Japan launches sovereign satellite navigation network as GPS cannot reach all of its country

• QZSS was designed specifically around Japan's difficult positioning environment and geography
• The seven-satellite constellation brings Japan closer to continuous domestic navigation coverage
• QZS-7 successfully reached orbit after QZS-5 was lost during launch

Mountainous terrain and densely packed city blocks across Japan can obstruct ordinary satellite positioning signals from reaching receivers on the ground.

Standard Global Positioning System coverage was never built with those obstacles in mind, leaving gaps in accuracy across parts of the country.

Japan has spent more than a decade building its own answer to that gap, and this week that effort reached a new milestone.

Why Japan built its own system

Japanese authorities developed the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, a constellation designed to guarantee near-constant coverage and sharper location accuracy across the archipelago.

Japan's Cabinet Office states that the system complements GPS by ensuring a navigation satellite remains almost always somewhere above the country.

Japan's islands span...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to techradar.com. To see the full text click HERE