re can microwaves be used to collect xyz coordinates in article apr cc usu edu writes in article c hs j ag bcstec ca boeing com rgc bcstec ca boeing com robert g carpenter writes it seems reasonable to me that a microwave transmitter receiver setup could do the job for example say you want to map an acre lot it d be convenient to place mw transmitters around the lot s periphery either or and then carry a hand held recorder and walk to a point on the lot press a button and the coords of the recorder s location is stored as digital data what s the chance of this working any systems like this already exist what kind of accuracy could you expect what would something like this cost to prototype is there a better alternative than microwaves of course you could develope this system but there is already a system called global positioning satellites it gives three dimensional coordinates anywhere on earth many surveyors use this system with a differential receiver transmitter to get coordinates within centimeters basic receivers with resolution of a few meters on a good day are available from many sources wmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmwmw weston r beal sldf sol ee usu edu sldf cc usu edu electrical engineer utah state university that s the wonderful thing about crayons they can take you to more places than a starship can guinon thought it means global positioning system there are two precision levels one for army applications killing has to be very accurate today and one for civil ones the civil precision is about to m correct me if i m wrong though it may be insufficiant for mapping buildings but there is a way with an additional reference point e g one fixed gps system in a house to get the same high precision as the military version but it gets pretty complicated then if you use a microwave system actually this means some type of radar you need quite a lot of number crunching to get accurate vectorized data out of your original signals so the gps system seems to be the better and running idea for your application there have been discussions in this newsgroup don t know of an address anymore cheers robert hb nby robert ganter universitaet basel i am a fan institut fuer informatik of my plan basel switzerland ganter ifi unibas ch amateurradio hb nby packet hb nby hb eas che eu
