it informative. I had an interesting encounter this weekend with a friend of mine that says that GPS stands for "Global Positioning System". I argued that it stands for "Global Positioning Satellite". His counter was that in a car, you have a GPS, or at least that's what they're referred to as, and "you wouldn't have a satellite in your car." My counter-counter was that the American public is lazy and has shortened the actual term "GPS Receiver" to merely (pun intended... MIR!) GPS. Well, after doing some research (not on Wikipedia Mind You) I discovered that the two are used interchangeably.When I worked in the industry in the 90's, we were developing GPS systems, or more accurately, systems that used GPS... they used Global Positioning Satellites. However, the 21 Global Positioning
Satellites that orbit Earth are collectively called the Global Positioning System, because their collective data are used in a coordinated effort to determine the location of one GPS Receiver.When I looked at Garmin's website, they astonishingly referred to GPS as Global Positioning System, But then I found countless other reliable websites that refer to it as Global Positioning Satellite... so... I guess the jury is still out. (but I'm right).
Here's a List of Credible References that I used.
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