User:RHB100

Hello, I am Robert H. Biggadike. I am a Licensed Professional Engineer in the field of Control System Engineering. I hold advanced engineering degrees from the University of Arkansas and UCLA in addition to an undergraduate engineering degree from Arkansas. In addition to my technical interests, I am interested in libertarianism and capitalism. I am orginally from Newport, Arkansas. I now live in California.

Philosophy on How GPS Article Should be Written

I have worked on the GPS article. I think the article should explain how GPS works. The physics associated with the spheres should be discussed in an interesting way. Also the mathematics associated with sphere intersections and computation of the intersections should be explained. I think this will be of great benefit to younger readers who may have their interest in physics or mathematics sparked by seeing practical applications. I think there is far too much reference to the IEEE publications in the section, "Using the C/A Code". In several cases there is only brief mention of a method followed by reference to an article in an IEEE publication which is inaccessible to most users. I think these references tend to degrade the quality of the article by making it uninteresting.

Quoting from the "Method of Operation" section, "The receiver uses the arrival time of each message to measure the distance to each satellite, from which it determines the position of the receiver using geometry and trigonometry (see trilateration[4]) The resulting coordinates are converted to more user-friendly forms such as latitude and longitude, or location on a map, then displayed to the user."

This is not the way it should be written in my opinion. Just saying "using geometry and trigonometry" doesn't explain how GPS works. It skips the highly understandable physics and mathematics. It doesn't satisfy the scientific curiosity of the reader.

New images

Hey thanks regarding the pics, I've added one more colorful pic ;) And now I've introduced an inportant concept that should make it alot easier to view the spheres thing. Please take a look and tell me what you think, for I'm not so sure ;p Should they maybe be 4 small spheres? (It was a bit unclear in Rhinoceros with 4) And this way I can show also that if you know Earth radius and your own heigh, you'd need only 3 spheres, for you get your own sphere solution. --Almighty001 (talk) 02:18, 29 October 2008 (UTC