Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
[Updated July 4] The world’s dominant mode of timekeeping, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), took on another leap second on Saturday, June 30 at 23:59:60 UTC.
And then the fun began: the addition caused software handling Internet services such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Mozilla, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare and Gawker to behave unpredictably or even crash over the weekend.
By Inside GNSS
Time is short — the European Satellite Navigation Competition, aka Galileo Masters — is seeking the best GPS and GNSS applications ideas for this year’s contest. The deadline has been extended one week to Sunday, July 8.
By Inside GNSS
Northern Jutland PeninsulaA seven day workshop on GNSS and Positioning for the Future will be held at a Jutland (North Sea) resort in Denmark from August 27 through September 2, 2012. It is open all those with an interest in satellite positioning and navigation but limited to the first 50 registered participants.
The workshop will cover GNSS basics, new satellite navigation systems, arctic navigation, intelligent transportation systems and environmental monitoring, with lectures by international experts in those fields. The program and full list of lecturers are available on the event website.
By Inside GNSS
Leica Geosystems Mining and Locata Corporation will continue their exclusive technology partnership in the mine machine automation and mine fleet management markets until at least June 2014. The extension guarantees the ongoing, commercial provision to the global mining industry of the Leica Jigsaw Positioning System (Jps), powered by Locata technology.
By Inside GNSS
The convergence of mobile communications, information, and navigation technologies is driving the need to re-examine interference and jamming issues within a broader national and international cybersecurity framework, a U.S. homeland security official told a recent conference on GNSS vulnerability.
By Inside GNSS
Dee Ann Divis, Washington View columnistDee Ann Divis, Inside GNSS’s Washington correspondent¸ was named the winner of the Society of Professional Journalists Washington, D.C., Professional Chapter’s highest journalistic award, the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award, for her work with the magazine.
By Dee Ann Divis
Chip-level GPS and other GNSS technologies are now moving beyond mass markets such as mobile phones and traditional navigation devices, with a global market predict to ship about 1.8 billion OEM units at a value of more than $3.3 billion by 2016, according to a new ABI Research report.
The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has published its second GNSS market report, including a special focus on maritime and surveying application markets and refining its projections of unit and sales revenue volumes through 2020.
According to the new GSA report, the worldwide GNSS market is growing rapidly with total market size expected to increase at an average of 13 percent per year until 2016. At that point, increasing market saturation, price erosion, and platform convergence will reduce the growth rate.
By Inside GNSS
Thales TOPSTAR 100 receiverFrench manufacturer Thales, the only non-U.S. company to offer GPS SAASM (Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module) receivers, is working on next-generation receivers for commercial aviation and military markets that will incorporate new signals and multiple GNSS systems.
Since the late 1990s, the company has delivered between 8,000 and 10,000 avionics installations in military and civil domains, according to Pierre Bouniol, GNSS Products Department manager, including multi-mode GPS receivers in stand-alone and enclosure configurations.
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. GROWTH SPURT
California/Nevada, USA
√ The age of the Sierra Nevada mountains — home of Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe — is puzzling to geodesists. Integrating GPS and inSAR, Universities of Nevada and Glasgow teams studied the area’s uplift and found that it is growing by 1 to 2 millimeters per year. The verdict? The entire range could have arisen in less than 3 million years.
A number of GNSS experts from the United States, Denmark, Norway and China will lead a weeklong workshop on the future of satellite-based positioning technologies from August 27 through September 2 at the Slettestrand Holiday Center in North Jutland, Denmark.
The topics range from GNSS basics and Intelligent Transportation Systems to new GNSSes, new receivers and indoor navigation as well as environmental monitoring and arctic navigation. The event is organized by Stanford and Aalborg universities.
By Inside GNSS
FIGURE 2: Example of a national geoid (upper diagram) and a correction surface for the transformation from the new orthometric height system to the old height system (lower diagram). Country is Switzerland. Geoid undulations range from 45 to 55 meters in ETRS89 and from -5 to +5 meters in the national System CH1903+. Lower diagram: Correction surface to transform from the new orthometric height system (LHN95) to the old height system LN02 with corrections from -0.10 to 0.55 meters.Q: How do GNSS-derived heights differ from other height systems?
A: Height estimation using GNSS always seems to be trickier than horizontal coordinate estimation.
Why?
On the one hand, the GNSS technique has error sources that are more critical in the vertical direction. Height estimates are weaker because of a combination of satellite geometry, the presence of strong correlations to other parameters, such as atmospheric delays, and the antenna phase center model applied during data analysis.
By Inside GNSS
Working Papers explore the technical and scientific themes that underpin GNSS programs and applications. This regular column is coordinated by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günter Hein, head of Europe’s Galileo Operations and Evolution.
By Inside GNSS
