97-million-year-old fossils reveal the earliest known animal "GPS"

No, that's a bearing. A heading is whatever direction the nose is pointing. Add wind correction to that to get bearing.

You left North Pole out, but good enough.

There are two longitudes from where true North and magnetic North will be perfectly lined up. You're not likely to be on either.

Draw a course on a map. You might fly the same course either direction, on the same day. Wind won't blow the course around. But it will mess up your heading so that your bearing doesn't track the course.

Animals can probably recognize surface topologies like people can recognize faces. Some of the Ukranian drones use topological navigation when their GPS is jammed.

Am 07.10.26 um 18:49 schrieb Jan Panteltje: ff the coast of California and arriving at Long Beach Harbor?

Just think at carrier pigeons.

Gerhard

Humans are basically also animals. They have figured out a bit more stuff to help them . Also to destroy them.

'Animals' do the same thing as humans, fighting, making war, use things as tools. Eat other animals..

Animals also communicate with each other. We are still working on understanding their languages,

Nah, don't worry about it john.

You see, in the real world, these nerds I'm slinging at wouldn't be allowed outside. They'd still be locked inside the lockers in high school.

There is a very good reason I don't respect nerds. And the nerds should know it.

Best wishes, and happy electronics design!

False. There are _4 unknowns_ in the GPS/GNSS navigation equation which is basically the Minkowski metric for light: the 3 spatial coordinates of the receiver _and_ its clock bias (the time of reception is known, and the time of transmission is known from the satellite's signal, from which also the satellite's position can be determined via its ). As a result, at least _4 equations_ are required to solve a system of navigation equations; therefore, _4 satellites_ have to be in the line-of-sight of a GNSS receiver (i.e. above its local horizon if it is on the surface) for it to calculate its position; the number of GPS satellites (about 80 are currently operating) and their orbits make sure that this is the case for every GPS receiver on the surface at all times.

In addition to that, GPS is augmented by other GNSS constellations like GLONASS and Galileo which are supported by many receivers (certainly in smartphones). China also has its own locally available GNSS, BeiDou.

You can test that on your mobile device by using the app "GPS Test", for example.

Read that more carefully.

You do not know what you are talking about. The receiver's determining its own position is _a prerequisite_ for using it for navigation, because navigation means that the path to the designated destination needs to be discovered, and the receiver's position changes; it is not possible to determine whether the receiver's follows the discovered path or has reached the destination without determining its position.

Note that "GPS" is used in the Subject and the referred article in double-quotes, i.e. _figurately_ only.

F'up2 sci.physics

Birds on the other hand -- I think it were crows -- have no trouble un- derstanding traffic lights. They drop a peanut on the ground, and then wait for red light to pick up the edible core.

And all that without having a driving license, imagine that.

Best wishes, and happy bird watching!

I imagine most of that was olfactory, the one sense you left out of your parenthesis.

Best wishes, and happy perfume!

Or memory, or a general idea of where you are. I believe the solar com- pass is meant to tell you how to get to shore, if you get lost in the Atlantic [1]. All you need to know is how to head east, and you'll get to shore eventually. A bit of bummer if the vikings would then end up in the Baltic Sea rather than Germany or Norway, or something like that but you do what you have to, to find land.

Wasn't it someone here who said animals went to a general area, rather than a location? Well, so do people, and then navigate from there.

Best wishes, and happy navigation!

Dogs brains have two major regions, "smell" and "ball."

I already read it, and quoted from it, and posted the same link to it.

"GPS requires four or more satellites to be visible for accurate navigation."

"There are marked performance benefits to the user carrying a clock synchronized with the satellites. Foremost is that only three satellites are needed to compute a position solution."

"Although four satellites are required for normal operation, fewer apply in special cases. If one variable is already known, a receiver can determine its position using only three satellites. For example, a ship on the open ocean usually has a known elevation close to 0 m, and the elevation of an aircraft may be known."

You snipped everything that I quoted from wikipedia. Go read it more carefully yourself.

What insult would that be, the fact that you can't seem to understand the difference between arriving somewhere in general and somewhere in particular?

Nope.

Salmon return with uncanny precision to spawn in the exact same freshwater location, often within meters or even yards of the specific gravel nest (called a redd) where they hatched.

NOAA

Note that they return to a particular type of gravel area.

During their long-distance migration across hundreds or thousands of miles of open ocean, they use the Earth's magnetic field as a compass to guide themselves back to the correct general coastal area and river mouth.

USGS

Salmon use an acute sense of smell (olfaction) to recognize the unique chemical signature and scent of their natal stream, which they imprinted on as juveniles before heading to the ocean.

USGS

What does electronics have to do with spawning salmon?

The electronics design is mostly easy. But it spins off a lot of grunt work: pcb layout, BOMs, mechanical design, c code, VHDL, FA testing, manuals, all that stuff.

"When you have a schematic, you are 10% done."

That was optimistic.

Nope.

When a trip is planned, the initial heading has nothing to do with where the nose might be pointing. Once the vessel starts moving, then where the nose is pointing at any particular moment is the current heading.

En route wind correction and local magnetic variance determine the current heading to get to where you want to go.

Read the nest sentence.

No s*it?

What do you think magnetic variation is about?

No s*it?

Maybe that's why heading is constantly corrected for both magnetic variance and wind en route.

Yeah, historically.

You do know inertial navigation is making a comeback these days?

It wouldn't surprise me if they used e-fields to navigate too.

I've been talking to people recently about using e-fields to communicate underwater. Sheet resistors, essentially.

Fair enough. And I haven't done any of this since the 90s, and then only on breadboards. I had to use the karnough maps by hand, as we didn't have the fancy V.H.D.L. synthesizers back then; at least not us students, I wouldn't know about professionals as I wasn't graduating in electronics.

For the time being, and even then, not yet, I'm stuck with V.H.D.L. and an F.P.G.A. on a small dev board, and a bigger dev board if I want to play with a SPIM compatible core [1].

I suspect I should take pictures of the tools I have on hand, and share with sci.electronics.design, so everyone here can at least have an idea of what I can and cannot do on my own.

But that's not for the immediate future, as I have some other life pri- orities right now.

In the mean time, happy designing, testing, laying out, buying mater- ials, coding C, and typing your very own V.H.D.L.

I'm not sure what F.A. testing is.

Best wishes!

Using the gyro-sensors [I'm ignorant of the correct technical term] in phones I imagine? All I know is that if I mean to walk, the route sug- gested by the phone map is total bullshit, and I'm better off learning the route on my own.

Of course, that doesn't work much in a foreign city, but most of our walking is done on home base [1].

So I don't know about you, but I think the maps and the routing algo- rithms need more immediate updating, rather than the location techno- logy.

Best wishes, and happy walks in life!

The heading ALWAYS IS where the nose is pointing. The initial heading isn't going to "might be" where the nose is pointing.

You're going to drift off the course that you planned, and that means the bearing to your intended target has changed. So adjust your heading

- you can accept the new bearing if it won't put you into a mountain, or you can adjust your heading a little bit more to get yourself back on the original course ASAP.

And track? That's the zig-zag line behind you because you're not very good at this.

The airplane has a heading while it's parked -> Magnetic Compass, it's always on.