Posts Tagged ‘History’

The History of GPS Technology

With GPS devices now in millions of cars, cell phones and purses around the country, it is hard to imagine that only a decade ago, the technology was used nearly exclusively by large corporations and the military. But time has went quick for Comprehensive Positioning Systems, which makes sense given that the tale of GPS’ description starts with a measure of time.

It all starts with TIME

GPS technology exists today because scientists sought a way to measure time more accurately than it had ever been measured before. And so, they developed the Atomic Clock, a super-accurate device that measure the time within a billionth of a second.

But the Atomic Clock was not made in order to keep scientists from being late for feast. They used the accuracy of the clock to test Einstein’s scheme of relativity as it pertained to time and space.

Using Atomic Clocks to measure time and space

With these atomic clocks, scientists and engineers learned that there were slight discrepancies in time around the globe. They started to position the clocks the world over from Mount Everest to the Gobi Desert and then looked for tiny differences in the time in each of the locations. This information helped confirm Einstein’s view of the universe and would soon become a key part of satellite technology.

Sputnik and the creation of a military GPS system

When the Russians launched Sputnik in the 1950’s, scientists quickly learned that the satellite could be used to track locations on the ground by beaming a signal up to the satellite – and having a response returned to Earth. How that message traveled determined the location of the satellite relative to a point on the earth.

The US Navy soon started launching satellites of their own, and used them in key military actions to help troops engage in the proper battle locations and help large ships circumnavigating the globe.

After a time, Navy engineers realized that enough satellites, placed in very specific positions with an orbit around the earth, would start a clear picture of our earth – and that this “picture” could be used map out individual points around the globe with stunning accuracy.

Completion of the System

In 1993, it all came together. The United States Navy launched the 24th of 24 carefully placed satellites into orbit – and the Comprehensive Positioning System was born. The satellites are positioned in such a way that now anyone with an inexpensive GPS device can locate their position (or another location) anywhere on the earth. And to reckon, it all started with Einstein and a group of scientists who wanted to find the ultimate measure of time.

Today GPS devices are a useful tool for many Americans. The technology has become very affordable and helps individuals obtain proper directions to their location while using a minimal amount of gas or time. And if someone had told you twenty years ago that GPS technology would be a “hot Christmas gift”, chances are you wouldn’t have given them the time of day.

For reviews, prices and product information about the latest GPS devices for the car, cell phone and more, visit www.gpsviews.com. At www.gpsviews.com you’ll find unbiased reviews, side by side product comparisons and everything else you need to make an informed buy – and get the most out of your GPS device.

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Mobile Ringtones – Look in the History

Ringtones is one of the most ordinary and age-ancient features embedded in mobile phones. It has made its presence felt in view of the fact that the birth of mobile handsets and has evolved from simple monotone to full track songs. Just imagine if we had to hear these monotones throughout the existence of cell phones, it would have become very irritating for us to listen to that single tone all the time. But thanks to the ringtone format technology, today ringtones are available in innumerable formats for our convenience.

The first commercial mobile ring tone was made and delivered in Finland in 1998. It was when a Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja had begun with their downloadable mobile ring tone service called Harmonium. The Harmonium comprised of tools for general broadcast to start monophonic ring tones and a means to deliver them over-the-air (OTA) via SMS to a mobile handset and to bill customer on their phone bill. These ringtones supported only one tone at a time at varying pitches. Most of the first generation mobile phones were embedded with this kind of monophonic ringtones. These ringtones were available in innumerable formats depending on the phone model. One of the most ordinary formats for monophonic ringtones was RTTTL, which was in a text format and could be sent over-the-air (OTA) to a mobile handset via SMS. Most of the early versions of Nokia handset contain ringtones in this format. Some of the cell phones also included melody composer software that enabled us to start our own ringtones with the help of “keypress editor”. At this stage, other manufacturers developed their own formats like eMelody and imelody by Ericsson, and KWS by Kyocera’s and many more.

After the monophonic phase, came in the polyphonic ringtones, which are embedded in nearly all the recently launched handsets of major companies. These ringtones have been originated from Japan circa 2001. They are different from monophonic ringtones because they enable different types of notes to be played at the same time. These ringtones were most commonly found in MIDI formats. But, later on, other formats like SP-Midi and SMAF had also evolved.

Lastly, the third generation ringtones known as “truetones” or “realtones” are ringtones encoded with high fidelity formats such as MP3, AAC or WMA format. Truetones allow hi-fi recordings like vocals, to be used as a ringtone. The first format of truetones was AMR-WB, which were incorporated into Nokia handsets around 2004. This format allowed the extracts from the first recording or master track to be used as a ringtone, whereas the other two were purely instrumental. This is one of the reasons, why truetones have an edge over monophonic and polyphonic ringtones. It is also one of the medium used by the music industry to generate revenue, as extracts of the marks are often released as tones before the singles, in order to promote the album in the market.

Initially, ringtones were only available for download by the service providers and broadcast were charged for it. But thanks to the World Wide Web, Bluetooth and infrared technologies, getting ringtones is a much simpler task now.

Bbg Communications: History of the Mobile Phone

The description of mobile phones traces the development of handheld radio telephone technology from two-way radios appended to vehicles and handheld cellular telephones.

Two-way radios started to be in use in motor vehicles like taxicabs, police cruisers, ambulances, and the like. They were not yet classified as mobile phones in view of the fact that they were not yet connected to the telephone network. That being said, it was not possible to dial phone numbers from two-way radios. Later, a growing community of mobile radio users, who were known as the mobileers, popularized the technology that would eventually lead to the early mobile phone.

The first mobile phones were everlastingly installed in vehicles, but the versions that followed such as the so-called transportables or “bag phones” were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as any mobile or as portable two-way radios. In the early 1940s, Motorola has designed a backpacked two-way radio, the Walkie-Talkie and later developed a large hand-held two-way radio for the use of the US military. This battery powered “Handie-Talkie” (HT) was as huge as a man’s forearm.

In December 1947, Bell Labs engineers Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young recommended hexagonal cells for mobile phones. Philip T. Porter projected further that the towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than at the centers and have 3 directional antennas that would hear into 3 adjacent hexagon cells. But the technology didn’t exist yet then and there was not yet any frequency allocated. It was not until the early 1960s when cellular technology was introduced by Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

The first use of radio telephony in Europe was well-known to be on the first-class passenger trains in Germany between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926. At about the same time, it was also first introduced on passenger planes for traffic security. It was also in Germany where radio telephony was introduced on a large scale, for the use of German tanks in the Second World War. Post-war, the German police made use of unused tank telephony equipment to run the first radio patrol cars in the British zone of occupation. . But the use of radio patrol cars service was limited to trained specialists on the use of the equipment. Ships on the River Rhine were amongst the first to use radio telephony with an untrained end customer as a user, in the early 1950s.

The MTA, which was the first fully automatic mobile phone system, was developed by the Swedish company Ericsson and was commercially released in the country in 1956. It was the 1st system that didn’t need any kind of manual control, but was at the heavy side of 40 kilo’s. A leaner upgraded version, at 9 kgs was introduced in 1965, called the MTB, which was with transistors and utilized DTMF signaling. It had 150 customers during its early launch, up to 600 when it shut down in 1983.

In 1967, the use of a mobile phone neccessitated staying within the cell site all throughout the phone call is made, which was serviced by one base station. Because of the stand-alone design of each cell site, this did not provide continuity of automatic telephone service to mobile phones moving through several cell areas. Continuity of calls while moving through several cell sites was made possible, according to BBG Communications, in 1970 with Amos Joel., another Bell Labs engineer’s invention of an automatic call handoff system, which allowed this process.

AT&T, in December 1971, submitted a proposal for cellular service to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In 1982, 11 years after AT&T’s proposal submission, the FCC gave its approval for an Advanced Mobile Phone Service and allocated frequencies in the 824-894 MHz band. In 1990, Analog AMPS was replaced by Digital AMPS.