Originally Posted by
ksryder
THREAD DRIFT ALERT: When I was first in the army in the late 90s early 00s the explanation for the greater accuracy of the military over the civilian devices was that they didn't want people to be able to make cheap guided missiles with super accurate GPS devices they could buy on the market.
Of course it was just a fellow soldier telling me this so that may very well have been army urban legend. (Like stress cards and the bullet on top of the flag pole.)
If true, evidently something changed in the early 00s because the civilian stuff suddenly became super accurate -- and much more reliable.
The stuff we had when I was deployed in the middle east was accurate enough, but SUPER SLOW and GIGANTIC. It was easier to buy handheld Garmins and have them shipped to us, sometimes, than use the various handheld and vehicle-mounted GPS units the military officially provided.
(Side note: we had delays getting repair parts for our HUMVEEs because GM found it more profitable, at the time, to manufacture parts for the civilian Hummers.)
So back to the OP: Yeah, sure, your phone is plenty accurate enough for every day purposes.
There was a time when GPS signals were basically scrambled a bit to reduce their accuracy. If you had the right codes you could 'unscramble them' and get back to the original accuracy. That was undone in the year 2000. See
Military Unscrambles GPS Signals | Science | AAAS ).
There was a (relatively recently) time when civilian GPS used a single GPS signal, while the military used two. That might have changed - don't know.
dave