Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
Col. William “Bill” CooleyThe U.S. Air Force appears to have identified a future leader of the GPS Directorate.
At a time yet to be determined, Col. William T. "Bill" Cooley will take up the role of Senior Materiel Leader at the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition office for developing and producing GPS satellites, ground systems, and military user equipment.
By Inside GNSS
Russia will build and launch 13 GLONASS-M and 22 GLONASS –K satellites between now and 2020, according to an outline of the nation’s space program published on the Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) website http://www.roscosmos.ru/main.php?id=24today (January 12, 2013).
By Inside GNSS
Brad Parkinson accepts Eduard-Rhein Foundation award in Munich, Germany. (Photo, SbphotodesigN – München)The Global Positioning System and its founders continue to collect honors for the world’s original GNSS enterprise.
Last month, the Space and Missiles Systems Center (SMC) at Los Angeles Air Force Base accepted the donation of the Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy from Brad Parkinson, the original director of the GPS Joint Program Office (JPO) established in 1973.
By Inside GNSS
Spirent Communications has announced the availability of test systems with support for China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System in addition to GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.
Spirent’s positioning and navigation group based in Paignton, United Kingdom, started shipping BeiDou-ready test systems to customers in 2012. The company’s equipment will now be upgraded to full BeiDou capability using the information from the recently released first full issue of the BeiDou-2 Signal-In-Space Interface Control Document (ICD).
In 2013, the annual European Navigation Conference and industry exhibition will be organized by the Austrian Institute of Navigation (OVN) and will take place at the Austria Center Vienna from April 23 through April 25. The lectures and sessions will be held in English.
The theme is Navigation – Expanding Our Horizons
By Inside GNSS
[Updated January 8, 2012] China released today (December 27, 2012 in Beijing; December 26 in the United States) an official version of the complete interface control document (ICD) for the nation’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) Open Service signal-in-space (SIS).
By Inside GNSS
Do we need performance specs for GNSS user equipment design? For a long time, the signal-in-space interface guidelines provided enough technical guidance. But times have changed.
Over the past two years, the effort by LightSquared to persuade the FCC to allow it to operate high-powered terrestrial transmitters in frequencies adjacent to GPS focused attention on potential vulnerabilities of GNSS user equipment.
By Inside GNSS
Figure 2. L1 pseudorange residuals (m) for GPS (L1 C/A, top) and COMPASS (B1-I, bottom) vs. time of day (hour).Septentrio reported today (January 8, 2013) that the Belgium-headquartered GNSS receiver manufacturer has successfully computed a position/velocity/time (PVT) calculation using BeiDou/Compass satellites in a three-constellation (GPS+GLONASS+BeiDou) solution.
"We are positively surprised of the better than expected performance coming out of what we characterize to be ‘a quite mature constellation,’” Laurent Le Thuaut, Septentrio’s business development manager, told Inside GNSS in an e-mail.
By Inside GNSS
The Institute of Navigation’s 2013 International Technical Meeting will take place January 28, 29 and 30 at the Catamaran Resort Hotel on Mission Bay in San Diego, California.
Stanford’s Sherman Lo will moderate the plenary session, "Exploring the Frontiers of Navigation: Unique and exciting new uses of navigation technologies."
The 120 technical session papers address:
By Inside GNSS
A GPS advocacy group has urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as it considers expansion of terrestrial use of the mobile satellite spectrum (MSS) adjacent to GPS, to recognize that expansion “not come at the expense of critical GPS services.”
By Inside GNSS
Conceptual design of ULTRA (ultra low-cost PRS receiver)When European leaders first took up the idea of creating their own GNSS system nearly 20 years ago, they held up the concept of civilian control as a crucial differentiator from existing services operated by national military establishments.
As Galileo nears its operational phase, that principle may manifest itself in a surprising form: the opportunity to offer a range of security-oriented positioning and timing solutions in place of the all-or-nothing alternatives on encrypted services maintained by defense agencies.
By Inside GNSS
Coming nearly full circle and yet ending up in a new place with a new name describes the peculiar fortunes of the European GNSS Agency, an unlikely fate perhaps reflected most clearly in its continued use of its predecessor’s acronym, GSA.
Five years ago when Europe’s GNSS program abandoned its seemingly misconceived and now roundly condemned effort to forge a public-private partnership (PPP) to develop Galileo, the original GSA — the Galileo Supervisory Authority — appeared orphaned, bereft of purpose and patrons.
By Inside GNSS
The accompanying figure shows the acquisition results of the FM3 Galileo satellite (PRN 11) E1b data channel, as computed by the NAVigation Signal Analysis and Simulation (NavSAS) group of the Politecnico di Torino/Istituto Superiore Mario Boella (ISMB) in Italy. The upper plot shows the search space along ±7 kHz Doppler frequency, while the lower one shows the search space along 4 millisecond code delay. The coherent integration time used to obtain this search space was 4 milliseconds, coupled with 11 noncoherent accumulations.The third Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellite, also known as Flight Model 3 (FM), began transmitting signals last week, and the FM4 spacecraft, like the FM3 launched on October 12, is expected to come on-line soon — providing the theoretical capability of 3D positioning using solely satellites of Europe’s GNSS system.
By Inside GNSS
