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ERIC Number: EJ1337198
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Mar
Pages: 4
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0031-9120
EISSN: N/A
How to Make a Multi-Billion Dollar Thermometer
Baird, William H.
Physics Education, v57 n2 Article 025003 Mar 2022
The United States' Global Positioning System (GPS), and similar geolocation systems such as Galileo, GLONASS, and Beidou are used by people all over the globe. Modern receivers of these global navigation satellite systems can track multiple satellites from different constellations. Casual, non-technical users are probably aware that the positional information provided is typically accurate to within a few meters. We could expect physics students to infer that, because these systems rely on the travel time of radio signals, this implies time measurement accuracy on the scale of tens of nanoseconds. This feature has led to GPS-enabled Internet time servers providing stratum 1 accuracy for under $1000. In this paper, we will show that we can couple a GPS unit to a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to determine the temperature in a room. The more serious application of this GPS-FPGA pairing is to provide precise time-stamping of events, thereby synchronizing data collection between stations across a room or across the globe.
IOP Publishing. 190 North Independence Mall West Suite 601, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 215-627-0880; Fax: 215-627-0879; e-mail: ped@ioppublishing.org; Web site: https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0031-9120
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A