Jeff Sanders asked:




WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) was developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the Global Positioning System to improve its accuracy, integrity, and availability. WAAS was originally intended to enable aircraft to rely on GPS for all phases of flight, including the precision approach to airport’s within its coverage area. The WAAS system typically provides better than 1.0 meters laterally and 1.5 meters vertically throughout most of the contiguous United States and large parts of Canada and Alaska. This accuracy is capable of provideing aircraft with the precision needed for safe approaches and inflight navigation for all weather conditions. Integrity of the WAAS information is no more than 3 seconds of bad data per year allowing the system to be considerd safe by the FAA for instrument flight rules.

Although orignally developed for aviation, WAAS is not just limited to the aviation industry, any GPS receiver that is capable of receiving the WAAS signal will be able to benefit from it’s correction data, making the GPS positioning more accurate. In fact a WAAS-enabled GPS receiver can even give you directions right down to the lane your car is traveling in (as long as the maping program supports “lane assist” directions). Because the Wide Area Augmentation System is quickly becoming standard in the GPS industry, most new GPS receivers today are WAAS-enabled. Just like with the conventinal GPS, the WAAS system doesn’t come with any extra cost or fees to use. All that is required is that the GPS receiver be WAAS-enabled so it can receive and decode the data then be able to apply corrections to it’s position. Currently the WAAS service is limited to the U.S.A., Canada, Alaska and Hawaii. Although independant from WAAS, Europe and Asia are working on their own supplemental GPS correction systems. Europe has the

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