GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
In: Technology
Basically, each GPS satellite has an onboard clock and it just broadcasts the time. Your GPS device gets signals from multiple satellites, each one slightly delayed by the speed of light. Then it does some math to figure out how far away each satellite is, based on how long it took the signal to travel. Then it does a bit more math to determine your position based on the known positions of the satellites.
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