Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has issued a Broad Agency Announcement (ONRBAA13-002) seeking proposals from industry and academia for methods to mitigate the denial of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services to U.S. naval forces.
The BAA invitation reflects anxiety about the vulnerability of GPS and overreliance of U.S. military personnel and systems on the space-based system.
By Inside GNSS
The Office of Naval Research has awarded Rockwell Collins a contract to develop technology to locate and classify an adversary’s attempts to interfere with GPS signals and disrupt military operations.
“This program will help assure that essential high accuracy navigation and timekeeping services are available to weapons platforms and military users while enabling warfighters to identify potential threats,” said John Borghese, vice-president of the Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center.
By Inside GNSS
Presentation of the 2012 €20,000 Galileo Master prize: (L to R)) Thorsten Rudolph, head of AZO, the contest organizers; Carlo des Dorides, head of the European GNSS Agency; winner Dirk Elias, Fraunhofer Portigal and Ulrike Daniels, AZO business development. (photo: Simone Hörmann/AZO).
The 2012 ESNC awards ceremony at der Residenz, Munich (AZO photo)Finding your way will be even easier with a new smartphone app from two Portuguese research institutes that augments GNSS with ultra-low magnetic field communication (ULF-MC) for reliable navigation in office buildings, airports, underground parking garages and other indoor locations.
By Inside GNSS
As part of ongoing research to help prevent and mitigate disruptions to computer networks on the Internet, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ research facility in Livermore, California, have turned their attention to handheld computing devices — including studying GPS spoofing threats to smartphones.
By Inside GNSS
University of Texas-Austin Radionavigation Lab drone used in GPS spoofing demonstrations. University of Texas photoA September report on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted the potential risks posed by GPS jamming and spoofing but failed to make any new recommendations on how the issue should be addressed. Associated privacy issues, however, have gotten more attention.
By Inside GNSS
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is expected to ask its top advisors on signal interference to help map out the allowable power limits for applications using frequencies close to those used by the satellite navigation community.
By Dee Ann Divis
The GPS Directorate has approved three contracts to continue the military GPS user equipment (MGUE) development program for portable, ground-based receivers.
By Inside GNSS
At the Intergeo conference in Hannover, Germany, today, NovAtel Inc. announced the addition of a new commercially exportable single-enclosure SPAN MEMS receiver to its line of SPAN GNSS/INS products.
By Inside GNSS
A third GPS Block IIF satellite launched successfully on Thursday (October 4, 2012) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida — the first GPS launch of the year. The spacecraft was carried aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Launch Vehicle
By Inside GNSS
In one of three separate filings on Friday (September 28, 2012) would-be broadband provider LightSquared asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set “operating parameters” leading to “revised technical rules” to enable it to operate in the lower of the two frequency bands where tests last year showed its operations would interfere with GPS.
Those rules and parameters should, the filing intimated, include standards for GPS receivers.
By Dee Ann Divis
With the debacle surrounding LightSquared’s now-stymied proposal still reverberating through Washington, federal agencies are studying ways to repurpose the spectrum adjacent to the satellite navigation frequencies without causing debilitating interference to GPS receivers.
By Dee Ann Divis
Ariane launch poster for ASTRA 2F and GSAT-10Arianespace successfully launched India’s GSAT-10 satellite this evening (September 28, 2012) on board an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The GSAT-10 carries India’s second GAGAN (GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation) payload, following a successful launch of the nation’s first space-based augmentation for GPS last year.
By Inside GNSS
Future of air traffic control (FAA image)A public-private partnership created to reduce the financial burden involved in implementing the nation’s GPS-based, next-generation (NextGen) air transportation system has raised its first rounds of financing and is now negotiating contracts with its charter customers.
“We have . . . closed our first tranche of equity,” said Jim Hughey, senior vice-president of the NextGen Equipage Fund. The fund has secured a total of $100 million in commitments with some $40 million of that coming from leading aerospace companies.
By Dee Ann Divis
