ABC Online has a badly written story on local company Locata who’ve developed a Local Positioning System (note, NOT a Global Positioning System) and received a $5 mill bung from the Federales to take it up a notch. (Googling doesn’t reveal a Locata website, but it does find a lot of other companies listing themselves as investors).
The potential is huge because unless you’re the americans and planning to invade other countries there’s no real need to use a contellation of satellites for positioning. Here in the ACT and NSW (and the rest of Australia for all I know?) we already have trig stations on the top of all the landmark hills. The work is half-done.
But I can imagine a hell of a lot of countries would like to end their reliance on American GPS (which can be denied them at any time) without having to go to the trouble of building a global system which they wouldn’t utilise beyond their own borders. Not to mention the benefits at municipal level of a more robust system.
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