia

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36912700

Looks like you are currently 1.5m out in your calculations which doesn't sound like a lot until you consider things like self driving vehicles.

[Rerouter]

using a gps / glonass / bidou GPS receiver your approximate accuracy is only in the ball park of 0.7m, put a tree overhead, drive next to a multi story office block, etc and that may blow out to 1.3m,

go anywhere near a city center and you will be lucky to find yourself on the correct block,

The self driving cars argument falls a bit flat here, I used to deal with inertial navigation GPS units for cars, the hardware is on the $300 dollar mark for a functioning product that would cross compare your road speed / forward reverse, and where you turned corners to sync with its mapping data, so it still functioned in say a tunnel, or a very built up area,

If a car with fancy enough vision systems to monitor lanes and such cannot afford to tack on such things and soley depended on GPS, then we are all doomed.

[Tom45]

Australia is moving 7cm north per year? That seems like a lot. Are there any other places on the planet that move at that rate or faster?

Does Australia have a problem with earthquakes? I don't remember hearing about any.

Are the Kiwis tagging along or is New Zealand being left behind?

[German_EE]

I know that India is moving north at a rapid rate as well, the result is the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau.

[JacobPilsen]

Tibetan Plateau.

West China 

[VK5RC]

One interesting fact that in my state,  south Australia,  the earliest satellite based maps were less accurate (due to errors in estimating the 'non-spherical'  shape of the earth) than the maps produced by Matthew Flinders (a rather OCD character) a few centuries before!  One boat actually ran aground a rocky outcrop at night due to this 'error'

[hendorog]

Australia is moving 7cm north per year? That seems like a lot. Are there any other places on the planet that move at that rate or faster?

Does Australia have a problem with earthquakes? I don't remember hearing about any.

Are the Kiwis tagging along or is New Zealand being left behind?

Its OK they can go, we are quite happy where we are.

Maybe soon their snoring won't keep us awake. 

[SkyMaster]

Australia is moving 7cm north per year? That seems like a lot. Are there any other places on the planet that move at that rate or faster?

Not a "place" per se, but...

The Magnetic North Pole is moving at a rate of 60 km per year.

In the '70s, it was moving at "only" 9 km per year; so something is going on. Poles reversal maybe.

 

[tautech]

Australia is moving 7cm north per year? That seems like a lot. Are there any other places on the planet that move at that rate or faster?

Does Australia have a problem with earthquakes? I don't remember hearing about any.

Are the Kiwis tagging along or is New Zealand being left behind?

Its OK they can go, we are quite happy where we are.

Maybe soon their snoring won't keep us awake. 

+1
Let the Aussies go walkabout. 

[Halcyon]

Does Australia have a problem with earthquakes?

Generally not. Minor tremors are common but most aren't even felt. Those that cause damage are fairly rare. This is one of the reasons Australia would be an excellent place for nuclear power. But that's another argument ;-)

If you're interested, you can view earthquake data here: http://www.ga.gov.au/earthquakes/

[Arjan Emm]

Australia sits quite comfortable in the middle of the very stable australian plate. Hence very little earth quakes.
The whole plate is moving north and on the edges where it collides with other plates is where you get the earth quakes.
It collides in the north to the eurasian plate en several others. Right on the edge you find the geological mess called indonesia, papua new guinea, solomo islands and vanatu. Highly volcanic and losts of very large earthquakes.
In the south east, New sealand sits partly on the australian plate  (North island) and partly on the pacific plate. The pacific plate pushes the south island against and up the australian plate hence the mountains there. So i'm afraid the kiwi's are keeping up with australia just fine. But with a bit more geological discomfort...

[nctnico]

using a gps / glonass / bidou GPS receiver your approximate accuracy is only in the ball park of 0.7m, put a tree overhead, drive next to a multi story office block, etc and that may blow out to 1.3m,

Make that +/80 meters! A long time ago I was responsible for a car which was used for recording how people drive. It had a GPS receiver to determine the location of the car. I used the GPS locations in my software to cut the interesting bits from the data (intersections, roundabouts, pieces of straight road, -whatever the researcher needed-). It quickly became obvious that the GPS wasn't accurate at all and I have to do some filtering / interpolation on it to get more accuracy. BTW most roads have lanes which are close to 4 meter in width so 1.5 meter is not going to make a difference. People think GPS is always accurate but it isn't. Not by a long shot! What you see in navigation systems is that it guesses on which road it is by using the GPS for a rough location and direction,

[Iron Downey]

The earth is absolutely moving. According to the theory of plate tectonics, the earth is moving all the time. You can also see this by the growing of Everest (Qomolangma)

[hendorog]

Australia is moving 7cm north per year? That seems like a lot. Are there any other places on the planet that move at that rate or faster?

Does Australia have a problem with earthquakes? I don't remember hearing about any.

Are the Kiwis tagging along or is New Zealand being left behind?

Its OK they can go, we are quite happy where we are.

Maybe soon their snoring won't keep us awake. 

+1
Let the Aussies go walkabout. 

If we ignore them they will go away 

[Muttley Snickers]

If this concept of continental drift or similar was found to be true then my only concern would be the possibly of gradual migration of animal and insect species, those people in Sydney could end up with cane toads from Queensland and us lot in Melbourne could find ourselves being dragged into big holes made by funnel web spiders, in which case I will be off to Tasmania.

 

[Halcyon]

... in which case I will be off to Tasmania.

Don't joke! Tasmania is absolutely beautiful. If I wasn't already paying a mortgage, I'd buy there in a second.

[Arjan Emm]

If this concept of continental drift or similar was found to be true...

You got to be kidding me, do you have doubts about this? Any geologist knows this is a fact and has been proven over and over.
Intercontinental drift doesn't happen so don't worrie about sydney moving to melbourne.
A continent, the australian plate in this case might split up though and drift appart. This is happening in africa but no signs for this on the australian plate.

[timb]

using a gps / glonass / bidou GPS receiver your approximate accuracy is only in the ball park of 0.7m, put a tree overhead, drive next to a multi story office block, etc and that may blow out to 1.3m,

Make that +/80 meters! A long time ago I was responsible for a car which was used for recording how people drive. It had a GPS receiver to determine the location of the car. I used the GPS locations in my software to cut the interesting bits from the data (intersections, roundabouts, pieces of straight road, -whatever the researcher needed-). It quickly became obvious that the GPS wasn't accurate at all and I have to do some filtering / interpolation on it to get more accuracy. BTW most roads have lanes which are close to 4 meter in width so 1.5 meter is not going to make a difference. People think GPS is always accurate but it isn't. Not by a long shot! What you see in navigation systems is that it guesses on which road it is by using the GPS for a rough location and direction,

How long ago is "a long time"? If it was before 2000, the additional error was due to Selective Availability, which was switched on up to that point by the US Armed Forces (it intentionally crippled civilian GPS to prevent our enemies from building cruise missiles out of off the shelf GPS receivers, or some such BS).

Though, even with SA on, you could have used Differential GPS to eliminate the SA imposed accuracy penalty. If you weren't in an (primarily coastal) area covered by a DGPS transmitter, there were also commercial DGPS services that worked all over North America. One was satellite based and another used local FM radio stations to rebroadcast the signal. (These would have been available since at least 1996 and was part of the reason SA was finally turned off.)

The advent of WAAS (which is DGPS data being retransmitted by one of the GPS satellites), high channel count receivers, SA being turned off and dramatic improvements in signal processing technologies is the reason why we can get sub-1m navigation out of receivers that are smaller than a penny with rice grain sized antennas.

I remember a time when the Garmin GPS 45 was *cutting edge* with its huge swivel out antenna and 6 hour battery life...

[GreyWoolfe]

using a gps / glonass / bidou GPS receiver your approximate accuracy is only in the ball park of 0.7m, put a tree overhead, drive next to a multi story office block, etc and that may blow out to 1.3m,

Make that +/80 meters! A long time ago I was responsible for a car which was used for recording how people drive. It had a GPS receiver to determine the location of the car. I used the GPS locations in my software to cut the interesting bits from the data (intersections, roundabouts, pieces of straight road, -whatever the researcher needed-). It quickly became obvious that the GPS wasn't accurate at all and I have to do some filtering / interpolation on it to get more accuracy. BTW most roads have lanes which are close to 4 meter in width so 1.5 meter is not going to make a difference. People think GPS is always accurate but it isn't. Not by a long shot! What you see in navigation systems is that it guesses on which road it is by using the GPS for a rough location and direction,

The home location on my Garmin Nuvi 1490 is 4 houses away despite setting home location while in the driveway

[Nerull]

There's a reason aircraft don't use GPS for autopilot landings, and there's a reason self-driving cars don't use GPS for lane positioning. It's simply not accurate enough, especially not 24/7.

[boffin]

The US is moving at a rapid rate too.  Toward the dark ages.

[SkyMaster]

The advent of WAAS (which is DGPS data being retransmitted by one of the GPS satellites)...

Actually, the WAAS signals are being transmitted by three dedicated geostationary satellites that are not part of the GPS satellite constellation.

 

[German_EE]

"The home location on my Garmin Nuvi 1490 is 4 houses away despite setting home location while in the driveway "

I have a similar problem with a TomTom Start GPS unit, the error is about 200m. There is a similar problem with road junctions, when I'm at the junction it still says I have 200m to go.

[timb]

There's a reason aircraft don't use GPS for autopilot landings, and there's a reason self-driving cars don't use GPS for lane positioning. It's simply not accurate enough, especially not 24/7.

Actually, the whole reason WAAS/SBAS was developed (by the FAA) was to provide an alternative to ILS for Category I precision approaches to airports. It provides 0.9m lateral and 1m vertical precision, which will put you on a near perfect final approach. All the pilots have to do is touchdown.

There's also a new system dubbed LAAS/GBAS (Local Area Augmentation System or Ground Based Augmentation System) to enable autoland (Category IIIC) at any airport with the system installed. Basically you place at least three GPS receivers around the airport, which talk to a central server, that applies correction data and transmits it to the plane on a VHF link.

The cost to setup a GBAS system is many times less than what a traditional ILS system would cost, and it's more accurate!

As for self driving cars, ~1m accuracy is good enough, especially when combined with highly accurate maps, correction algorithms and a slew of sensors.

The advent of WAAS (which is DGPS data being retransmitted by one of the GPS satellites)...

Actually, the WAAS signals are being transmitted by three dedicated geostationary satellites that are not part of the GPS satellite constellation.

 

Well, yes, technically they are three separate satellites that are not part of the GPS constellation, but they *are* part of the GPS system. Plus, they also broadcast standard GPS signals, in addition to the WAAS data, so they're generally considered to be GPS satellites.

[SkyMaster]

The advent of WAAS (which is DGPS data being retransmitted by one of the GPS satellites)...

Actually, the WAAS signals are being transmitted by three dedicated geostationary satellites that are not part of the GPS satellite constellation.

 

Well, yes, technically they are three separate satellites that are not part of the GPS constellation, but they *are* part of the GPS system. Plus, they also broadcast standard GPS signals, in addition to the WAAS data, so they're generally considered to be GPS satellites.

Close, but no cigar 

The WAAS satellites do not broadcast any GPS signal.

The GPS satellites are owned by the United States government. But it is not the case for the WAAS satellites.

The three satellite that are being used to transmit the WAAS signals are all privately owned satellites. The are common geostationary telecommunication satellites that also serve other purposes; one of these satellite is owned by a Canadian company.

• GPS is managed by the Department of Defense (DOD)
  
  
• WAAS is managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)

WAAS is not GPS. WAAS allows the GPS receiver to improve the GPS signal accuracy; at the receiver level.

The GPS system is unaware of the WAAS existence