Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
With plenty of promise, the third launch of Europe’s Galileo constellation took place four years ago. What followed was not at all what was expected, as problems turned much of the promise into gloom.
By Inside GNSS
While news broke last week of a Department of Defense (DOD) policy to prohibit GPS-enabled devices in deployed settings, no one should expect a drop in usage of popular devices such as Fitbit fitness trackers from the general public.
By Stan Goff
The Galileo constellation took another big step towards full operational capability with the successful launch last month of four satellites on-board an Ariane 5 launcher. Representatives of leading industry that have adopted Galileo then held a special press briefing for journalists from across the continent to address updates on how European citizens and businesses are already taking advantage of benefits delivered by Galileo.
By Stan Goff
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will conduct demonstrations of GPS receivers this fall to support the buying plans of first responders, the Coast Guard and other agencies within DHS. The tests aim to clarify how well the receivers stand up to jamming and spoofing while being used on small, unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS or drones) for maritime missions.
By Dee Ann Divis
Senate Seeks Report on OCX Alternative
Both the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have now passed their spending bills, largely agreeing with the White House and their House counterparts on funding levels for the GPS program with the exceptions of nearly tripling the House cut to the GPS IIIF program and taking a shot across the bow of the new GPS ground system.
By Dee Ann Divis
China sent a new BeiDou navigation satellite into orbit on a Long March-3A rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, in the southwestern Sichuan Province, at 4:58 a.m., Tuesday, July 10.
The satellite is the 32nd of the BeiDou navigation system, and one of the BeiDou-2 family, which is the second generation of the system. The state-run Xinhua press agency confirmed the launch within two hours after liftoff.
By Inside GNSS
The Australian government has launched a four-year plan to upgrade and densify its National Positioning Infrastructure (NPI) to improve position accuracy from coast to coast.
By Dee Ann Divis
The U.S. Coast Guard’s Navigation Center (NAVCEN), and its commander Captain Russell Holmes, received special honors at a ceremony where Holmes officially took his leave for New Orleans and a new post as officer in charge of marine inspection for the outer continental shelf.
By Dee Ann Divis
The Cospas-Sarsat MEOSAR (Medium-Altitude Earth Orbit Search and Rescue) system has been in the news quite a bit of late, and with good reason. As the technology has evolved, so too has the ability to improve search and rescue operations which save lives.
The cover story for the current issue of Inside GNSS is dedicated to the Cospas-Sarsat MEOSAR system and its role as a solution to support the ICAO GADSS Autonomous Distress Tracking recommendation.
By Inside GNSS
The Federal Aviation Administration’s Geosynchronous Earth Orbiting 5 Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) navigation payload, developed by Raytheon’s Intelligence, Information and Services business, is now operational and fully integrated into the WAAS network. The GEO 5 payload joins two others already on orbit in correcting GPS satellite signal ionospheric disturbances, timing issues, and minor orbit adjustments, giving users increased coverage, improved accuracy, and better reliability.
By Inside GNSS
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has considerably increased the number of services and applications that require positioning information. In this sense, IoT positioning sensors usually obtain and deliver their position to a central node where it is further managed and analyzed by a user or scheduler. Nonetheless, the stringent requirements of low-cost IoT sensors in terms of low power consumption to achieve larger battery lifetime are pushing current technologies to their limits.
By Inside GNSS
Recent presentations and publications have suggested that multi-frequency spoofing is infeasible using low-cost, off-the-shelf equipment, and that a good defense against any but well-funded and technically competent adversaries would be to use a multi-frequency capable survey grade receiver. The authors of this article wish to demonstrate that this is definitively false.
Today, it appears that the Cospas-Sarsat MEOSAR system, relying on payloads deployed on GNSS constellations (Galileo, GPS, GLONASS), offers all the conditions to meet the new recommendation of ICAO for ADT-system for Commercial Aviation, with a new generation of in-flight triggered beacons, identical to the current ELT in terms of aircraft integration, but capable of receiving triggers and cancellation events from the avionics, from the crew or from internal sensors, and of detecting and managing their inhibitions to maintain the capability to raise alerts and be localized in any situation.
By Inside GNSS
