Of Electronic Charts and All

In the morning there is the usual scramble for the newspaper. And generally I lose the battle.

‘You read it.’ I told my wife today. ‘Anyway I find the newspapers are more of a distraction than anything else.’

‘It’s got nothing about electronic charts or other subjects that interest me. The maximum that the newspaper has reached into my field is the GPS. Even that they write just once in a while. Moreover the newspapers never give you anything of importance. Just some drivel.’

For example, take this news snippet that appeared in the May edition of Inside GNSS, a magazine that I receive monthly:–

GAGAN DELAYED, AGAIN
India’s first GPS/SBAS payload, the GAGAN transmitter on the GSAT-4 geostationary satellite, disappeared into the Bay of Bengal on April 15 when its ill-fated launch vehicle veered off course. A key part of India’s GPS augmentation plan, the failure will further delay civil aviation modernization. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhakrishnan promised another launch within a year.

The fact that our GPS aspirations are getting delayed over and over again doesn’t seem to excite the public. It was grandly announced many years back. Planned for launch in 2007, then 2008, 2009 and now plunged into the sea in 2010. But it’s yet to create a splash in our newspapers. At least I don’t remember reading anything about it in the news.

Of the one billion plus people in our country I would guess one billion remains blithely ignorant about this important happening.

Sad. Really sad.

Not so much that the satellite plunged into oblivion, but the fact that this event didn’t get mentioned in the news. Satellite launches malfunction. These things happen. And we will get over it. But who will wake up the sleeping mass? I guess that would take time.

Remember Y2K? The media had created so much panic on account of systems expected to malfunction at the dawn of the new millennium. That particular night of 31st December 1999 while the whole world was making merry and ushering the new millennium in I was on a ship hunched over the GPS and other equipment keenly awaiting the chaos predicted to descend on the earth. In the event nothing happened.

But something happened soon thereafter. In May 2000 the NASA switched off the SA (selective availability) error of the GPS. Suddenly making it into an accurate positioning system. The fact is that nobody (in India at least) realized it then that the world had changed.

I remember around that time the Director General Lighthouse and Lightships (DGLL) was executing a costly project of setting up DGPS reference stations all along the coast. In some class in the maritime college that I was attending, one of the instructors had sniggered and announced that with the SA error removed the whole project had become redundant. The unrefined GPS was now almost as accurate as the DGPS.

But I don’t think anyone of us in the class realized the true impact this act of USAF
would have on the world.

Switching off the SA spawned a whole lot of industries in the world market including in India. Like car navigation systems, container tracking, tracking of trucks plying all over the Indian roads. In fact, anything that required to be positioned accurately on a map. It even gave a thrust to the electronic chart industry of which I am a part of.

Meanwhile another revolution was concurrently happening. I am talking about the quantum developments in communication. Now we have GPS on the mobile too.

‘What’s your coordinates?’ is a common terminology understood by a layman on the street. Lay-people today are comfortable with such terms as Latitude and Longitude which was perhaps once upon a time understood only by geographers and navigators.

I love technology. If there is one hope that I have against the entrenched bureaucracy and corruption it is that the relentless march of technology would overwhelm it soon. There will be no secrets left in the closet.

The man in the market place will know it all.