Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
The grapevine was abuzz on Halloween with chatter that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) might soon act on a long-pending request from Ligado Networks to use spectrum near the GPS frequencies to support terrestrial communications.
By Dee Ann Divis
The GPS III Contingency Operations Program (COps) successfully connected with the first GPS III satellite on orbit on October 21. The Air Force can now operationally command and control the powerful new GPS III satellites
By Inside GNSS
Direct georeferencing improves the efficiency and accuracy of mapping from both manned and unmanned platforms. An upcoming 2-day workshop on this topic is designed for:
By Inside GNSS
The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has just issued its sixth annual GNSS Market Report, a booklet that comprehensively runs down the major market sectors and gives gratifying growth figures for all of them. This is not news, strictly speaking. This is more of the same that we have seen over the last two decades, the last six years of which have been quantified in the sturdy GSA Market Reports.
By Inside GNSS
The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) constellation operated by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) consists of eight miniature satellites that use GPS signals bounced off the sea surface to measure wind speeds. One after the other at 12-minute intervals, the satellites pass over tropical storms, gathering data that can be used to predict the storms’ path and their intensity.
By Inside GNSS
The newest EGNOS satellite is aloft. Eutelsat’s 5 West B satellite was successfully launched from Kazakhstan on October 9. Among other payloads, the 5 West B carries a GEO-3 payload of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS), Europe’s regional satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS). The satellite will support EGNOS V3, the next generation of the EGNOS program.
By Inside GNSS
The Army is in the midst of testing new assured position, navigation and timing equipment (A-PNT) as it searches for more ways to thwart jamming and spoofing and stay operational if GPS is denied or unavailable.
By Dee Ann Divis
A live demonstration in the North Sea used the Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR) service to initiate an emergency rescue in three and a half minutes after a “person in distress” operated her Galileo-enabled personal locator beacon (PLB) from a small life raft, adrift on the open water.
By Inside GNSS
For the first time, a sophisticated GPS-guided Naval Strike Missile fired from the deck of a U.S. combat ship sailing in the Indo-Pacific region.
The USS Gabrielle Giffords launched the precision strike weapon, which “can find and destroy enemy ships at distances up to 100 nautical miles away,” according to a U.S. Navy statement. The NSM flies at high subsonic speed an “at sea-skimming altitude, has terrain-following capability and uses an advanced seeker for precise targeting in challenging conditions.”
The NSM can navigate by GPS, inertial and terrain reference systems. It is able to fly over and around landmasses, travel in sea skim mode, and make random avoidance maneuvers in the terminal phase. An imaging infrared (IIR) seeker and an onboard target database give NSM independent detection, recognition, and discrimination capabilities for targets at sea or on the coast. Its design and materials endow it with stealth capabilities. It weighs slightly over 400 kg (880 pounds) and has a range of at least 185 km (100 nm).
The Navy Strike Missile launch was part of exercise Pacific Griffin, in the Philippine Sea near Guam, an exercise conducted with the Singaporean navy. It marked the second time such a missile was launched, but the first time it was fired in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the Navy.
The Navy awarded Raytheon a contract in 2018 for the weapons system, developed around the missile designed by Norwegian firm Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace.
By Inside GNSS
Ivan Revnivykh’s life and experience encompass the far frontiers of his homeland, Russia, from the magnifi cent landscapes of the country’s Pacifi c coast to research stations in Antarctica, to the great capital city of Moscow where he lives and works today. To everything he does he brings a sense of excitement and adventure.
By Inside GNSS
Every GNSS has experienced a failure. On January 26, 2016, an error in the GPS data upload system caused incorrect data to be transmitted from the satellites on the L1 band used by most commercial GPS receivers. Th e problem was resolved within six hours, although some users experienced problems for as much as twelve hours. Th e next day, the US Air Force (USAF) released a full statement explaining that the problem was caused by ground system soft ware when one satellite was decommissioned.
By Inside GNSS
Seventeen years after federal regulators restricted a promising wireless technology to protect GPS and other spectrum users, they are being asked to loosen those limitations. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) proponents insist the strictures are too tight and cut off their ability to innovate. In June, Robert Bosch LLC formally requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) do what it said it would do back in April 2002: reexamine controls on UWB that the FCC itself called “extremely conservative” when they were written. The request is not to change the rules—not just yet anyway—but for the FCC to launch a rulemaking process that could eventually lead to changes in the rules. And Bosch wants a lot of changes.
By Inside GNSS
Due to the proliferation of personal privacy devices and other jamming sources, it is imperative for safety-critical GNSS users such as airports and marine ports to be situationally aware of local GNSS interference. This article proposes and validates an enhanced method for geolocating GNSS interference sources so that jammers and spoofers can be found and disabled.
By Inside GNSS
