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iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

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61–70 of 205 posts

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Google Pixel 6 can already do this. I can see L5 and L1 GPS satellites at the same time right now. I can also see a lot of other systems ones.

How is the positioning accuracy outdoors? My iPhone 13 is rather disappointing in this regard. Even in my garden, with a clear sky, Maps.app will show my location at least 5 m off my actual position.

5m is within the design spec of L1 GPS, so you’re getting it as designed. GPS was never designed to be mm level accurate. The new L5 frequency aims for 30cm accuracy.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#62

Article about what dual-frequency GPS is: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-l5-precision-dual-freq... It says that GPS has added a new band (L5) that works better indoors. Combining it with traditional L1 gives better results. L5 is not fully deployed.

My Google Pixel 6 can already do this. I can see L5 and L1 GPS satellites at the same time right now. I can also see a lot of other systems ones.

How do you check what satellites you can see?

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my 2 year old Android device already had a feature that was only now implemented by Apple in their top of the line products. Neat. Does anyone have personal experience of how dual-frequency improves GPS? As I'm not really using GPS a lot, I'm not sure I noticed a difference from my previous devices (I live in EU, so also no high rise skyscrapers here)

Android has copy and paste before iOS but you wouldn’t want to brag about it just because. It didn’t work well at all till iOS came out with their implementation

I had a Symbian phone back then. It had copy and paste. Nothing to brag about because it was such a normal feature.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Google Pixel 6 can already do this. I can see L5 and L1 GPS satellites at the same time right now. I can also see a lot of other systems ones.

How do you check what satellites you can see?

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.android.gpstest.osmdroid...

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#66
post #61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the positioning accuracy outdoors? My iPhone 13 is rather disappointing in this regard. Even in my garden, with a clear sky, Maps.app will show my location at least 5 m off my actual position.

5m is within the design spec of L1 GPS, so you’re getting it as designed. GPS was never designed to be mm level accurate. The new L5 frequency aims for 30cm accuracy.

> GPS was never designed to be mm level accurate

Kind of. Consumer/public GPS was never to be that accurate. Galileo for example, has the following accuracy: 1 metre (public), 1 cm (encrypted)

I'm sure the same applies to other systems too.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

inside of the mall when your weather widget pulls your location every 5 minutes they will better know what stores you went in to in what order

Wouldn't the WiFi and Bluetooth beacons provide more accurate and more granular points of data than polling GPS for this purpose?

That would require calibration (this is the layout of the store, the receiver is here, reflections can occur here and so on) while a GPS system would allow owners to just connect to a centralized app and bam, here is where all your visitors walked for the last 3 months.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team and I are watching you as we speak. Spoiler alert: Your tinfoil hat doesn't help.

Weird, I thought we stopped doing tinfoil hat jokes post-Snowden.

Ah, I was just joking around my username!

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#69
post #44
post #2

For those of us not deep into the technical details here: what's this mean?

GPS assumes* light travels in a straight line, which it doesn't due to atmospheric effects and reflections off buildings. L5 is a second frequency from the same satellites, which is affected by these problems differently, so the chip can compare the differences between the two signals and guess what's up with the atmosphere and buildings / throw out the dumber looking signal. It's also mostly independent so it's more…

The single frequency situation isn't all that bad though since there are a dozen satellites in view and tracked even in urban outdoor environments.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any specific use cases where this will see outside benefit (urban areas)? Or is it just faster fix and higher precision without PPS/RTK?

based on the keynote, they say it will be better in "urban jungles". It was part of the Apple Watch Ultra and said it worked better for the Boston (IIRC) Maraton. I would hope for the phone it works better for navagation in Car Play... I dont know how many times my phone things, when driving forward, that im turning down a side road...

That last bit is a software issue. Apple maps is constantly trying to route me to a parallel street for 1 block in a city and it actually thinks I listen to it. Google maps doesn't have either of these behaviors on the same hardware/APIs.

No, a more accurate GPS will not fix Apple's bugs.

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