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How GPS Works, And How It Got Better Than The Designers Ever Imagined

Scott Manley · 943.4K views · 2023-08-31 · 27:20

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Overview

Scott Manley covers how GPS works and how civilian accuracy went from a planned 100 meters to about one meter. He explains the technology and the removal of restrictions that made this possible.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a solid history and explanation of GPS, especially when GPS outages or accuracy come up.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2023–2025

Topics

Space exploration & spaceflightConsumer devices & gadgets
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gpsnavigationsatellitesselective availabilityscott manley

What people said

rezonant · 2024-02 · Strong recommendation

The sibling response here covers all of the points I would say. Scott Manley has a nice video covering the history of GPS and how it works, well worth a watch [VIDEO] It's not as simple as you think.

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nancyminusone · 2025-06 · Recommendation

Don't mean to be rude, but your deep dives could be deeper. I clicked on 'How GPS works' expecting to see a certain Scott Manley video [0] there. Instead, it's 10 shorts I'd put firmly at the 'like n subscribe' end of the scale. Think I'll stick to my own curated list of creators for now. [0] [VIDEO]

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franky47 · 2023-09 · Recommendation

For a video form of this topic, Scott Manley did a review of how GPS actually performed better than initially designed: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Scott Manley, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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