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Re:Magnetometers based on diamonds will make navigation easier by contravariant on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @08:11PM (#23992975)
Field strength pretty quickly drops of over distance, and even the most powerful magnets don't go much beyond 100T (and even that's a stretch). Assuming you could somehow achieve 100T 1m away from the magnet (which is charitable, usually the high teslas are only achieved at the exact centre) then just a kilometre away it will have dropped to 1 microtesla, well below the 25~65 microtesla of the Earths gravitational field.

So you'd need those kinds of magnets on a kilometre spaced grid, which doesn't seem realistic. And that's with some rather charitable assumptions about building a strong magnet, to be honest I expect you'd have difficulty turning a few compasses in the same building, let alone miles away.

Re:Magnetometers based on diamonds will make navigation easier by chockablock on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @08:31PM (#23993093)
The AFRL press release linked in another comment says that this technique relies on measurement of the crustal magnetic field, which is in the 10s of nanoteslas range.