Building a GPS receiver
Hi everyone! Shortly after publishing my iOS 4 jailbreak last October[1], I got to work on my next hobby project: a from-scratch homebrew GPS receiver, which can solve the user’s location solely from billions of radio antenna samples. I took a commodity SDR (alongside the Python standard library and numpy) and built a signal processing pipeline that can detect and track GPS satellites over many minutes, drop and pick up satellites as they come in and out of view, and precisely determine the user’s position and clock inaccuracy. All told, gypsum can go from a cold start to a fix on the user’s…
Building a GPS receiver launched on April 15, 2024 with 552 votes, #36 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Building a GPS receiver is a hobbyist signal processing project that creates a functioning GPS receiver from scratch using a commodity software-defined radio (SDR), Python, and numpy. It processes raw radio antenna samples to detect and track GPS satellites, determining precise user location and time in under a minute from a cold start. Designed for developers and enthusiasts interested in signal processing and GPS technology, the project stands out for demonstrating how to build satellite navigation entirely from basic components and standard libraries.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Have you ever noticed that your Maps app still works during a flight? It can feel illicit, like someone just forgot to turn off the signal, and that watching yourself crawl along the earth should be done without drawing undue attention. A few months ago I learned that there were only around 30 GPS satellites serving the entire planet. This piqued my interest, because it reminded me of the 13 root
In this 4-part series I build gypsum , a from-scratch GPS receiver. Have you ever noticed that your Maps app still works during a flight? It can feel illicit, like someone just forgot to turn off the signal, and that watching yourself crawl along the earth should be done without drawing undue attention. A few months ago I learned that there were only around 30 GPS satellites serving the entire planet. This piqued my interest, because it reminded me of the 13 root DNS servers from which all resolution flows. Perhaps GPS has a similar design in which the ‘source of truth’ is diluted by several layers of signal repeaters? I navigated to gps.gov , and was presented with this…from axleos.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi everyone! Shortly after publishing my iOS 4 jailbreak last October[1], I got to work on my next hobby project: a from-scratch homebrew GPS receiver, which can solve the user’s location solely from billions of radio antenna samples. I took a commodity SDR (alongside the Python standard library and numpy) and built…
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