5 GPS Alternatives You Should Know

Mar. 4, 2020

GPS has become the de-facto medium and almost synonymous with the Global satellite navigation system(GNSS). Part of the reason is that GPS is the oldest navigation system. It was started in 1978 by the US Defense. However, there are other navigation systems also like GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, Quasi-Zenith and the recently announced NavIC by India. So in this article, we take a look at all the GPS alternatives in great detail and compare them point by point. We have talked about the coverage, accuracy, orbital height, and many other things that define a satellite navigation system. Now without further ado, let’s go through the list of GPS alternatives.

1. NavIC

While NavIC is quite new in the realms of satellite navigation systems, it’s nonetheless very promising. NavIC, in case you don’t know, isan indigenous satellite navigation system built by Indiafor its region and adjoining neighbors. We have written adetailed explainer on NavICin a separate article and discussed how it’s better than GPS so go ahead and read the article to get a better idea. Anyway, unlike GPS which is a global navigation satellite system, NavIC, on the other hand, is a regional navigation satellite system.Constellation of NavIC Satellites / Source: ISRO

Essentially, it means that GPS covers the whole world for location positioning whereas NavIC covers primarily India and some neighboring regions. Having said that, NavIC is relatively better than GPS in terms of accuracy, at least in India, becausethe NavIC satellites are always in direct line of sight with India’s region. So to sum up, NavIC is an India autonomous satellite navigation system and it seems a better alternative than GPS. Also, India is going to launch at least 5 more satellites in the coming years so that is great.

Apart from that, both GLONASS and GPS have almost the same orbital height and period so, in some sense, both are somewhat identical. As for the accuracy,GLONASS has a location precision of 5-10 meterswhich is great and very similar to GPS’ 4-7 meters. Of course, the location gets much better with the help of local cellular triangulation. All in all, GLONASS is a capable satellite navigation system by Russia and it’s second only to GPS.

And similar to NavIC, QZSS also follows the same principle of ‘direct line of sight at all times’ in sync with Japan’s co-ordinates. It has deployed its satellites in both geostationary and geosynchronous orbit to ensure thatat least one of the satellites is visible over Japan at all times. So to conclude, Japan’s QZSS is nowhere near US’ GPS, but it holds a lot of promise and we hope for a bigger expansion shortly.

So those are the 5 GPS alternatives that have been developed by Russia, China, India, European Union, and Japan. As I said above, there are only a handful of countries who have invested in building their indigenous satellite navigation systems and it’s mainly for self-dependency during aerial attacks, submarine, and terrestrial war. One more thing to note here is that users cannot choose which GNSS system they can use. It all depends on thesmartphone hardwareandnavigation appsthat they are using. So, keep that in mind. Well that’s all from us, let us know your thoughts on the subject in the comments below.

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