Thread: Geotagging app
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Old November 6th 17, 08:07 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
Alan Browne
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Default Geotagging app

On 2017-11-06 11:48, nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:


| iphones have a gps, which can show altitude if it's tracking 4 or
more | gps satellites, just as any gps would. |

A quick look around seems to indicate that the GPS altitude used in
cellphones is not very accurate.


it can be very accurate, depending on how many gps satellites are
being tracked.

recent iphones also have a barometer, as do many other smartphones,
wearables and of course, dedicated gps devices (e.g, garmin), which
increases accuracy, particularly indoors.

however, nothing is perfect. my garmin dedicated gps in my car once
told me i was 200 feet below sea level, despite being on a bridge
over a river and with at least 8 sats being tracked. it was wrong. it
did have the correct road, though.


GPS elipsoid and the local geoid are not coincident all over. The
difference can be quite large and correction models are not all that
accurate.

The barometer is not very useful to determine altitude above sea level
unless set to a known reference point first. Otherwise it's pretty good
for relative changes over a short period.

Hmm, there's a thing Apple could do: have a function to ping Apple with
the position of the phone and receive the nearest QNH (or a triangle of
them to interpolate from). Then the baro altitude could be used to
determine an accurate altitude above sea level.