He has taught Remote Sensing Laboratories, as well as under- graduate courses in Geomorphology and Coastal Environments at the Uni- versity of Maryland, and is currently adjunct Professo[r]
(1)(2)(3)(4)Copyright ©1996, Gregory T French All rights reserved No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, or by any means,
without the permission of the publisher Exceptions are made for brief excerpts to be used in published reviews
Published by GeoResearch, Inc
8120 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 300 Bethesda, MD 20814
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 9680018 ISBN: 0-9655723-O-7
Printed in the United States of America
This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases Supplemental materials for instructors and trainers are available
in various media
(5)Preface
There is an ever-growing supply of information about the Global Positioning System Unfortunately, these new (and now, some not so new) documents seem to be located at each end of the comprehension scale: either at the “gee-whiz” level which basically describes how inter-esting and useful this new utility is, or at the engineer’s level which starts out with Keplerian orbits and Hopfield Modeling What seems to be missing is a comprehensive, yet easy to understand, presentation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) for people who may have a very real need to apply this new technology but lack the basic understanding necessary to make important, and often expensive, decisions about it Thus this book
This book is designed to support an introductory course on the fundamentals of the Global Positioning System based on a series of graphic representations and distilled concept-bullets Math is scrupu-lously avoided-that level of information is readily available through numerous highly technical publications and is no more necessary for most users than is a textbook on electronics necessary for the purchaser of a television set
(6)(7)About the Author
Gregory T French is a Senior GPS/GIS Project Manager at
GeoResearch, Inc., a company specializing in integrated GPS / GIS appli-cations and field data collection He holds Bachelor of Science and Mas-ter’s degrees in Physical Geography with minors in Geology and Computer Applications in Geography from the University of Maryland He received his basic GPS training from Ashtech, Inc., in 1992, and advanced Master GPS training from Corv/a//is Microtechnology, Inc (CMT), where, in 1996, he re-ceived his GPS Instructor’s certification
Mr French has a long and varied background in earth sciences tech-nology He has served the EPA’s Environmental Photographic Interpreta-tion Center (EPIC) as a remote sensing imagery analyst and as Chief of Remote Sensing Imagery Research and Acquisition As a research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Laboratory for Coastal Research, he was deeply involved in research in state-of-the art digital shoreline mapping technology He has taught Remote Sensing Laboratories, as well as under-graduate courses in Geomorphology and Coastal Environments at the Uni-versity of Maryland, and is currently adjunct Professor of General Sciences at University College, University of Maryland, where he instructs courses in Global Environmental Change and Oceanography
He has authored over two dozen technical reports on environmental, earth science, and GPS topics for Federal and State agencies as well as for open publication, and continues to explore the ever-expanding horizons of GPS applications in modern geography