Global Positioning System’s Signals Are In Play

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: GPS is invading recreational sports. Under clear skies, those signals beaming to earth from satellites can find you on a hilly running trail, in a kayak on the ocean, or on a green fairway where you’re trying to fade a 230-yard drive into the wind.

In the four years since the Defense Department loosened its grip on the Global Positioning System, the technology has migrated from military missiles and luxury cars to the wristbands and back pockets of people who normally revel in getting away from it all.

For many athletes and outdoor adventurers, those space signals are taking the place of the speedometer, the compass, the map, and all manner of guesswork.

Last year, 5 million recreational GPS devices were shipped by manufacturers to retail stores, up from 3.2 million in 2002, said Alan A. Varghese, senior director of semiconductor research at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y. Shipments are pegged to grow at about 31 percent a year until 2009, he said.

“Always knowing where you are is a fundamentally exciting idea,” said D. Noah Eckhouse, an entrepreneur who has been working with GPS since 1992, when he was in an MIT research lab and helping sailor Bill Koch outfit his team’s boat with satellite technology that helped them win the America’s Cup.

Back then, Eckhouse recalls, GPS hand-held devices were rare and cumbersome gadgets, bigger than bricks, that cost about $2,000. A government military report on the technology in the 1980s predicted worldwide demand for no more than 25,000 GPS units.

“They really never thought of where it could go,” Eckhouse said. “But it was pretty clear to us that it was going to go into a lot of things.”

He and three partners were among the first to see the profit potential in a tracking system that has since made its way into popular culture, such as the best-selling book “The Da Vinci Code,” and into cellphones so parents can mind their kids. They founded Player Systems Corp. in 1994, a maker of GPS devices for golf carts. They directed their early efforts at resorts, where golfers routinely pay hefty fees for a round and thus could easily soak up the cost of the new equipment in the cart.