Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
This three-day NavtechGPS Winter GNSS Training course will take place at ESA/ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, November 17-19, 2014.
Registration is open.
Course 336: GPS Fundamentals, Enhancements & Introduction to Differential GPS will be taught by Dr. Chris Hegarty. The course is open to citizens of NATO countries.
By Inside GNSS
Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, logistics and technologyPushed by Congress to upgrade to M-code, the U.S. Army is earmarking money for the new capability even as sequestration is forcing programs cuts, according to the service’s top acquisition official.
“We are heading towards the M-code capability,” said Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology. The Army has worked “our S&T (science and technology) pieces,” she said, noting that the Air Force was developing the necessary circuit cards through is Military GPS User Equipment (MGUE) program.
By Inside GNSS
A confluence of technology, policy, and applications is turning indoor venues into the next big frontier for positioning and navigation.
Recent market studies have heralded the prospects for positioning, navigation, and tracking inside buildings where GNSS signals are often attenuated or blocked entirely. Many products and conceptual designs combine the indoor technologies with GNSS to provide “ubiquitous” positioning.
By Inside GNSS
GPS pseudolite used in experiment at University of New South Wales Satellite Navigation and Positioning LabInternational aviation officials have asked U.S. experts to consider updating standards for GNSS aviation receivers to improve their ability to withstand interference from repeaters, pseudolites, and jammers.
Repeaters — generally used to extend navigation signals inside buildings where they would otherwise be blocked — rebroadcast GNSS satellite signals and therefore operate in the same frequency band. Although useful within a building, care must be taken to confined the repeater’s signal lest it confuse other receivers operating nearby.
By Inside GNSS
Raytheon UK launched a new enhanced version of its battlefield GPS L1/L2 anti-jam (GPS-AJ) capability, Landshield, this week (October 13–15) at the annual conference of the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA 2014) in Washington, D.C.
A multi-element antenna with the anti-jam processing in a single small “one-box” form factor that interfaces at the RF level, Landshield is designed to enable GPS equipment to function unimpaired against a full range of hostile jammer types including narrow band, broadband, continuous wave, pulse, swept, and spectrally matched.
By Inside GNSS
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are getting a lot of attention this week at the INTERGEO conference and exhibition in Berlin, Germany, where a special session on Tuesday (October 7, 2014), “UAVs in Practice,” focused on their use in airborne surveying and mapping, environmental monitoring, and other commercial or civil applications.
By Inside GNSS
xOEM500Oxford Technical Solutions Ltd. (OxTS) has announced its first inertial navigation OEM board set with integrated GNSS — the xOEM500, which the company is promoting at this week’s (October 7–9, 2014) Intergeo trade show in Berlin, Germany.
By Inside GNSS
VectorNav VN-300 GPS/MEMS IMUVectorNav Technologies, now based in Dallas, Texas, offers the VN-30, a miniature dual GPS-aided inertial navigation system that combines MEMS inertial sensors, two high-sensitivity GPS receivers, and an onboard extended Kalman filter algorithms to provide estimates of position, velocity, and orientation for industrial applications.
By Inside GNSS
One of 12 magnetograms recorded at Greenwich Observatory during the Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859
1996 soccer game in the Midwest, (Rick Dikeman image)
Nouméa ground station after the flood
A pencil and a coffee cup show the size of NASA’s teeny tiny PhoneSat
Bonus Hotspot: Naro Tartaruga AUV
Pacific lamprey spawning (photo by Jeremy Monroe, Fresh Waters Illustrated)
“Return of the Bucentaurn to the Molo on Ascension Day”, by (Giovanni Antonio Canal) Canaletto
The U.S. Naval Observatory Alternate Master Clock at 2nd Space Operations Squadron, Schriever AFB in Colorado. This photo was taken in January, 2006 during the addition of a leap second. The USNO master clocks control GPS timing. They are accurate to within one second every 20 million years (Satellites are so picky! Humans, on the other hand, just want to know if we’re too late for lunch) USAF photo by A1C Jason Ridder. 
Detail of Compass/ BeiDou2 system diagram
Hotspot 6: Beluga A300 600ST
1. STOP THE CAR!
Las Vegas, Nevada USA
My favorite bumper sticker this month: “Oh, no! Not another learning experience!”
After 20 years of putting together a European GNSS program, disappointment over the skewed launch of the first fully operational Galileo satellites is palpable and widely felt. For end users, it is uniformly bad news, and no system provider that sincerely wants to achieve interoperability and robustness in a system of GNSS systems can relish the European program’s current difficulties.
By Inside GNSS
Aviation officials Thursday (September 25, 2014) for the first time approved the use of unmanned aircraft for commercial filming in the United States, opening the door to what is expected to be a slow-building gold rush to the skies.
Six companies received exemptions from the existing rules, which generally ban the commercial use of unmanned aerial systems or UAS. The exemptions were granted to RC Pro Productions Consulting LLC dba Vortex Aerial, Aerial MOB LLC, Astraeus Aeria, HeliVideo Productions LLC, Pictorvision Inc., and Snaproll Media LLC.
By Inside GNSS
Editor’s Note: An exclusive interview with Gen. Hyten is available here with more details.
Details are emerging about another restructuring of the contract for the new GPS ground system, a deal that pushes completion of the project back another two years and recasts the remaining work to fit within the Air Force’s strained financial profile.
By Dee Ann Divis
Gerald Mader, National Geodetic SurveyIn August, a group of scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that the severe drought gripping the western United States in recent years is causing a “uplift” in the western United States.
About the same time, governmental agencies were reporting widespread cases of land subsidence in California’s central San Joaquin Valley caused by overpumping of water from wells there.
By Inside GNSS
