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While Australians are happily touring around the length and breadth of this wide brown land with the aid of their trusty GPS – spare a thought for the Russians who are still to have a fully functional system
While Australians are happily touring around the length and breadth of this wide brown land with the aid of their trusty GPS – spare a thought for the Russians who are still to have a fully functional system.
This week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was shown a trial of the Global Navigation Satellite System by his deputy, Sergei Ivanov. Ivanov explained the wonders of Sat Nav to the minister by attaching a Sat Nav device to the PM’s black labrador, Koni. The trial was broadcast on Russian TV.
Ivanov explained that the equipment goes into a standby mode when “the dog doesn’t move; if it, say, lies down in a puddle”.
Putin interrupted him jokingly: “My dog isn’t a piglet, it doesn’t lie in puddles.”
The navigation system, which goes by the acronym GLONASS, was developed during the Soviet era as a response to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), but it has been slow to take shape amid the post-Soviet economic meltdown.
Ivanov predicted that GLONASS would be available worldwide by the end of next year, for which it would need to have 24 satellites.
Source:
SMH
