GPS reviews, news, tips, tricks and deals
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the US drone held by Iran may have been brought down using a known GPS spoofing exploit. According to the report, an Iranian engineer working with the captured drone claims that:
Iran guided the CIA’s "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military.
Since we now have a consumer handheld that can utilize the Russian GLONASS constellation, I couldn’t resist posting this. My apologies for the poor quality of the image. ITAR-TASS apparently sells these, so there are probably better images available, but the “buy” link takes you to a Russian language only page.
We had some surprises this morning as the Garmin Oregon 450 went on sale a couple days early, and we came across an unanticipated sale on the nuvi 2012 Advanced series as well. UPDATE: Plus two more killer handheld deals. Here’s the full list of bargains we’re tracking on our GPS Deals site:
Still going:
The US Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in a case destined to determine whether police can attach a GPS tracking device to an individual’s vehicle without getting a warrant. Cases such as this have divided various Circuit Courts of Appeal, with most coming down in favor of warrantless tracking.
CSR has announced the SiRFstarV chipset, which can utilize multiple GNSS systems including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Compass (once operational). That sounds great, but I’m not sure we’ll see it in many handheld receivers. To date, I can only think of a couple of Garmin sportwatches that have incorporated SiRFstar IV chips.
Perhaps this is due to a patent suit a few years ago leaving manufacturers a little gunshy. It certainly isn’t because handheld owners are overjoyed with other brands of chipsets.
Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced stepped up enforcement of anti-jamming laws, with the intention of removing cell phone, police radar, WiFi and GPS jammers from the market. Now they’ve gone a step further, calling out twenty online sellers of GPS jammers (PDF). Basically, it comes down to this…
Goodbye MapSource, hello BaseCamp. Alas, Garmin has stopped development on their MapSource mapping program – no further releases are planned. A Garmin developer let the cat out of the bag yesterday in a post on the Garmin forum…
…MapSource has not been worked on in quite a while, and there will be no new releases of that software. You are of course welcome to keep using MapSource, we will keep it on the website for the foreseeable future.
Google has quietly dropped their “in traffic” time estimates from Google Maps. When you set up a route in the past, you would usually see two time estimates, including one showing the estimated time “in traffic.” Traffic conditions are still shown, and you can still change the time of day to visually see the impact on traffic, as shown above. But this won’t change the estimated travel time.
The Garmin GTU 10
Google Map Maker has come to the US. Instead of just reporting an error, you can now go in and make changes yourself. All edits will be reviewed for accuracy before being committed to the publicly available map. The information posted today talks about POIs, bike lanes and the like, but it appears that you can edit/add streets and addresses as well. Eventually, this should improve Google Maps Navigation, which definitely needs it! Check out the video promo below and then have at it my cartographic friends!
