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India’s home-grown GPS alternative: ‘NavIC’: What you need to know!

India is pressuring tech firms to make cellphones compatible with its in-house navigation system within months, according to a report from the news agency Reuters on Monday, September 26. The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), also known as Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), is compared favourably to the European-developed Galileo and the US-based GPS.

According to ISRO Chairman K Sivan, the NavIC constellation will make history by bringing cutting-edge ocean-based applications to the whole population, particularly for the underprivileged and unserved. IRNSS-1I will assist in precisely detecting location and time through signals in a space spanning India by employing receivers on the ground.

NavIC, a feature of the handheld GPSMAP 66sr and GPSMAP 65s from Garmin, was created to offer customers in India and an area up to 1500 km from its border reliable location information services. The services connected to IRNSS include Standard Positioning Service (SPS) and Restricted Service (RS), which are offered to all users and authorised users, respectively.

The independent regional navigation satellite system created by India has been labelled ‘NavIC’ by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. NavIC provides services such as terrestrial and marine navigation, disaster management, vehicle tracking and fleet management, a navigation aid for hikers and travellers, and visual and voice navigation for drivers.

NavIC was approved in 2006 and started construction in 2017 at a cost of $174 million. It was operational in 2018. NavIC, which consists of eight satellites, is now utilised in India for public vehicle surveillance as well as for emergency warning messages to fishermen travelling into the deep sea where there is no terrestrial network access.

According to India’s draught satellite navigation strategy for 2021, the government would strive on ‘increasing the coverage from regional to global’ in order to guarantee the availability of the NavIC signal wherever in the world. NavIC is designed especially for ‘strategic sectors’ in order to reduce reliance on foreign satellite systems for navigation service requirements.

 

 

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