Originally Posted by
jimjim1
....
There's no need to be demeaning here....
I was just thinking in the way the old LORAN-C system worked when determining a position, cause technically you don't need to know the time to find your position.... you just need the signals from the stations with the same timestamp, and by knowing the exact position of the stations, and the timeintervals between receiving the signals, you can determine where you are. (which by the way requires 3 stations in a 2D environment, hence 4 satellites are required in a 3D environment).
That system makes sense for GNSS as well, then you can always calculate accurate time afterwards, if you even want to calculate it or just accept whatever time comes from the satellites (accurate enough for most of the stuff we do anyway) since by knowing your position, you'll automatically know the distance, and the from there calculate the time it has taken for a signal to get here. Ans as sasid earlier, it will ofcourse require all
satellites to be syncronised time-wise, otherwise we'll get Galileo all over again.