The latest generation of GPS receivers look pretty exciting. As an
example the recently announced uBlox 5 claims to bring the cold start
down from about 30 seconds to 1 second - which is a huge difference
when you're sitting around waiting to get a lock.

http://www.u-blox.com/technology/u-blox5/index.html

Interestingly they claim that the system contains 1 million
correlators. I'm not sure how that works - it sounds like a lot. They
also claim 50 channels and simultaneous access to GPS, WAAS, EGNOS,
MSAS and Galileo satellites. And all this running on 15mW which is
about a fifth of the current generation's power consumption.

With the small size, low power, sensitivity improvements and fast lock
times of these new generation GPS chipsets I'm expecting to see them
popping up in a lot more products. Cameras could easily incorporate
GPS to log the locations of all your photos. Watches with GPS already
exist but it's getting close to the point where commodity watches
could incorporate a GPS chipset just as an accurate time source. Or
your credit card could include a GPS to give you a more useful record
of where you made your purchases.

Just dreaming I guess,
Zik

On 12/5/06, Alan B. Pearce <A.B.Pearce@rl.ac.uk> wrote:
> >The benefit however is it's a more modern GPS chipset, to it
> >locks on cold start much faster then my "few year old" GPS,
> >and also can recover from dropouts MUCH faster.
>
> This seems to be a benefit of having many more parallel channels in the
> receiver. More channels allows it to try so many more satellite combinations
> in parallel, so it finds them faster.
>
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