Thanks. I would still be curious to know how the strength of an artificial magnetic field at a range of say 10 km compares to the order of magnitude of local variations they are talking about in the earth’s magnetic field.
This looks like it might be in a similar vein to the navigation system discussed in a previous post about a new Royal navy test system. There are many good links in the comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222625
Neat. Geopositioning in general is a "hard problem" especially with additional variables/complexities that are introduced for specific use cases (military or not). There's tons of room for cutting edge research here still, and it's exciting to see companies invest in that.
Reading the article, it seems the real use case (unmentioned) is on ballistic missile nuclear subs.
You want them to be well below the surface of the water, where the GPS signal does not penetrate so well. Thus having a way for them to know precisely where they are without relying on GPS would be very helpful.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field
In any case it wouldn't be as portable and would make you rather easy to detect I would imagine, if you wanted to cover a large area.
/Jk
You want them to be well below the surface of the water, where the GPS signal does not penetrate so well. Thus having a way for them to know precisely where they are without relying on GPS would be very helpful.