A New GLONASS Application

http://en.rian.ru/art_living/20101118/161395333.html

"Father Frost, Russia's Santa Claus, received on Thursday a staff
featuring a GLONASS satellite navigation system so he can be tracked
on his New Year's gift-giving journey.

The system will transmit Father Frost's coordinates to a special
center, which will publish them on the internet so that everyone can
follow his progress on his traditional New Year voyage.

. . . The GLONASS module was installed in the crystal-shaped top of
the staff, which is 180 cm long and weighs some 3 kg."

The GLONASS receiver is presumably smaller and lighter.

The company web site describes applications, but not much about the
user equipment:

http://www.autotracker.ru/en/

A list of Russian GNSS equipment manufacturers:

http://www.aggf.ru/eng/members.html

Here's a combined GLONASS/GPS/WAAS/EGNOS 24-channel receiver that's
about 1.4 inch on a side and weighs 10 grams (no mention of feature
size, but clearly larger than SiRF, Qualcomm, Broadcom, et al):

http://www.navis.ru/en/catalog_110_162.html

A 9 MB file with some interesting market projections:

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/pdf/icg/2009/icg-4/11.pdf

Slide 4 shows chipset price forecast, now around $4 to $5 each.

Russia is heavily promoting GLONASS so I did a brief search for a hand
held GLONASS receiver .. something eTrex class priced in the $150
range. I couldn't find anything available.

Unless consumer equipment becomes available worldwide soon, overcoming
the GPS 'inertia' of over a billion users will be exasperating. Then
consider that huge Japanese market where GPS is destined to gain an
even stronger foothold with the introduction of QZS augmentation and
its interoperable GPS signals. Broadcom has already demonstrated that
is a promising concept.

GLONASS is still not fully operational. Four satellites have been 'In
maintenance' for quite some time now and it's doubtful if the two
spares will enter service again. Furthermore, the spares are in Plane
III while Plane I is most in need of replenishment. Another Proton
launch with three satellites is planned for next month. So that
should get them close to a second IOC.

--- CHAS

Consumer level chipsets are coming out now. So I think you have to
wait one year (at least) :)


Maybe, but I think that noone is going to use a Glonass only solution.
And glonass can get users thanks to the failure of Galileo (so far, of
course) more that the inertia of the GPS, Imho

Russia is a dictatorship. They beat people that don't like the regime,
they put journalists on prison on bogus charges and kill people that
insist on criticizing the regime. If that's not enough reason to
boycott GLONASS down to strictly a backup, than you really don't care
about all the worst things that still happen in this world. Please
don't tell me this doesn't matter. China is the same. Boycott GLONASS
and COMPASS.

To give a specific, technical reason, if for any reason they are
problems with GLONASS, they're very likely to withhold that bad
information to the maximum extent possible, completely the opposite of
USAF that has been extremely transparent about all recent GPS snafus
(not that they were that serious anyways). A dictatorship actively
manipulates information without any freedom of press to question that
manipulation. And GLONASS satellites don't seem to last a long time.
If Russia decides to stop investing on frequent launches, the GLONASS
will be barely usable in very few years.

Democracy sucks, but is much, much better than any other alternatives.

Marcelo Pacheco