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BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#31

Post by mindcrime »

lxgr wrote: post #21

High-power, and ideally authenticated, alternatives to space-based GNSS are desperately needed, given the sharp uptick in jamming and spoofing incidents in many places. In a true "end of history" moment, the US and other NATO members discontinued both of their ground-based systems (which are inherently harder to jam due to their much higher transmission power, since transmitters are not power limited) – Omega in the…

GPS jamming, and much more concerningly spoofing, will probably quickly come within reach of non-nation-states and smaller groups of all kinds, and ultimately individual actors

It may already be so:

https://hal.science/hal-03456365v1

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#32

Post by toast0 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Note that this blog post (and the associated video) were a quick off-the-cuff thing while I was on the NAB show floor—I have been talking to a few of those involved in the testing at NIST, Sinclair, and Avateq (among others), and will hopefully have a lot more in a follow-up. Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so t…

I bought an atsc 3 tuner, and the experience turned me off of OTA tv. Since then, things managed to get worse as when I was poking around, DRM wasn't in use, but now it is.

I was hoping to get better fidelity between the roughly 2x bitrate per channel, and the video codec update. And probably overly optimistically was hoping the 1080p feed source was progressive so there wouldn't be a deinterlacing step.

Otoh, local broadcasters use an audio codec I can't easily use, integration with mythtv is poor, and there's no sign anything is going to get better soon.

Maybe if I had a tv with an atsc 3 tuner, live tv would be an option, but I'm not buying a tv for that.

ATSC 1.0 took a while before gathering momentum, so maybe that's going to be the same here, and in another few years, it might make sense to consider a transition. OTOH, maybe the writing is on the wall and OTA broadcasting will die on this hill. I was an OTA enthusiast, but between ATSC 3 being terrible, and the reallocation of spectrum that means cellular base stations sometimes overwhelm my pre-amp, it's not much fun anymore. (I have a filter post-pre-amp but it'd be better if I got on the roof to put it pre-pre-amp, but roofs are scary) Maybe I'm just getting curmudgeonly though.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#33

Post by kristopolous »

gblargg wrote: post #30
kristopolous wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fighting through a cold so granted my reading comprehension is way down but at least in my diminished state I was reading through that and was baffled ... I'm sure the average reader who deals with broadcast signal electronics knows what's going on here but I just walked away from it confused. It looks like terrestrial broadcasters sending out time codes for triangulation?

I was amazed to not even find a Wikipedia article about BPS.

I'm guessing the long term vision is phones and cars will receive broadcast television because traditional TVs are usually pretty stationary objects?

It sounds like a hail mary. How many people use the fm radio transceivers in their smartphone?

Maybe it's a total re-imagining of what to do with high power terrestrial band broadcasting?

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#34

Post by 1970-01-01 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #18
Lammy wrote: post #15

I hope it will still be possible to receive a BPS timing signal privately and anonymously with ATSC 3 like one can with GPS. ATSC 3 has the Dedicated Return Channel because marketers “““need””” to spy on every-fucking-thing we do: https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A323-2024-04... “Conventional linear TV services alone (albeit ultra-high-definition) may not be sufficient to sustain the terrestrial broadc…

Yeah... and that's one of the most innocuous new "features" in ATSC 3.0. Almost everything I've seen (besides BPS, and maybe HDR if you're one of the few who has a really good home theater setup) is a benefit for broadcasters and advertisers, and a bit worse for consumers (especially requiring new hardware/decoders... and sometimes persistent Internet connections!).

Same feeling here. ATSC 3.0 with DRM and persistent Internet requirements tells me this is going to be the downfall of OTA television. I can see ATSC 4.0 being a discounted ISP subscription paired with some OTA location checks via BPS.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#35

Post by jeffbee »

lxgr wrote: post #21

High-power, and ideally authenticated, alternatives to space-based GNSS are desperately needed, given the sharp uptick in jamming and spoofing incidents in many places. In a true "end of history" moment, the US and other NATO members discontinued both of their ground-based systems (which are inherently harder to jam due to their much higher transmission power, since transmitters are not power limited) – Omega in the…

A university of Texas research group demonstrated more than ten years ago that they could spoof GPS in the vicinity of an automatically navigating UAV, and force it to land at a point of their choosing. This has been within the reach of garage hackers for a long time.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#38

Post by kmeisthax »

Lammy wrote: post #15

I hope it will still be possible to receive a BPS timing signal privately and anonymously with ATSC 3 like one can with GPS. ATSC 3 has the Dedicated Return Channel because marketers “““need””” to spy on every-fucking-thing we do: https://www.atsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A323-2024-04... “Conventional linear TV services alone (albeit ultra-high-definition) may not be sufficient to sustain the terrestrial broadc…

Wait, to be clear, this 'dedicated return channel' is just for TVs to broadcast back to the station that they're watching the adverts? I thought ATSC 3.0 was going to rely on IP backhaul for that. Actually broadcasting back seems... impractical at best.

I mean, let's keep in mind, even ATSC 1.0 had really awful reception issues; compared to analog NTSC where there was enough redundancy that you could just tune into a garbage station from way too far away and see something. Now imagine trying to make that already unreliable channel bidirectional. I just really hope all the return channel stuff is optional, because it sure as hell isn't going to work without way more stations broadcasting on more channels, and OOPS you've reinvented LTE.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#39

Post by geerlingguy »

kristopolous wrote: post #33
gblargg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was amazed to not even find a Wikipedia article about BPS.

I'm guessing the long term vision is phones and cars will receive broadcast television because traditional TVs are usually pretty stationary objects? It sounds like a hail mary. How many people use the fm radio transceivers in their smartphone? Maybe it's a total re-imagining of what to do with high power terrestrial band broadcasting?

Or a way to try to preserve ownership of some spectrum. IMO it may follow the same route as HD Radio adoption.

Re: BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

#40

Post by The_Double »

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Note that this blog post (and the associated video) were a quick off-the-cuff thing while I was on the NAB show floor—I have been talking to a few of those involved in the testing at NIST, Sinclair, and Avateq (among others), and will hopefully have a lot more in a follow-up. Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so t…

How does it solve for time without location? With GPS location and time are one solution to an equation with 4 unknowns (x,y,z,t). Without location you won't know the time delay between you and the transmitter.
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