GPS: from ‘Manpack’ to iPhone

David Van Dusseldorp, who arrived at Rockwell Collins Inc., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a young engineer in 1976, remembers sitting atop the company’s research building in the middle of the night during the summer of 1977. His job was to reposition an antenna every 5 minutes in an effort to capture the first signal from a satellite as part of the company’s Generalized Development Model project, the result of which was a five-channel global positioning system (GPS) receiver. David Van Dusseldorp, who arrived at Rockwell Collins Inc., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a young engineer in 1976, remembers sitting atop the company’s research building in the middle of the night during the summer of 1977. His job was to reposition an antenna every 5 minutes in an effort to capture the first signal from a satellite as part of the company’s Generalized Development Model project, the result of which was a five-channel global positioning system (GPS) receiver.

The engineering team on the project made him a stand marked with graduated degrees so he could properly position the antenna during the nightly 4-hour window the lone satellite was said to be overhead. The first two nights ticked by to no avail, with word coming from the U.S. Air Force that it had not been able to turn on the signal, which only intensified the competition between Rockwell Collins and other companies trying to be the first to capture the signal.

The first GPS receiver station developed by Rockwell Collins in 1976. Images © Rockwell Collins, Inc

The Manpack weighed about 17 lbs. and cost in the neighborhood of $45,000. Images © Rockwell Collins, Inc.

The pivotal moment in navigational history came during the third night, Van Dusseldorp recalled, when the engineer at the computer waiting for the signal received and decoded a message: AAAAA.

“When he first saw the message, the person who was decoding it on his computer was going through it again because we were expecting something clever,” continued Van Dusseldorp, who now serves as a technical project manager and has been with the company for 34 years. The Air Force later declared a tie in the race to capture and decode the message.

“Back then, we didn’t realize the total promise of the system,” noted Van Dusseldorp, “but it was a brand new way of navigating and we felt we were doing something special.”

The company’s first receiver consisted of a four-bay rack that stood about 6' tall and generated so much heat it had its own air conditioner. It sat on a pallet and could be loaded onto cargo planes to see how well it worked while flying missions.

About a decade later, the company delivered its first personal GPS receiver designed for U.S. ground troops. Considering the so-called Manpack weighed about 17 lbs. and cost in the neighborhood of $45,000, it almost seems impossible that today you can go online and download a TomTom GPS app for the iPhone at a cost of $49.99.

Rockwell Collins shrunk the Manpack down to hand-held size with its Precision Ligtweight GPS Receiver (PLGR, or plugger) model, then down to the Defense Advanced GPS Receiver (DAGR, or dagger) and currently down to the MicroDAGR. Images © Rockwell Collins, Inc.

There’s even a $59 child-tracking device that’s smaller than a credit card and has a panic/emergency button on it that sends e-mail and text alerts to parents. The tracking device stays with your child and you follow along using your smartphone or any computer with Internet access. Not a bad idea if your child is going on a field trip and you want a little extra peace of mind. Better yet, you can hide the device somewhere in your car if you’re worried that it might be stolen—or, if you must, to track where your teenager is really going when borrowing the car.

Just how did GPS devices get so small and so cheap so quickly? Credit GPS tracking chips. They have gotten smaller and more efficient.

For example, when CSR, a GPS maker based in Cambridge, England, introduced the SiRFstarIV GSD4T chip about a year ago, the company touted the chip’s ability to handle twice the search capacity of its predecessor while using much less battery power.

“With consumers expecting reliable location services everywhere, we had to rewrite the traditional rule book on GPS architectures and create a new, low-energy way to maintain continuous location awareness without draining the device battery or requiring network assistance,” said Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer for CSR. “With SiRFstarIV and our unique SiRFaware technology, we have developed an architecture that will not only significantly improve the consumer experience when navigating with smartphones, but also enable consumer devices to maintain continuous location awareness.”

Meanwhile, Auckland, New Zealand-based Rakon has developed a GPS tracking chip that’s just 2.5mm × 2.0mm. That’s small enough to implant under the skin of pets to help track them in case they get lost, reported GPS for Today, a Web site (www.gpsfortoday.com) devoted to GPS technology. As the site noted, about the only things necessary for such an advancement to work effectively would be the ability to communicate with GPS satellites and a power supply to keep the chip functional.

As far-fetched as that may seem, Van Dusseldorp agreed the possibility exists. Already, he noted, there are wristwatches with GPS receivers that tell runners how far and how fast they’ve run.

No matter where GPS technology takes us, however, whenever Van Dusseldorp discusses GPS, his mind always travels back to those nights on the rooftop.

“In my romantic memory, if you will,” he said, “I remember sitting up there in the pitch black. There were no cell phones back then, so they ran a phone line up there because my wife was 8 months pregnant and they wanted to make sure they could get a hold of me. And in my mind’s eye, I view this thunderstorm off in the distance, lightning flashing.” To this day he’s not sure if that storm really existed, but he is sure of this, “We can look back and say GPS changed the world.” µ