... it will be easier given the batteries don't last 55 days and anyway it will be in a metal plane hold which will screen the signal..... and it is just UTube, so only a few people will see it... and the budget for this is small....

Yeh, lets just pretend.

Nothing more to say...

On the website it says he developed a device with a bigger tracking log and more battery... It still does seem very unlikely though!

http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com/drawing.aspx

The reason the briefcase was so big is that it must have contained a lead-acid car battery in there.And it looks like an aluminium briefcase. An effective Faraday cage if ever I saw one.

P.S. GPS gets confused on Eurostar trains as well. It doesn't expect cars to be driving at 186 mph

For those doubting about the technology, surely it's not that difficult? Battery lifetime: given the resolution required surely it only needs to turn itself on and get a fix every 10 minutes or so. And if you're only logging that often I'm sure a 64+GB SSD would have plenty of room. Finally the briefcase could have a whole load of interleaved aerials and a socket on the outside to attach a larger one...or the instructions to the DHL drivers could have been to always carry it on the front seat. Works for my N95...as for being inside buildings, it only needs to catch some signal going in and going out and then assume it's still at the last known position till it gets another fix or some algorithm like that.

This of course assumes he used heavily customised kit and not an off-the-shelf product. I probably made several wrong assumptions above but it doesn't seem like it should be impossible. I'm pretty sure this bloke could do it pretty easily http://spritesmods.com/?art=main

Still at the end of the day the only way he could possibly have gotten those lovely patterns over the ocean is chartering his own planes at ridiculous cost.

Given that the firm I work for has sold GPS trackers that operate for months from batteries for asset location purposes, if it's in a suitcase full of batteries and with an external aerial feed (i.e. on the roof of the truck, or a window of a plane) then it's possible. Given the scales involved even if the signal is weak and the position is out by a couple of kilometers it'd still work.

That said, I prefer the conspiracy theories ;-)

Did you see the size of those things in that suitcase? It's certainly no stock battery.

I've already seen Uranus, or was it the full moon

The Reg is a Fake! We, and all of the stories here, are figments of the neurotic imagination of some obsessive nerd living in the attic of the family home.

I mean, really, look at the photos of the 'anniversary'. The shadows are all wrong and real humans couldn't possibly look like that and still be viable life forms.

We're all made up! Get over it!

I for one welcome our insane overlord and give thanks that she (yes 'she' so it's really our Overlady) created someone as beautiful and intelligent as me and allows me to imagine her alone and in 'all her glory' (winkwinkwinkwinkwink!).

I won't even get into the strange but wonderful things she makes me do (winkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwink!).

Doesn't prove a thing, but just happened to look at the metainfo of his instructions at http://animasher.s3.amazonaws.com/nordenankar/travel%20instructions.pdf .

Created on 6/5/08, six weeks or so AFTER he sent the thing off with DHL...

Looked pretty plastic to me, whiners.

And my GPS works from directly inside my car.

Who says it needs to be working on the actual flight, just on and off. You can see the image is made up of direct lines.

Loops made by visiting small islands?

Yes, it does seem far fetched, and its not "documented" (proven) that well really.

NMEA logs could be faked also.

who seriously cares if this is a fake or not?

Its hardly newsworthy, so what if he made it up? The article says its for advertising...

"Did you see the size of those things in that suitcase? It's certainly no stock battery."

Say they're 50amp-hour batteries (about half of a 90amphour leisure battery), that GPS has to draw no more than 38mA. It's not impossible, just not very likely.

And the route, again, not impossible but hightly unlikely, the flight path would not get permission, they've listed a bunch of coordinates, but that doesn't explain the loops, since planes follow flight paths they can't just decide to fly to go flying around without clearance for their flight plan.

It seems unlikely they went looping in Iraq for example:

N 34.9850° E 42.7697° & KIRKUK

Their insurers would not give them permission, a quick search shows their flights into Bagdad occasionally get shot at.

Then there's the signal problem, it isn't a case of weak signal = inaccurate. You just can't get a lock if you can't get multiple signals that can be distinguished from noise.

But that's all irrelevant. If you wanted to make that with a GPS device, stick it in the test rig at my old office (I worked on these) and simulate the path on a test rig.

What I reckon they did is hand the coordinates of DHL depots to the advertising agency and they drew a picture through those coordinates and a few others and invented a story to go with it. Make a few photo shoots, try to make a viral.

You all are going off of your experiences with little handheld GPS devices. To get a proper signal you need a powered antenna which is mostly larger than your entire handheld. I have seen some impressive GPS kit that worked in a basement of a large reinforced concrete building, thanks to multiple large high-sensitivity antennas. I've also spec'd some nice embedded GPS chips that will run on very little power, mostly thanks to the fact that GPS signals only update once a second, so they can sleep something like 99.9% of the time. As others have mentioned, 10 minute intervals would be plenty for the scale involved, and the equipment could drop to a low power (think .002 Watts) mode for a serious amount of time. And who says that it never got charged for the whole trip?

Still it does look like it's rather unlikely that they did much flying over the middle east and certain bits of Africa.

Plus, doesn't it seem like a colossal waste of time? Then again, in marketing terms, some GPS hardware and 55,000 miles or whatever of flight time is probably rather cheap. That's like 1/7th of a second of Super Bowl advert time.

At the bottom of that website is the line...

"This is fictional work. DHL did not transport the GPS at any time "