Set your GPS for Canberra

[Gob]

It's a world-first technology developed in Canberra, tested at Cooma and set to rewrite the rules for a global geographic positioning systems industry worth $200 billion a year.

Locata Corporation, a start-up founded by former garage-band musicians David Small and Nunzio Gambale, has invented the seemingly impossible, a GPS that doesn't use satellites to relay signals. Instead, it uses a network of small, ground-based transmitters that use wi-fi to send location positioning signals more than a million times stronger than GPS.

Mr Gambale describes it as the difference between switching on a small torch and a powerful searchlight.

''The problem with GPS is that it was never designed for a modern world where it has become a utility. It was designed in the era of the Beatles,'' he says.

''It's still an exquisite technology, but it's fallible. Each satellite has four atomic clocks on board, and every satellite has to transmit the signal at exactly the same time. We're talking about the speed of light, and when you have two satellites that are out by one millionth of a second that can translate to a 300 metre error.''

There's also the problem of signal-out inside buildings and densely built-up urban areas called ''city canyons'', as well as an emerging black market in GPS jamming devices, which can be bought online for as little as $30.

In the United States, random jamming of GPS at a busy airport was eventually tracked to trucks on a nearby freeway. Drivers were using the jammers to avoid variations in their routes being tracked.

A $30 jammer ''can shut down a GPS signal for three city blocks'', Mr Gambale says. But there's also a $300 jammer, and that's capable of creating a wider arc of chaos. ''We're not replacing GPS - we're working with it to make the system safer,'' he says.

It's taken 17 years of ''stealth research'' and 92 patents to build that back-up, and Locata has recently signed contracts with the United States airforce after tests at Holloman airbase in New Mexico. ''It's all in the timing. We've got systems running for the US military at up to 50 kilometres apart and they are synchronising to a precision of better than two nanoseconds, that's two billionths of a second. That beats any GPS and it's why the industry initially thought that what we were trying to do was straight out of science fiction. Honestly, there is nothing else like it in the world.''

The system is also being used in open-cut mines to position excavation equipment, and proved accurate to within 2.5 centimetres.

[dales]

Good for you guys down under!

The internet we use came out of "Beatles-era" technology.

Can you guys do something with that?