Now this is cool. Rakon, a 39-year-old New Zealand-based company, has developed the world’s smallest GPS receiver. Claimed to be as tiny as the size of a baby’s fingernail, the GPS receiver chip is small enough to be fitted into devices such as watches and cellphones. As GPS becomes commonplace in our everyday gadgets, we can be sure that things will get a little more interesting.
Brent Robinson, Rakon’s Managing Director, also mentioned that the GPS receiver will have sensitivity good enough to pick up weak signals, perfect for urban environments with high interference. Let’s see how long before this baby gets plugged into every of our favorite portable gadgets.
January 16th, 2006 at 2:32 am
ubar!
January 16th, 2006 at 3:24 am
yeh, I can’t wait for locational-triggered ads to appear on my cell phone.
January 16th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Too bad it will suffer from the same thing all GPS units do- You cant use them in doors. But they are great outdoors.
January 17th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
does not do anything about the size of the antenna.
January 26th, 2006 at 8:36 am
[Comment ID #1195 Will Be Quoted Here]
Actually indoor GPS is not impossible, just currently impractical. Rakon is working on a version of this model that should enable GPS designers to have real working indoor GPS… Stay tuned for more later in the year.
January 26th, 2006 at 8:44 am
[Comment ID #1203 Will Be Quoted Here]
Unfortuately the antenna is still a major limiting factor, blame the physics of the thing. For this module to work you still need an antenna as well as a baseband processor to do the signal processing. However With major companies out there on the verge of releasing software GPS to run on current generation processors (ie ARM9) so with an antenna and the existing system processor you can easily integrate GPS into your product. There is also the potential with a bit more development to have a complete solution working on a very small footprint…
January 28th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
How cool