[time-nuts] GPS at 60,000 feet

David McGaw n1hac at alum.dartmouth.org
Fri Feb 1 15:27:50 UTC 2013


ITAR limits are "AND".  If it is below 50,000 ft OR below 1000 knots, it 
will work.

My Garmin GPS60CSx has always worked on commercial flights at 40,000 ft 
and 500 MPH.  We use commercial Trimble units on our scientific balloons 
that go up to 120,000 ft (38 km).

David McGaw
NASA BARREL project Systems Engineer
Dartmouth College


On 2/1/13 9:14 AM, Jim Lux wrote:
> On 1/31/13 1:09 PM, Chris Albertson wrote:
>>> I know  for sure my handheld Garmin works at 27000 feet, at
>>> 530mph...   ...I was actually surprised it worked up there.
>>> It made me  wonder what the actual limits are.
>>
>> What are the limits of your hand held unit or what are the limits of
>> GPS in general.   I think GPS works as long as you are under the orbit
>> of the satellites.  The company I used to work for placed GPS on some
>> low orbit spacecraft, so say roughly 200 miles up and 18,000 mph but
>> I'd guess most hand held units would not work in those conditions
>>
>
> GPS will even (maybe) work at the Moon: with a gain antenna pointed 
> back at earth.. you're looking at the satellites on the opposite side 
> of the earth radiating around the limb.  I don't know that anyone has 
> actually tried it but it's certainly been analyzed to death.
>
> The potential problem with a handheld GPS in space (depending on where 
> you are) would be whether you can keep track of the constellation and 
> acquire new s/v's fast enough with lots o'Doppler.
>
> You already have to deal with the Doppler from the S/Vs buzzing around 
> at 3-4 km/sec.  Whether your receiver can handle the extra 7 km/sec 
> Doppler in LEO is a good question.  7 km/sec is about 20 ppm, and I 
> suspect that the receiver can already deal with that much change in 
> the oscillator frequency.  It might be doppler rate that it would have 
> a hard time with (because the designer cranked down on the loop 
> bandwidth for noise reasons)
>
> What are those folks flying GPS on CubeSats using?
>
>
>
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