Uses of the GPS

Living in St.Louis, I never had a need for a drivers license because there is a lot of public transportation. Coming to Oxford had its ways of making me see the true importance of having a driver license though. I was 20 years old when I finally got a drivers license. Once you’re on your own there’s no going back to public transportation. You will no longer have the patience to stand wait for the bus, the train, or even someone picking you up. With the responsibility of having a driver’s license comes a new found sense of direction. You also are no longer counting on the bus driver to know where to go. Riding the bus, all a person needs to know is the direction in which you wish to go… east bound, west bound, north, or south. During my first trip back to St.Louis after getting my drivers license, I was going to go to my aunt’s shop to get my hair done. Her shop was a place I had been to many times before, but I had never driven myself there before. A simple switch of highways across town almost became a road trip to Kansas. This incident made me realize I had absolutely no sense of direction. My fiancé and I went out to Sam’s Club and purchased a GPS.

A GPS is a Global Positioning System that uses a network of 24 satellites placed in orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. The GPS system was originally only used for military applications and in the 1980’s the government made the satellites accessible to civilians, regular people like you and I. These satellites can be used in any part of the world and as long as you have an address it can get you wherever you need to be so that even people with no sense of direction can be independent drivers.

The GPS system is simple to work. Once the GPS is charged, it will find your current location so that it knows where you are. Next you should proceed to put in where you would like to go. If you know the address, click the address icon on the pad. It will ask for the state that you wish to go, then the city, street address. Click done and the GPS will calculate the amount of miles you will travel and the time that you should arrive at your destination. If you are looking for a place like a restaurant, you can go to destinations and type in the name of the restaurant and again it will give you turn by turn directions.

The problem with the GPS as with other forms of technology is that some of the software can become out dated but upgrades are available. Updated software is important because countries and cities are always improving their road ways and building things which means locations may move. The older models don’t always pick up things like new highways if the software isn’t updated regularly. For instance, my fiancé and I were going to the mall in St.Louis but the city was doing road work on the main highway to the mall. The side of th

e road that gets you to the mall wasn’t getting worked on yet so getting there was no problem. Getting back home wasn’t so easy though because we couldn’t go back the way we came. We went another direction hoping that the GPS would reroute its self. The GPS didn’t pick up the newer highway nearby because it software hadn’t been updated. For the first 25 minutes of the drive, the GPS kept trying to turn us around to get on the highway that was blocked off due to construction, but eventually it did reroute us. By that time, I had found some familiar land marks and could direct us myself though.

Finding your way around unknown territory is not the only way that the GPS systems are being used. Today they put GPS systems in cars in case they are stolen and the GPS can be used to find vehicles and track your children so that you always know where they are. People even use GPS systems to help them navigate when they are camping. The GPS system is a technological advancement that is continuing to improve how people move about the world. GPS systems have changed the way people travel permanently. The uses for GPS will continue to grow as the world continues to explore and look for new inventive ways to advance travel technology.