GNSS / LoRA and Quantum Positioning systems?!

This has been an interest and a concern of mine for quite sometime and it has been on my radar (pun intended) for quite some time to investigate some simpler or not so simpler alternatives.

What's the problem?  well, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite systems), otherwise known by the general public as GPS (Global Position systems) have a bit of a flaw in the fact that a particular country "owns" the satellites that are used, America owns one setup (GPS), Russian another (GLONASS), Europe another (Galileo), Chines another (BeiDou), India and Japan have their own Navigation Systems you get the jist.

Interestingly it costs about $2Bn to keep GPS running and operational per year - however, it is "free" to be used by everyone.

One of the BIG flaws of using GPS / guidance systems is the mass usage within drones - and the way that these signals can be blocked or overridden with false information - not a good thing :-(

Now, imagine you wanted to "get off" the reliance of these systems, but still wanted to achieve similar results.  Well, it's not as easy as it sounds.

Here's a very interesting approach, that DOES still use GNSS, but also uses LoRa devices for localised data transmission - I'm sure you can think of many different usages for this kind of setup:

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2971.html

For when you need to know the position of an "item of interest" to within a few cms!

Detailed technical breakdown (with code samples) - think I might be having a play very soon!

https://wiki.dfrobot.com/GNSS_RTK_High_Precision_Positioning_Kit_SKU_KIT0198_EN

RTK
Real Time Kinematic (RTK) uses carrier-phase differential measurements. A base station transmits correction data (RTCM) to rovers for real-time cm-level accuracy.

I do already have some 2mtr tripods just like that sitting in the corner of the room - perfect for re-purposing.  I wonder how this can and will scale and how to lock down the security & make it more robust.... must stop the brain going off and building out a full blown solution in my head :-D

Here is one such non-GPS system that was just trialled by Q-CTRL.  Now, this is a very interesting concept. I like the tag line for this company as it reflects my own point of view about Quantum - "how do you make something useful with it"?

DARPA selects for Advanced Defence Platforms

Quantum Gravimeter provides GPS backup at sea when GPS is not reliable or available:

More info from Q-CTRL themselves

Here's a course on BLACK OPAL where you can learn more about using Q-CTRL

(I did actually start doing this with IBM back in 2017-ish, so it's great to see it is moving on)

Now, I can really see a future of potential innovative uses here - no wonder Q-CTRL are getting ahead of the curve and making waves.

One to keep an eye on over the coming weeks / months / year

I follow these people out of interest and curiosity - as I see Mars as a potential "restart for human-kind", away from the capitalist / money driven cr@p world that has been created - it has the potential to be a new culture, a new approach, a refresh of using technology to benefit everyone:

and THIS quote is what also sparked my interest in relation to Q-CTRL:

and THIS article is just for fun - was looking at "muscle wires" back in the late 1990s that did a similar thing, looks like they might be smaller and better now.