The U.S. Army is working on getting some new ordinance:
The Army is fast tracking a GPS guided 120mm mortar round to Afghanistan in response to an urgent request for precision mortar fire from commanders on the ground there, and should be fielded by the end of the year. Called the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI), it improves upon the current round’s 136-meter Circular Error Probable (CEP) reducing it to about 10-meters.
Reading the comments to this article you will find out that 10 meters is the maximum. They are hoping to get about 5 meters.
Just a few minutes before reading this I had pointed out to Barb how accurate the location information given by my Windows Phone 7 Series is. Not only did it put the little diamond for the location of the phone on the correct house–it put it in the correct corner of our house.
Don’t buy a mobile phone unless you can remove the battery.
Update: I forgot to include the link to the article. That has been fixed.
So they’re going to strap one of your phones to the mortar?
That might actually work but that isn’t what I was thinking about.
Your mobile phone reports its position to the network. That location information can be used to drop a mortar on your position.
Hmmm… Who makes a phone with a battery you can’t remove?
Apple and… I can’t think of anyone else.
Hmmm… I wonder who works for a company that has Apple as one of the chief competitors?
It irritates me now that I can’t easily swap out my iPhone battery. As the performance continues to degrade, it’s going to annoy me more… Quite asside from the security issue of someone using my own phone to monitor/bug/TARGET me.
Joe,
Where is the article?
I sem to recall that the Brits have had a precision 120mm mortar round for quite a while now.
Bill W.,
Sorry about that. It’s fixed now.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I have shielding envelopes and cases. Works just as well.
Chris,
The phone can still listen in on conversations and report back when it gets a data connection.
So… how are you going to use the phone without the battery?
Secondly, couldn’t the phone companies defeat this by connecting the gps feature directly to the battery instead of having it integrated into the phone? Maybe two gps features? One in the phone and something internal to the battery? Could a mini-battery be developed that charges off the main battery and never allows the gps portion of the phone to be disconnected?
Just brainstorming here… I don’t know enough about cellular phones to know how they are made. All I know is it seems anything is possible anymore, even cloning animals.
Phone company doesn’t care where you are as long as they don’t have to send information to you. When the phone is on, it has to tell the phone company where it is to be able to receive calls etc. Why should they make the effort to know where it is when the battery is dead/fled? Recall that the phone companies kicked and screamed over the E911 requirements.