WHEN T.V. WATCHES YOU

“If you’re inside a build­ing, a GPS receiver can­not find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of TV sig­nals,” notes Roland Piquepaille. The CIA-​​backed start-​​up says TV sig­nals are 10,000 times stronger than the ones from GPS, accord­ing to the Mercury News.

Rosum founder James Spilker, one of the orig­i­nal archi­tects of the GPS satel­lite… real­ized a syn­chro­niza­tion fea­ture in dig­i­tal and ana­log tele­vi­sion sig­nals could be used for other pur­poses than to lock the ver­ti­cal hold for older TVs.
The engi­neers cre­ated a radio receiver chip that could zero in on the TV sig­nal and get the syn­chro­niza­tion infor­ma­tion. Using pre­ci­sion tim­ing, they fig­ure out how far a TV sig­nal trav­els before it is picked up by a device equipped with Rosum chips. Next, they com­pare the mea­sure­ments against other data that they col­lect with their own lis­ten­ing sta­tions and then finally cal­cu­late the device’s posi­tion. The Rosum engi­neers call this process “mul­ti­lat­er­a­tion,” which is akin to nav­i­ga­tional tri­an­gu­la­tion…
Rosum’s vice pres­i­dent of engi­neer­ing, Greg Flammel, says tests of the tech­nol­ogy show it can track some­one in the base­ment floor of the San Francisco Public Library. It also found a per­son in the heart of San Francisco’s finan­cial dis­trict…
Rosum is best used with a GPS sys­tem, mainly because TV sig­nals don’t reach into places such as the Nevada desert or the mid­dle of the ocean. The tech­nol­ogy also isn’t use­ful for track­ing some­one ver­ti­cally. So it can locate a per­son in an office tower but can’t deter­mine what floor they’re on unless the build­ing is ringed with a set of Rosum anten­nas. (thanks to JF for the tip)

May 11th, 2005 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.