Week 4 — The Global Positioning System

Presentation Slides

• Tuesday — The Global Positioning System — How GPS and GNSS positioning work; Trilateration: where is Air Force One?; Latitude and longitude, precision, and error; Converting from latitude/longitude to meters, and why it is not straightforward
• Tuesday — GPS extended slides: trilateration build, error budget, meters demo (reference)

Press F for fullscreen and P for presenter view with speaker notes.

In-Class Practice

• Tuesday — Find Air Force One, then Where Am I: trilaterate Prague on paper from three signal delays and upload a photo of your solution. Record your completion on Learning Suite. Activity guide

Hands-On Practice

Campus Field Trip

This session has its own step-by-step guide: what you need, an overview, the click-by-click QGIS walkthrough, what to hand in, and the snags that usually come up.

Open the Week 4 hands-on guide →

Self-check quizzes — not graded; open them on a phone or laptop as often as you like:

• How Does It Know Where You Are? — How a receiver turns a radio signal into a position, what the digits of a coordinate are worth, and where GPS error comes from.

Lab Assignment

Lab 3 — GPS Data Collection and Importing Into QGIS

Due Saturday at 11:59 pm on Learning Suite.

Reading Quiz

This week's reading: GIS Fundamentals, Chapter 5 (GNSS and Coordinate Surveying).

Quiz 3 — GPS, Part 1 on Learning Suite: open book. Due Saturday at 11:59 pm. See Reading Quizzes.

Note

If you see a discrepancy between Learning Suite and this page, please let us know so we can rectify it.

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Version 2026.10.1 · Last updated October 15, 2026