Cell tower on the Faroe Islands

Apparently Swedish news papers have dubbed the LTE technology developed by among others Ericsson to “Super 3G” and are waiting to call it 4G.

I have heard rumours that Ericsson internally are very careful not using the term 4G on LTE but waiting for LTE-Advanced with even higher bitrates to see if it is deserving the designation.

Super 3G gives the impression that it evolves from Turbo-3G which is not really the case, this is a new radio system and although some things such as MIMO actually was specified in HSPA it still was not in widespread use as it will probably become in LTE.

LTE can deliver a gross maximum bitrate in the downlink pushing 300 Mbit/s and LTE-Advanced is said to be pushing towards the 1 Gbit/s which would be really getting mobile broadband to take off.

For me the major hurdle is the uplink however which in all systems, today as well as LTE systems are considerably lower in bitrate than the uplink. This limits the use for mobile applications that transmits lots of data (video cameras) and the industry is looking for cheap way of communicating with cameras in vehicles such as taxis, buses and trains and even with a good coverage for LTE it will not be enough.

This is going to be a rather lengthy post again but bear with me. It will also be a bit technical so I will have to explain some of the basic technical points before we start on the really nifty things here. But in the end you will learn how to use your GPS receiver to track your movments when shooting outdoor, you will learn how to download this information and use it to geocode your pictures so that when they are uploaded on sites such as Flickr your photographs will automatically appear on the map in the correct location.

The resons for geotagging

It is a way of organising your photographs that is pretty new actually. Never before has it been so easy to know where a certain photograph was taken and it is a great way of finding other people’s photographs from a certain location.

My good friend Torbjörn hacking in the tent

It also means that if you use your GPSr when you are on holiday you know exactly on which spot you were when you took that picture and it is a great way of sharing information about good photographic spots, not to mention that it sort of becomes a photographic diary, tracking your movements around with your camera and GPSr.

There many be also personal reasons for geotagging, for me it started because I am a map freak. I love maps in all sorts of ways and I spend half a fortune on them. These days I mostly use electronic maps because they are more versatile but when I go hiking I always have a paper map as a backup – you never know when electronic will fail you.

There are two kinds of photographers, those who has experienced equipment failure and those who will.

This is very true.
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