It's hard to imagine in this paranoiac age of electronic eavesdropping, data mining and myriad digital spying schemes by nefarious civilians, corporations and Big Brother government, but at one time the military actively fought against implementing arguably the most important spy tech of all time — GPS.

Not only did the military finally agree to build the GPS system, but "Tear down this wall!" President Ronald Reagan directed the Department of Defense to declassify it as well as actively aid and abet commercial GPS development.

As a result of the government's GPS openness, this weekend we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first consumer handheld GPS device. On May 25, 1989, the first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. The 8.75 x 3.5 x 2.25-inch, 1.5-pound waterproof and floatable handheld looked like a large calculator with a rotating antenna arm attached. It featured a multi-line LCD display, ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000. [Author's note: the current owners of Magellan, MiTAC International, are unsure of the exact on-sale date of the NAV 1000, so have made their best guess to celebrate the anniversary.]

In between, two massive and tragic air disasters — the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 by the Russians on September 1, 1983, and the Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986 — alternately sped up then delayed consumer GPS development.

GPS origins

Dr. Ivan Getting, vice president of research at Raytheon, first promoted the idea of using a system of satellites to track any moving object in 1960, following the U.S.S.R.'s October 4, 1957, launch of Sputnik. By the early 1970s, several competing GPS ideas emerged, and the battling projects caused military paralysis until a serendipitous four-hour weekend meeting in November 1972 between the third in command at the Defense Department, Dr. Malcolm R. Currie, and Dr. Bradford Parkinson, an enthusiastic 37-year-old Air Force colonel and MIT and Stanford graduate.

After a DoD review council voted to end the project in August 1973, Currie convinced Parkinson to reconstitute GPS as a joint services project.

Over the following Labor Day weekend, Parkinson sequestered himself in the Pentagon with a dozen engineers from the military and several universities. By Monday morning, September 3, the group had produced a seven-page paper describing what would eventually become the GPS system.

Parkinson spent the next three months convincing the powers-that-be. Finally, the same defense review council that had turned Parkinson down four months earlier gave him the go-ahead.

This artist drawing provided by Lockheed Martin shows a Block III GPS satellite orbiting the Earth. Image: Lockheed Martin/Associated Press

After five years and several additional attempts to kill the project, Parkinson's persistence paid off. On February 22, 1978, the first NAVSTAR Block I GPS satellite was successfully launched. Within eight years, there were six working GPS birds hurtling around our blue marble of a planet.

But the only people who could take advantage of this new satellite navigation system were the military and, later, commercial shippers and rich folks with yachts who could afford a laptop-sized 12-volt receiver.

Founder Tuck and his merry GPS band

Also hurtling above our big blue marble in the early 1980s was a telecommunications engineer, serial entrepreneur and avid aviator named Ed Tuck. Tuck, who ran a small venture capital firm, would fly up and down the California coast frustrated by having to navigate to small, hard-to-find airports without towers.

In early 1986, Tuck founded another venture capital firm called the Boundary Fund in West Covina, California. Tuck was aware of the new GPS system and its potential; two weeks after the Soviets shot down KAL007, President Reagan had issued a directive to declassify GPS and encourage its commercial development in the hopes of averting a similar aviation disaster in the future.

What Tuck wanted was a mobile GPS device that could tell him where he was while he was flying. While on the lookout for help to create his dream navigation device, Tuck was introduced to a pair of guys: hardware specialist Don Rea and software expert Norm Hunt, who ran Omicron Labs, a small Santa Ana, California, electronic navigation engineering consulting firm. A year earlier, on the evening of March 1, 1985, the pair had successfully tracked five of the six working GPS satellites for six hours, making Rea and Hunt relative experts in the new system.

Tuck described a GPS unit anyone could carry — it had to be small (optimally the size of a pack of cigarettes), it had to be reasonably lightweight, it had to run on batteries for several days, and it had to be affordable, around $300.

"We told him he was completely nutty," remembers Rea. "What he wanted was way too far from what we thought would be possible." Especially since Rea and Hunt's initial tracking success came from "a whole bench filled with stuff."

But Tuck had seen and heard enough from Rea and Hunt. On April 8, 1986, Omicron and Boundary Fund signed a deal to create a handheld GPS navigation device. Tuck named the new venture Magellan, after the Portuguese circumnavigator.

Tragically, Hunt died of a heart attack in October 1986 while driving with his partner. So Tuck brought in Valerie Wong, who was actually the first official Magellan employee, to write the software, along with Larry Weill to handle the signal processing architecture, algorithms, simulations and all the mathematics chores, and Sab Ifune to work on the RF (radio frequency) tech.

Gallium arsenide to the rescue

The problem with Tuck's battery-powered GPS vision was the power-hungry radio receiver chip, which had to receive high-frequency 1.5GHz L-band signals from the GPS satellites, then digitally decode them. In these early microprocessor days, chips were hot and power hungry and relied on steady AC power.

But in 1985, chipmakers started fabricating chips from a new material, gallium arsenide (GaAs). Initially developed because of its potential to create more powerful solar cells, GaAs moved electrons up to six times faster than silicon and operated at much higher temperatures so needed less cooling and less power to operate — perfect for a battery-powered device.

"We knew from what we were reading that we had to have [a GaAs chip]," says Rea. "That was a given."

This "breadboard" was used to test circuitry and components at Magellan while developing the first civilian GPS receiver. Image: National Museum of American History

But gallium arsenide was also rare and, therefore, more expensive than silicon, and GaAs chips had only just started to appear in the market in mid-1984. Finding a GaAs chipmaker who would work with a startup wasn't proving to be easy.

But another problem literally exploded for the nascent GPS industry.

After the initial Block I GPS satellites were launched, the plan was to place the Block IIs in orbit using the space shuttle. But after the Challenger disaster, America's space program came to a smoke- and tear-filled halt. It would be three years before the first Block II GPS satellite would be launched — on a Delta II rocket.

The paucity of GPS satellites also made GPS readings a bit tricky and, therefore, a less commercially viable product. After Challenger, there were only six working GPS satellites, and you needed at least three, four optimally, to get an accurate location fix. Bunched up like a swarm, the necessary satellite confluence happened only twice a day for a couple of hours — fine for boaters, not much for lost landlubbers.

Given the lack of GPS satellite expansion, it was no surprise that no other companies pursued a consumer GPS product. Why would a chipmaker invest in what looked like a stalled market with an unproven startup?

Then, in early 1988, Tuck and company encountered Gary Barta, who convinced his employer, a startup chipmaker in Beaverton, Oregon, TriQuint Semiconductor, to work with Tuck and his small crew to develop a GaAs ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit).

n 1986 Magellan engineers began experimenting with electronic mockups. This is the earliest power supply unit. Image: National Museum of American History

Tuck's team, now including Sharon Jones, Janice Blankenhorn, John Foukos, Dennis Rich, Jon Vavrus and James Yuan, worked furiously on integrating Barta's GaAs ASIC with all the other NAV 1000 breadboard parts, including an Intel 8086 processor, memory chips and a 6000-gate digital ASIC developed with VLSI Logic that Rea dubbed SAC — Swiss Army Knife — for all the digital logic chores it handled. Wong's operating software had to turn the incoming signal data into usable bearing and heading coordinates, and they had to find a company to develop a small, inexpensive antenna. At the time, GPS antennas cost $500; the Magellan crew found a firm that would build one for just $75. Eventually, they would develop one that cost just 50 cents.

Tuck continued to run the new company, but his other ventures distracted him. So in early 1988, Tuck hired Randy Hoffman to be Magellan's "real" day-to-day CEO. Hoffman then hired Rick Sill to handle the upcoming NAV 1000 marketing and selling chores.

Selling GPS

Hoffman and Sill were told the first prototypes would be ready to demo at the September 1988 IMTEC (International Marine Trades Exhibit & Conference) in Chicago. Sill issued a press release on the first day of the show announcing the NAV 1000 to generate interest. As a result, "our booth was mobbed when the show opened," Sill notes, "with people standing three deep to catch a glimpse of this new box that could identify their location anywhere in the world."

There was just one problem: the NAV 1000 didn't work.

"When we finally got everything shrunk down so it would fit in the handheld case, we ran into serious, almost unsolvable, sensitivity issues due to self-jamming," Rea explained. "Management and sales were, of course, totally frustrated while all this was going on, not wanting to hear that we had absolutely no idea how long fixing this was going to take."

In Chicago, Sill faked it as best he could. "We were lucky in that the GPS coverage window in Chicago that September was something like 2:30-4:30 a.m., so we could not have demonstrated easily even if it had been working," Sill recalls. "But eyebrows were raised nevertheless as people began to doubt our claim."

October, November and December passed with no solution. But Barta, convinced Magellan was on to something, left TriQuint and came to work for the company full-time, and managed to solve the vexing jamming problem.

Finally, in early January 1989, the Magellan crew were successful in getting the unit to calculate position fixes. Sill caught a flight to Norway for the Oslo Boat show. "When the [satellite] window was right, we walked folks to the roof of the convention center and, lo and behold, demonstrated that the Magellan unit worked."

Once European distributors were convinced of Magellan's and the NAV 1000's viability, it was back to the now skeptical U.S. marine market. A month later at the Miami Boat Show, the only GPS reception window was around the 1:30-3:30 a.m.

Sill invited boating magazine editors for beers at the Miami Howard Johnson Hotel for a middle-of-the-night demo. To Sill's surprise, two showed up — Freeman Pittman of Sail and Dan Fales of Motor Boating and Sailing.

"After swilling a few pints we headed out to the causeway and fired up the unit," Sill reports. "Roughly two minutes after pushing the Fix button, our latitude/longitude was displayed and huge smiles appeared on the faces of the editors."

The following day, word spread throughout the show that Magellan and the NAV 1000 was for real. For the next four months, the Magellan crew worked furiously to build units.

On that sunny May 25 afternoon, a UPS truck pulled up to Magellan's Monrovia, California, office. "When that UPS truck drove up to our building, every Magellan employee escorted boxes out the door and hand delivered them to the driver with fists pumped high in jubilation," Sill smiles.

Those first 20 or so NAV 1000s handed over to the anonymous UPS driver for delivery to retailers netted the young company around $40,000, and initiated our location-based age. (See an early review of the NAV 1000 here.)

A war-fueled GPS revolution

While Magellan sold 500 NAV 1000s in the first year — a modest success for a new company in a new industry — GPS still remained a mystery to most mainstream consumers. War would serve as the launch vehicle to bring GPS to Mr. and Mrs. America.

Just as Barta was solving the NAV 1000's jamming problem in February, the first Block II GPS satellite was launched after a seemingly interminable three-year interregnum. On August 2, 1990, the ninth Block II satellite made it into orbit — the same day Iraq invaded Kuwait and ignited the first Gulf War. By the time the first President Bush invaded Kuwait and then Iraq in early 1991, there were 16 working GPS satellites circling overhead, providing coverage 19 hours a day.

The military immediately — finally — realized the spying benefits of GPS. Coalition forces bought 4,000 commercial units from industrial GPS supplier Trimble, and more than 1,000 special military-modified NAV 1000s. Individual soldiers, unable to procure a unit through official channels, bought a NAV 1000 on their own.

While GPS proved invaluable to the coalition forces, it could prove equally valuable for the enemy. So the government introduced "selective availability" (SA) — errors added to reduce accuracy in civilian GPS receivers.

But even with SA, the technology's success on the battlefield made GPS the must-have gadget for drivers, hikers and boaters. After the success of the NAV 1000 and the publicity generated by the Gulf War, the GPS floodgates opened. A variety of GPS devices from other companies such as Garmin (1989), TomTom (1991) and Mio (2002), hit the market using maps and navigation software from a variety of suppliers such as Navteq (1987), Navigon (1991), SiRF (1995) and TeleNav (1999).

President Clinton turned off SA on May 1, 2000, which improved consumer device accuracy to 15 meters, coincidentally around the same time the first handheld units with included city street maps became available, such as the first full-color GPS handheld, the Magellan Meridian Color Handheld GPS Navigator, in 2002.

In 2004, Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) improved overall accuracy to within three meters. While originally intended to improve aviation accuracy, WAAS enabled precise car navigation turn-by-turn directions == a boon for sales of handheld and both factory-installed and third-party car navigation systems. On September 18, 2007, the feds disabled SA permanently, just around the time smartphones started including GPS capabilities and mapping apps.

A Pebble smartwatch displays GPS data.

Now that the world's political powers recognize GPS's more surreptitious qualities, the U.S. NAVSTAR system has acquired competitors. The Chinese started building its BeiDou Satellite Navigation System (BDS) in 2000, with plans to expand to global coverage in 2020. And of course the Russians launched their own GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS), which reached full deployment in October 2011, just as the first satellites for the 30-satellite Galileo system, developed by the European Union and the European Space Agency, were launched. Galileo is scheduled to be completed in 2019.

Today, when you count smartphones, dedicated portable units, court-ordered ankle bracelets, pet collar tags, find-your-keys or smartphone fobs and other location-specific gadgets — and, of course, military drones and other spy gear — commercial GPS is arguably found in more devices than any other wireless technology. Not bad for a technology that didn't even work when it was first announced.