Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
One of my fond memories as a boy growing up in rural northeastern Oregon is sitting on an apple box in the basement of our house reading back issues of National Geographic.
All those wonderful color photos. And the maps, with their little illustrated explanations of Roman ruins in England or Babylonian irrigation practices in the Fertile Crescent!
By Inside GNSS
eCall is the European Union (EU) initiative aimed at reducing road casualties by increasing the speed and efficiency of emergency response. It involves a device installed in cars that will automatically dial the EU’s “112” emergency phone number in the event of a serious road accident.
Key data including time, date, and GNSS coordinates will be sent to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and then relayed to the most appropriate emergency service. The eCall is triggered by airbag deployment and impact sensor information.
By Peter Gutierrez
Jan Brecht-Clark, director, National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and TimingWith the urgent interference and patent controversies of the last two years largely resolved, the office tasked with helping sync the government’s GPS activities will take advantage of a lull in the action to plan a more strategic way forward — though that path does not currently appear to include talking to Congress about GPS civil funding.
By Inside GNSS
With the election finally over, and the chain of decision makers now largely clear, the spectrum war between LightSquared and the GPS community is heating up again with new fronts opening at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress.
The focus of the action are changes to rules governing spectrum and receivers that, if enacted, could enable LightSquared to move forward with its plans for a high-powered, terrestrial broadband network.
By Inside GNSS
FIGURE 1: (top) Device without case. (bottom) Device with case.Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology in mobile communications, often called 4G, is making its way into a host of consumer devices. It started with data-only modules for Internet connectivity but quickly made its mark on smartphones, automotive communication, and embedded modules that provide fast and reliable wireless data connectivity to the machine-to-machine (M2M) market.
By Inside GNSS
Back in television’s halcyon days I should have been watching Donald Herbert explain science and technology on his Mr. Wizard programs.
But I was probably laughing my way through the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show instead, especially one of its mainstays, Fractured Fairy Tales — irreverent, yet revealing retellings of the Grimm Brothers’ homilies to human foibles.
And so I became a journalist instead of an engineer, hoping to fracture fallacies and received truths rather than oil shale.
By Inside GNSS
TABLE 1. Spoofer antenna requirements for various hardened GPS signal types
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.”
– A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Is our faith in the integrity and infallibility of the Global Positioning System misplaced or, perhaps, insufficiently grounded?
By Inside GNSS
Members of Congress — who have not finished next year’s appropriations, face half a dozen major tax and program fixes set to expire, and have their own re-elections to worry about — must quickly decide how to handle a tsunami of federal budget cuts that experts say could sweep the economy back into recession.
By Dee Ann Divis
Q: What are the tradeoffs between using L1-only and L1+L2 for PPP?
A: Precise point positioning (PPP) is a technique that can compute positions with a high accuracy anywhere on the globe using a single GNSS receiver. It relies on highly accurate satellite position and clock data that can be downloaded from the International GNSS Service (IGS) or obtained in real-time from a number of service providers, using either the Internet or satellite links.
By Inside GNSS
TOP PHOTO: Antenna configurations on trials vehicle: Dual GPS antennas for the INS under test and single GPS antenna for the CIMU; BOTTOM PHOTO: Commercial IMU/DGPS system used for reference (left), FOG-based INS configuration (middle), and MEMS-based INS configuration 2 (right) The automobile versus the horse and buggy. Cloud computing opposite desktop software. The trend is predictable, yet it is always surprising when one technology takes over the market space of another. After all, television did kill off the radio star.
By Inside GNSS
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced the award of a contract that will help accelerate the development of GNSS-based procedures under the agency’s Next Generation (NextGen) air traffic management program.
By Inside GNSS
UK-based Racelogic has been singled out as a double winner in the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, receiving both Innovation and International Trade awards.
Announced on April 21 to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday, the 2012 Queen’s Awards for Enterprise listings contained 209 companies, with Racelogic being one of only four to be honored with the award for both Innovation and International Trade.
By Inside GNSS
IFEN GmbH and WORK Microwave have announced a new round of enhancements to the NavX-NCS line of GNSS multi-frequency simulators.
Increased usability and control is achieved through the new NCS Control Center software release V1.7, according to the Germany-based companies. The GNSS simulators now feature motion models that simulate the physical behavior of various types of vehicles or vessels, including airplanes, trains, cars, trucks, and ships.
By Inside GNSS
