THE VIDEO SHELF · gps
How GPS Works, And How It Got Better Than The Designers Ever Imagined
Scott Manley covers how GPS works and how civilian accuracy went from a planned 100 meters to about one meter. He explains the technology and the removal of restrictions that made this possible.
Why HN readers recommended it
Recommended as a solid history and explanation of GPS, especially when GPS outages or accuracy come up.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Scott Manley
- Topic
- gps
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2023–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
The sibling response here covers all of the points I would say. Scott Manley has a nice video covering the history of GPS and how it works, well worth a watch [VIDEO] It's not as simple as you think.
rezonant on Hacker News · 2024-02
In Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon usersFor a video form of this topic, Scott Manley did a review of how GPS actually performed better than initially designed: [VIDEO]
franky47 on Hacker News · 2023-09
In Official U.S. government information about the Global Positioning System (GPS)Don't mean to be rude, but your deep dives could be deeper. I clicked on 'How GPS works' expecting to see a certain Scott Manley video [0] there. Instead, it's 10 shorts I'd put firmly at the 'like n subscribe' end of the scale. Think …
nancyminusone on Hacker News · 2025-06
In Show HN: I Built a Site That Curates Weird YouTube Rabbit Holes Daily
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.