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Regarding the limitations of GSM tracking - obviously. And ankle bracelet tracking systems use a combination of both GPS and mobile networks to determine position (sometimes referred to as "Assisted GPS").
In urban areas there is likely to be a higher density of cellular transmitters, improving cellular positioning. In the less-urban rural areas the GPS is likely to be used more.
The emphasis on satellite is made either for or by the media, since most people seem to base their ideas of how GPS works based on its unlikely dramatic use in movies and TV.
(which is not to suggest that any aGPS tracker implementation is not going to be fallible in some way).
See the BluTag as an example of the ankle tag
http://www.onguard-plus.com/english/04track.html
If the Government was only planning to use these mobile tags on non-violent first time offenders then that would be worth investigating.
Instead of quietly conducting a trial of the technology, they have proudly trumpeted this as
the core of a new policy to be used for monitoring paedophiles and violent offenders i.e. just the people who will be driven to break their curfews regardless of the consequences, or who will be motivated to try to jam or spoof the system, which the average poll tax defaulter on bail etc. will not bother to try to do.
Combined GPS and Mobile phone systems have not been as successful in urban areas for tracking high value delivery vehicles etc. compared with such systems as Quiktrak, which uses a dedicated infrastructure of radio beacons and calculates the location of their tags via the network rather than via the GPS/Cellphone handset device.
http://www.quiktrak.co.uk/techniek.html#how
This infrastructure does not cover th whole country (neither, for that matter does the Mobile Phone infrastucture) and there is no way that for a maximum of 18,000 people (many of whom will remain tagged to fixed rather telephone lines rather than mobiles) it can be cost effective to build one.
Perhaps the iridium sats are still up there and will be used for this new fiasco.
Last I heard was that they were supposed to have been destroyed by forced re-entry.
Maybe not.....
The Iridium low earth orbiting mobile phone satellite network is still up there and in business (military and government work)
http://www.iridium.com/corp/iri_corp-news.asp
but that is not a GPS system and needs a much bigger antenna to transmit up to the satellite compared with that needed to communicate with a terrestrial mobile phone network.
Galileo the EU rival to the USA monopoly on GPS is in the works, but it too will suffer from exactly the same physical orbital clear line of sight problems here in the UK.
thanks for the info.
are these high orbit sats ????
low orbit one's will be the problem, but not geostationery one's.These are 50,000km up and can have a signal window of around 10hrs.....so even with only 2 sats, they can cover a 24hr period no problems.
The tagging devices would need to operate on microwave freqs.....maybe pulsed transmissions.......buildings and inner city shadows, should not present a problem at all.
I am totally against any form of tagging....good old hard labout like the yanks have, where the prisoners clean the streets are just the trick..
Iridium is a network of 66 (with 13 spares) Low Earth Orbit satellites (780Km - 485 miles high). Originally there were going to be 77 of them, hence the name Iridium (atomic weight of the element iridium is 77)
http://www.iridium.com/corp/iri_corp-understand.asp has a little Flash animation which gives details of how it works:
48 spot beams per satellite (30 miles in diameter each)
Telephone and Messaging: 1616 - 1626.5 MHz L-band
Intersatellite links: 23.18 - 23.38 GHz Ka-band
Downlink: 19.4 - 19.6 GHz Ka-band
Uplink: 29.1 - 29.3 GHz Ka-band
Digital Voice and Data: 2.4 kilobits per second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_%28satellite%29
They were developed before GSM mobile phones really took over the planet, and made the mistake of putting the expensive telephone switch into orbit, instead of doing all the switching and routing on the ground, like the rival Globalstar system, so they were never competitive on price and capacity. The system effectively went bankrupt, but got bailed out by the US military in 2001.
Apart from the voracious demand for satellite comms bandwidth by the US military (so great that, for example, Powerpoint presentations are now banned from US Navy satellite channels), that it is doubtful if there is enough capacity for thousands of UK electronic tags to be monitored, let alone millions of vehicles on toll roads.
Suspicious people who cannot believe that they could have been so naive commercially, might conclude that there could be some sort of electronic eavesdropping capability in this array of 66 Low or Medium Earth Orbit satellites, and that some of the in orbit "spares" could be cover for secret spy or comms satellites - there is a lot of modern electronics that could be fitted into a 689Kg (1500 pound) satellite without affecting the original capability, which was designed over 15 years ago.
geostationery sats would definetly be the answer.increases in technology will allow for this type of tagging to take place and its just a matter of time.
This new car tracking proposal gets one thinking as well....the infrastructure is already there on our motorways and roads. these could easily and quickly be converted within a few months.
The infrastructure is *not* there at present, that is the point. It could be built, but it will cost billions and it will be hugely intrusive.