GPS seems to have come out of nowhere. There was no progression like eight-track tape to cassette to CD to MP3 player. One day we were driving around clueless of where we were, struggling with roadmaps bought as gas stations that couldn’t be folded back neatly once opened and — suddenly — there was an amiable female voice coming out of the dashboard offering directions to our destination and showing no signs of impatience when we made wrong turns.
From the author’s introduction to GPS for Everyone

GPS seems to have come out of nowhere. There was no progression like eight-track tape to cassette to CD to MP3 player. One day we were driving around clueless of where we were, struggling with roadmaps bought as gas stations that couldn’t be folded back neatly once opened and — suddenly — there was an amiable female voice coming out of the dashboard offering directions to our destination and showing no signs of impatience when we made wrong turns.
From the author’s introduction to GPS for Everyone

The book is motivated by a taxi driver asking GPS expert Pratap Misra how the system works. As GPS experts, we should be capable of passing an under¬standing of GPS to the non-technical individual and Pratap’s book does that. The average person views GPS as the little box that gives location and direction. Pratap discusses GPS history, example operations, and antidotes so that the lay person can bet¬ter understand the system.

GPS for Everyone covers the basic principles of operation, the GPS sig¬nals and how the receiver processes the signals, the technology involved, many of the civil and military operations, and the story of how GPS came to be developed. Pratap has a nice variety of pictures and illustrations significantly enhancing an individual’s understand¬ing. He also discusses what is ahead in satellite navigation with the new systems coming on line.

I was so impressed with this book, that when I gave a talk to my former high school, I took a copy and left it with them.

GPS for Everyone: You are Here
By Pratap Misra, Ganga-Jamuna Press, 2016, ISBN-13: 978-0-9709544-3-5

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John Raquet’s Compass Points

With an imposing 6’2” physique and a disarming grin, John Raquet rises above the crowd. To colleagues he’s a top-flight engineer and university professor, and director of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) Autonomy and Navigation Technology Center. But he is also a former all-star basketball player, a preacher, sometime soccer coach, former military officer, and, most definitely, a family man.

John Raquet’s Compass Points

With an imposing 6’2” physique and a disarming grin, John Raquet rises above the crowd. To colleagues he’s a top-flight engineer and university professor, and director of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) Autonomy and Navigation Technology Center. But he is also a former all-star basketball player, a preacher, sometime soccer coach, former military officer, and, most definitely, a family man.

And boy what a family: wife Cindy plus eight kids, who have managed, among other things, to keep him in wrestling shape.

“Thinking back to when I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary over a three-year period, I remember at times coming home after a frustrating day in my student office and finding the children happy to see me and ready for a good friendly wrestle on the floor,” says Raquet.

“They really didn’t care if I was struggling in a class or couldn’t get a navigation computer program to compile. Playing with them on the floor after a difficult day was an incredible boost, helping me to keep in mind that some things are more important than others,” he continues. “So, rather than being a distraction from my career, I feel like my children have actually helped me to keep things in perspective.”

In the Beginning. . . .
Raquet grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, in a town called North Olmsted. In high school, he worked at a garden center and was pretty serious about basketball, making an all-Cleveland all-star team his senior year.

His mother, Sharon, was a nurse. His father, Charles Raquet, spent his entire career as an engineer at NASA Lewis, now NASA Glenn, in Cleveland.

Charles Raquet completed a Ph.D. in physics from Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon, when John was about six months old.

Working for NASA, Charles Raquet spent much of his time developing antenna technology for communication satellites. One of the highlights of John Raquet’s undergraduate university days was having an internship at the same NASA facility where his father worked, testing out arcjet engines for spacecraft in 1988.

“Growing up, I had always liked visiting my father’s office and his lab, so it was very exciting to actually be working at the same NASA facility,” John recalls.

By 1989, Raquet had a fine undergraduate career at the U.S. Air Force Academy under his belt and a bachelor of science in astronautical engineering in his pocket, and he was active military. His next move was a master of science program in aeronautical/astronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he worked to develop an innovative, fuel-efficient, collision-avoidance and docking system for the Space Shuttle.

But there was a major development in his personal life as well. While still in graduate school at MIT, he met Cindy, who was working as a recent Wellesley College graduate in a small high-tech company in Boston. She was one of only a few non-engineers.

Cindy has remained a true partner and devoted traveling companion to John throughout the years. “She has attended probably 15 Institute of Navigation [ION] GNSS conferences with me,” he says, “and even though she’s not a navigation engineer, she knows lots of people who attend, because each place that we’ve lived has involved organizations that are active in the ION.”

After receiving his master’s degree, Raquet was assigned to what is now the 746th Test Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

He was originally told that he was going to be a flight test engineer, and he was very excited about the opportunity to fly as part of his job, but when he arrived, Holloman leaders discovered that Raquet had a masters degree and decided to put him in the reference systems development element.

“This was one of several times in my life where I look back and am glad that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted,” Raquet says, because it put him in the middle of an emerging technology, the Global Positioning System, that was beginning to transform the world of positioning, navigation, and timing.

“In the reference systems element, we were starting to use GPS as an input to our flight reference systems, which were used to generate truth data when testing navigation systems, mostly INS [inertial navigation] at that time,” he says. “During the four years I was there, we went from not using GPS, to using GPS pseudoranges, to pseudorange DGPS [differential GPS], to incorporating a full integer-resolved, carrier-phase DGPS solution into our reference system.”

So, it turned out that working with reference systems allowed Raquet to “cut his teeth” on GNSS and ultimately set the direction for the rest of his career.

Unforgettable
Raquet says he “first got truly excited about GNSS” when Dr. Gérard Lachapelle came to Holloman AFB in the early 1990s to teach a course on carrier-phase integer ambiguity resolution.

“To this day, it still amazes me that, using carrier-phase DGPS, a receiver can tell you where you are within a centimeter, using signals from satellites 20,000 kilometers away and traveling at several kilometers/second.”

In the GPS class that he teaches today, Raquet has all of the students submit a work of “GPS Art” sketched by plotting the position of an GNSS antenna moved in whatever shape they want, using carrier-phase DGPS for positioning. “I suspect that this is a part of the course that they will never forget,” he says, “long after all of the details of the course have faded from memory.”

From New Mexico, it was on to Canada and back to school, this time as a doctoral student in geomatics engineering at the University of Calgary — Lachapelle’s stamping ground — from 1995 to 1998. There Raquet pioneered a new method for network-based precise differential GPS positioning that is currently deployed throughout the world.

And he remained busy on the home front: “Cindy and I started that program with two young children, and left with four — so, there are two Canadians in my family!”

Full Circle
Today, John Raquet is a professor of electrical engineering and Director of the Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center at AFIT. Located at Wright Patterson AFB, near Dayton, Ohio, his office is not so very far from where he grew up playing basketball in North Olmsted.

Back in Ohio, Raquet appears to have achieved that much-sought but rarely found work-family balance.

“I absolutely love being a professor and running a research center,” he says. “One of the best parts of my job is getting to know each of my research students as I work with them over an extended period of time. I also have really enjoyed attempting to develop an engaging, fun culture among the ANT Center staff.”

And fun is something he knows about, keeping eight children, ages 8 through 23 — four boys and four girls — entertained and yet on track: traveling, playing whiffle ball in the back yard, hiking, camping, and on and on.

“We recently all took a trip to the Grand Canyon and back in our 15-passenger van, which was a blast!” says Dad.

One of the family highlights was the opportunity for them all to live in Finland for six months in 2010, when Raquet was AFIT’s first-ever Fulbright Scholar at the Tampere University of Technology.

Raquet found the Finnish posting both professionally and personally enriching. “Living in Europe enabled us to show our children quite a few historical sites that we never thought they would be able to see, at least while living in our own home.”

In the midst of this rich family life, however, Raquet has still managed to get a little work done.

In recent years, ANT has developed the Sensor Processing for Inertial Dynamics Error Reduction (SPIDER) filter framework to alleviate some of the issues inherent with specialized navigation post-processing software.

“We got tired having students struggling to reuse sensor integration software, to the point that they would often start over again from scratch,” Raquet explains. “To fix this, we developed the SPIDER filter frame-work, which has a number of nice features that enable the students to add in their own sensor model with-out affecting other sensor models that may already exist. This has significantly improved our ability to reuse this software.”

A familiar face at conferences and events, Raquet has many awards and honors and well more than 100 published articles and conference presentations to his credit as well as a long line of mentored students. And one still has the feeling that he’s just getting started.

“At the Center, we continue to do lots of work in navigation using non- GNSS means,” Raquet explains, “which is almost always more difficult and less accurate than GNSS, when it’s available.”

Recently, ANT has been investigating the use of magnetic field variations to determine absolute position, by comparing the measured variations to a map, demonstrating this capability indoors, in a ground vehicle, and in an aircraft.

“We have been spoiled by GNSS, and have come to depend on it,” Raquet says. “So, it is important to have alternative navigation signals to fall back on, if and when GNSS is not available.”

Imparting Perspective
Raquet has worked for the Air Force for his entire career, initially as an active duty military member and now as a government civilian. He was active duty from 1989 through 2003, which included his first five years as a professor, and then converted to civilian status.

Raquet decided to get out of the military at the 14-year point, six years before he would have reached full retirement, partly so that he could continue to be a professor, which would not have been possible if he had stayed in uniform.

And, as do many parents, he takes a part of his work home with him.

“Like my father, I like to talk with my children about how things work,” Raquet says. “After a number of drawings literally on the back of a napkin, we finally broke down and purchased a whiteboard which was installed in our dining room; so, now it’s much more convenient to make a quick drawing of something.”

Given that the couple — “mostly Cindy,” Raquet insists — have home-schooled all their children, a whiteboard seems a natural furnishing for their dining room.

And that choice seems to have paid off.

“We have three in university — two studying music, and one electrical engineering,” Raquet says. “We really don’t know yet what the other children will study, although my 10-year-old has let us know that he is just biding his time until he can build robots for a living!”

Music is another family activity, both listening and playing. Most of the children play one or two instruments, including, thus far, the harp, violin, two violas, French horn, flute, trombone, and piano. “

“We also enjoy breaking out into spontaneous song from time to time,” he adds.

John and Cindy enjoy music as well, although they spend more time teaching it and driving around to lessons than actually playing anything.

As a man of faith, Raquet is very active in the Arbor Church, a reformed Baptist congregation, as a pastor and, along with Cindy, as a counselor. Together they have provided premarital counseling for a number of couples, and, looking ahead to their 25th anniversary in January, the Raquets would seem to be good models for giving marital advice.

Raquet offers quite a bit of instruction for fellow church members and says he really enjoys preaching things other than engineering.

“It’s amazing how often engineering concepts provide good analogies for spiritual concepts,” he says, “although sometimes I have to pass on the best engineering analogies, because only engineers would really get it!”

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Inside GNSS editor and publisher Glen Gibbons has received a high honor from the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) for his "outstanding contribution to navigation" as a journalist and publisher.

The 2015 Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal was presented to Gibbons by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, on July 15 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The duke is the patron of the institute.

Inside GNSS editor and publisher Glen Gibbons has received a high honor from the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) for his "outstanding contribution to navigation" as a journalist and publisher.

The 2015 Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal was presented to Gibbons by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, on July 15 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The duke is the patron of the institute.

"Glen Gibbons has probably done more than anyone to raise general awareness and understanding of the emergent satellite navigation technology, including its capabilities and limitations," reads the citation accompanying the medal.

RIN director Peter Chapman-Andrews said the medal is the institute’s highest award, which is never made more than once per year and sometimes not at all. At the institute’s annual meeting, Gibbons will share the spotlight this year with the European Space Agency and other RIN award recipients. The duke will recognize ESA with his own technical award for navigation for the agency’s successful comet-chasing Rosetta Mission.

As probably the world’s first full-time GPS/GNSS journalist, Gibbons is the editor and publisher of Inside GNSS. He and his wife Eliza Schmidkunz started the technical magazine for engineers, designers, program managers, and policymakers nearly 10 years ago in Eugene, Oregon USA.

He began his career covering GNSS applications and policies in 1989 as the founding editor of GPS World, the first trade magazine on the subject, established in Eugene by the Aster Publishing Company.

Over the years, Gibbons and Inside GNSS have often been the first outside of scholarly journals to cover news and issues of all of the space-based positioning, location, timing and navigation systems. At Inside GNSS, these have included such subjects as GLONASS revitalization, the decision for the common GPS/Galileo civil signals, the transformation of EU’s Galileo from a public-private partnership to a European Commission-contolled program, the first analysis of the new BeiDou signal, the patent dispute between the United States and the European Union over modernized signal development, the formation of the International Committee on GNSS (ICG) by the United Nations, and the first Galileo-only signal analysis.

The RIN award is named for Sir Harold Spencer-Jones, the UK’s astronomer-royal in the 1930s and 1940s, who determined the accurate median distance from Earth to the Sun.He was also the first president of the RIN.

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One of the first feature articles I wrote as a newly minted GNSS magazine editor 26 years ago was about an advanced rail traffic management system based on GPS that Burlington Northern, with the help of Rockwell Collins, had designed and implemented.

Headed up by a couple of former NAVSTAR GPS Joint Program Office leaders — Don Henderson and Ed Butt — BN’s Advanced Railroad Electronics System (ARES) demonstrated its effectiveness on 250 miles of BN track in the Mesabi Iron Range from 1987 to 1992. ARES tracked and controlled seven locomotives and three maintenance vehicles, from a control center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I titled the article, which ran in the May/June 1990 issue of GPS World, “On Track with GPS.”

Everyone who came to Minnesota to watch ARES in action — including Federal Railway Administration (FRA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials, congressional staffers, shippers, Draper Lab analysts, and railroad executives — agreed that ARES was a fine example of positive train control (PTC). Using a GPS constellation that was only half-built and the much less robust computers and wireless communications of that era, PTC could still help avoid collisions, control train speed, and improve rail traffic efficiency for the nation’s railroads.

Fast-forward 26 years to a 50-mph–rated railroad curve outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where on May 12 an Amtrak passenger train left the tracks at 106 mph, killed 8 people and injured 200. Meanwhile, every day thousands of railcars — a 4,000 percent increase since 2008 — carrying highly explosive shale oil are being hauled through American cities and along the nation’s waterways and through other sensitive environments.

Positive Train Control — why is this still not a thing 26 years later? Mostly because of strong resistance from the rail industry and weak oversight by federal regulators.

NTSB has included PTC on its “Most Wanted List” every year from the inception of the list in 1990, but then the board doesn’t regulate U.S. railroads. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (RSIA) mandated that PTC be implemented on so-called Class I rail tracks by the end of this year. That legislation came about after the collision of a California Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train resulted in 25 deaths and 102 injuries.

In the wake of the latest Amtrak accident, FRA officials say they will issue an emergency order to begin implementing a train control system that notifies an engineer when a train exceeds the speed limit and automatically applies the brakes — that is, PTC. After a long series of oil car accidents, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx ordered railroads to use stronger-walled railcars to transport oil and implement an automatic braking system to control speeds.

Will all this kerfuffle actually get PTC back on track? Well, as NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart told a U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee in April, not really.

“We know that several rail carriers have stated that they will not meet the 2015 deadline,” Hart said. “This is disappointing.”

At the same subcommittee hearing, Acting FRA Administrator Sarah Feinberg admitted, “Although the railroads subject to the mandate are working diligently towards implementation of PTC systems, FRA is concerned that the vast majority of these railroads will not be able to meet the deadline.”

Currently, PTC systems are in use on Amtrak lines only on the Northeast Corridor in the United States and on the Michigan line between Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan.

Oh, I should mention that on May 14, 2012, the FRA issued a final rule that exempted about 10,000 miles — out of about 140,000 miles — of U.S. track from the RSIA’s PTC mandate.

As Mayor Tom Weisner of Aurora, Illinois, where more than 40 oil trains roll through town each week, told NPR news: the new rules are full of holes and do little to protect those who live near the rails.

“I don’t think our federal regulators did the job that they needed to do here,” he says. “I think they, uh . . . wimped out, as it were.”

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Well, you could, but maybe you don’t.

The anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 came and went in March with the fate of the Boeing 777 still unknown.

It didn’t have to happen.

It’s 10 p.m. somewhere over the vast oceans that comprise three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. Do you know where your airplane is?

Well, you could, but maybe you don’t.

The anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 came and went in March with the fate of the Boeing 777 still unknown.

It didn’t have to happen.

Although they were inherent in the program from the get-go, civilian applications of GPS trace their origin to President Reagan’s September 16, 1983, announcement — after a Soviet pilot shot down an off-course Korean airliner — that the United States would make its nascent (and still-classified) GNSS system available for civil aviation worldwide.

The problem in that case appears to have resulted from navigation error — human or mechanical — but could also have been remedied by a suitable surveillance and tracking regime. Indeed, the interface with airliner autopilots, suspected of contributing to the 1983 tragedy, was subsequently modified to reduce the chance of such mishaps.

In 1994, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Council approved a policy on implementation and operation of communications/navigation/surveillance/air traffic management systems that stated “GNSS should be implemented as an evolutionary progression from existing global navigation satellite systems . . . towards an integrated GNSS over which Contracting States exercise a sufficient level of control on aspects related to its use by civil aviation.”

The policy continues: “ICAO shall continue to explore, in consultation with Contracting States, airspace users and service providers, the feasibility of achieving a civil, internationally controlled GNSS.”

That same year, the United States renewed and refined Reagan’s pledge, promising ICAO that the GPS Standard Positioning Service would be made available on a continuous worldwide basis, free of direct user fees, for the “foreseeable future.” Russia followed in 1996 with a similar commitment for GLONASS, and both offers were accepted by the ICAO Council.

In the intervening years, as GNSS service providers have repeated their vows to ICAO, the latter organization has shaped a multitude of standards and recommended practices (SARPs) and minimum operational performance specifications (MOPS) that support applications of the GNSS technology along with satellite-based communications.

Nonetheless, the search for an integrated GNSS for civil aviation has not gone well, because we still have not reached the Promised Land of mandatory, real-time tracking of civil airliners over the oceans.

To paraphrase journalist/provocateur John Oliver, “Why is this still not a thing?”

Here is an industry that can squeeze another row of seats into the economy sections of its entire fleet in six months, but it can’t implement a fundamental safety measure that’s been technically feasible for nearly 20 years?

Who’s at fault? Culprits abound: The air transport industry that wants to avoid equipage costs. The unenforceable ICAO measures pending “voluntary” adoption by carriers and member-states. The national civil aviation authorities that, appearing to have abandoned any regulatory role except the narrowest and most pressing of safety issues, continue to punt on the increasingly obvious lack of surveillance.

Meanwhile, the people financing this fiasco — travelers held hostage by an ever more oligopolistic airline industry — continue to get a bad deal.

Perhaps we need to turn this problem over to the National Security Agency or the CIA, who seem to know where everybody is in the world at every moment. Or maybe the people and institutions with the power to remedy the situation need to step up and fulfill their responsibilities.

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The money, which is supposed to support that portion of the GPS program springing from the needs of civilian users, has been held up for months. In fact, as of late August — with less than 40 days left to go in the fiscal year — the money had not been transferred to either the military’s GPS Directorate or the National Coordination Office (NCO) for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT).

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has told those awaiting their slice of the GPS civil program budget that the funds are on the way.

The money, which is supposed to support that portion of the GPS program springing from the needs of civilian users, has been held up for months. In fact, as of late August — with less than 40 days left to go in the fiscal year — the money had not been transferred to either the military’s GPS Directorate or the National Coordination Office (NCO) for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT).

Not only are the funds late, when the promised amount finally does arrive, the total will — again — be far short of what was budgeted.

The reasons for the breakdown have been murky. By all accounts the FAA, which is responsible for the civil funding, has been dragging its feet when it comes to distributing the money. Sources, however, also describe a process that has been complicated by program delays, Defense Department priorities and a Congress that is taking an ever-sharper pencil to government spending.

The funding problems are a particularly touchy issue politically and all of those who agreed to talk about it — experts from both the military and civilian side — requested anonymity to be able to speak freely.

The FAA would just as soon not be involved at all, sources agreed. The agency was tapped by its parent, the Department of Transportation (DoT), after the White House issued its space-based PNT policy at the end of 2004. That policy designated DoT as the responsible agency to provide resources for the “assessment, development, acquisition, implementation, operation, and sustainment of additional designated Global Positioning System civil capabilities beyond the second and third civil signals.”

Having the civil community fund the capabilities it desired gave it leverage when negotiating with the Pentagon — and reined civil requests in a bit. “It’s really easy to say I want something when you don’t have to pay for it,” said one expert.

At the time, said a source, those additional capabilities included the fourth civil signal, L1C, and civil signal monitoring. The earlier civil signals, including L5, were considered to be part of the GPS program and were to be funded by the Defense Department as already planned.

Tougher Than It Looks
Faced with finding both the money and the mechanism to keep funding flowing, a source told Inside GNSS, DoT first looked at distributing the cost across the many transportation offices that benefited from GPS. That plan was ultimately deemed too “high-risk,” especially given that the total budget would have to go through more Congressional committees — each with the power to slice off bits for other programs.

Ultimately DoT decided to fund the entire requirement through FAA. The aviation agency had one of the largest budgets in DoT, a particular interest in GPS, and the staff necessary to manage the requests to Congress and oversee spending. FAA was not happy with the decision, said the expert, who is familiar with the discussions at the time. “FAA did not appreciate being the sole source for the civil funding.”

FAA’s reticence was not just because managing the civil funding would be a lot of work. Multiple sources have confirmed that FAA does not get extra money to cover the new expense — a total of $235.5 million over five years, according to a background paper on civil funding that can be found on the NCO-managed website, gps.gov.

“From the civil perspective that was a significant amount of money,” said one source. “They [FAA] would have to carve that amount of money out of their budget and, frankly, they wanted to spend it on aviation-centric things and not be the sole representative for all the civil funding from which all the civil departments benefited.”

Money Worries
Despite FAA’s misgivings, things went fairly smoothly at first. A total of $7.2 million and $20.7 million was allocated in fiscal year 2008 (FY08) and FY09, respectively, according to the funding profile. The agency asked for and received $43.4 million in FY10.

In fiscal year 2011, however, Congress cut the FAA request of $58.5 million, granting only $38.423 million. That was more of a program adjustment than a cut, however, explained one expert. As part of its responsibility to finance civil monitoring the FAA was partially funding the new GPS ground control segment or OCX. That program had gotten a late start and the money was not yet needed.

“They weren’t ready yet to spend that money in FY11,” said the source. So, the Air Force indicated they could afford to give up that money in the fiscal year as long as they got it back in a future fiscal year.

The money does not, however, appear to have been restored. FAA only got $19 million of the $50.3 million it requested for civil funding in FY12.

“I’ve been on programs before where you weren’t able to spend it one year and then you get punished the next year — even if that’s the year you really need it,” said the source. “Congress looks at it that way — you didn’t use what you asked for and therefore we’re going to take it out.”

Though the Senate did not give a reason for the cuts, the House said the FY12 request was slashed because the Department of Defense (DoD) was holding “a significant unobligated balance in this program.” The same reason was given this summer when the House whacked FAA’s request for $40 million for FY13 back to $15 million. The Senate cut the request to $19 million. The final amount of the cut has yet to be worked out by congressional conferees.

Sources gave several reasons why the civil money lingered in the account without being obligated to a contract. As the GPS Directorate went about its work, it prioritized some pressing tasks ahead of getting the civil funds obligated, said one source, which allowed the money to accumulate.

There was also a lack of clarity on how to allocate the money, said another source. “They don’t know what to spend it on.”

Indeed, Raytheon, the OCX prime contractor, has only recently completed its plan on how to implement FAA’s monitoring requirements in the ground segment. There also appears to be a long running discussion about how FAA’s needs are to be integrated into the constellation and what that means for modernization.

Among the things that the aviation agency was seeking at one point, according to one insider, was the same level of integrity from the GPS satellites as is provided by the total GPS Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). The level of integrity reflects the probability of getting so-called “hazardously misleading information” about the precise location of aircraft.

The aviation integrity requirement is very tough — a probability at or below 1×10^-7 for an approach at the worst time and location in the service volume for which the service is claimed to be available, as summarized in a 2003 paper entitled, “Integrity Lessons from the WAAS Integrity Performance Panel (WIPP),” by Todd Walter and Per Enge of Stanford University and Bruce DeCleene of the FAA.

The GPS constellation has an integrity level of 1×10^–5, said the source. The FAA wanted a higher level that required laser crosslinks costing some $29 million to $35 million per satellite. FAA would then have to monitor the system for 10 to 15 years to verify its integrity, the source said, substantially pushing off any benefit. Though the decision is not final, the laser crosslinks will likely be deferred, said the source.

At this point it is not clear how far behind FAA is on getting the amount that it needs to meet its funding obligation. Of the total $235.5 million in the five-year funding profile, Congress has provided only about $119 million.

During discussions at the August meeting of the National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board in Arlington, Kirk Lewis, executive director of the GPS Independent Review Team, mentioned $55 million as the amount of civil monies that the Air Force was still expecting.

Whatever the amount, the original five-year funding period has run its course. The FAA, however, is not abandoning its pledge. Sources confirmed that the FAA and DoD are negotiating a continuation of the funding arrangement.

But It’s Not All in the Mail
In addition to the outright funding shortages, the FAA has been dragging its feet in transferring the funds it has received. As noted earlier, the 2012 funding for National Coordination Office had yet to be sent — forcing cuts including a scaling back of travel, Inside GNSS has learned.

Agreed-to funding also had not been transferred to the GPS Directorate. “There is no question that the program office made its plan based on having that money,” said one source familiar with the problem. “That was their choice . . . and they are having to live with that decision.”

Sources told Inside GNSS that a deal has been worked out to get the money to the program office before the end of the fiscal year.

For the OCX program “FAA has authorized expenditure of all prior year funding ($32M) that was obligated on the contract, plus $2M for FY12,” the FAA said in an emailed response to a query about the funding. The rest of the FY12 money will be transferred as well, sources confirmed.

Sources told Inside GNSS that all the money will be obligated before the end of September. Both FAA and DoD now have a special incentive to quickly push the funding to the appropriate contractors: Should the drastic budget cuts set to kick in at the beginning of next year actually happen, any unobligated money is at risk of being swept up by Congress.

Effects Unclear
Given the long FAA requirements process and the shifting design parameters being handled by the GPS Directorate, it is perhaps understandable that the effect of the civil funding delays on the GPS program are unclear.

None of the sources who discussed the matter with Inside GNSS were able to pinpoint what the lack of money would do to the program. In fact, more than one person said that the GPS Directorate had not issued any kind of assessment on what the cuts would mean.

“The big question,” said one expert, “is ‘How is it going to hurt you, and what is it you are not going to do?’ We don’t have a clue.”

”We have not yet assessed the full impact and rationale of this cut,” confirmed a spokesperson for Air Force Space Command, Space and Missile Systems Center’s Global Positioning Systems Directorate in an emailed statement. “The GPS program office is actively working with DoT/FAA to minimize any impacts to the GPS program based on the proposed funding changes.”

Without a Fight
Multiple sources confirmed that the FAA did not go to Capitol Hill to argue for restoration of the civil GPS money even though the issue of having unobligated funds had, ostensibly, been resolved. Not knowing the consequences of making the cuts may be part of the reason why.

The FAA may also have lacked the information it needed to fight the cuts.

“The executive agency can go back and reclamith — or argue to have a change [cut] undone,” explained a source. “In order to do a reclamith you’ve got to have some really hard facts and data as to what the impact is if I get this or don’t get it. And they don’t have that information. So I can understand full well why the FAA did not go back and reclamith it.”

The FAA may have also been trying to pick its battles in a tight budget year, sources confirmed, and the civil GPS funding involves a relatively small amount money. “They had much bigger fish to fry,” one source pointed out.

Fortunately, a new champion for civil funding could be waiting in the wings. The National Coordination Office apparently may take on that role. The NCO already follows GPS funding closely and, if the agencies agree, sources said, may step up to defend the civil allocations before Congress.

The post GPS Civil Funding appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

The "After Longitude" symposium covers what happened in between Harrison’s clocks and geospatial PNT. It is sponsored by the British National Maritime Museum and the Royal Institute of Navigation.

The event takes place on March 22 and 23 at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. 

Speakers on Thursday, March 22 will cover the earlier history of navigation. On Friday, topics include:

The "After Longitude" symposium covers what happened in between Harrison’s clocks and geospatial PNT. It is sponsored by the British National Maritime Museum and the Royal Institute of Navigation.

The event takes place on March 22 and 23 at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. 

Speakers on Thursday, March 22 will cover the earlier history of navigation. On Friday, topics include:

• Navigating at 50,000 and 500 feet during the Cold War
• Lunars in Space
• The Longitude Challenge in Deep Space
• From Lighthouses to eNavigation
• From Harrison to GPS

and issues of modern maritime navigation.

Register online at the website below.

The post After Longitude – Modern Navigation in Context appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

Peter Chapman-Andrews replaced David Broughton as director of Britain’s Royal Institute of Navigation in January. He will be the fourth director since RIN was founded in 1947.

Chapman is a graduate of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He served as Queen’s Harbor Master, Portsmouth, and as fleet navigation officer on the staff of CinC fleet. He also served as aircraft director officer, principal warfare officer, navigation officer and ship’s commander during his career in the Royal Navy. He retired  in 2004 with the rank of captain.

Peter Chapman-Andrews replaced David Broughton as director of Britain’s Royal Institute of Navigation in January. He will be the fourth director since RIN was founded in 1947.

Chapman is a graduate of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He served as Queen’s Harbor Master, Portsmouth, and as fleet navigation officer on the staff of CinC fleet. He also served as aircraft director officer, principal warfare officer, navigation officer and ship’s commander during his career in the Royal Navy. He retired  in 2004 with the rank of captain.

David Broughton served more than 17 years as RIN director and is now secretary general of the International Association of Institutes of Navigation (IAIN).

RIN, based in London, is a charitable learned society dedicated to the art and science of navigation.  The membership group holds educational events and competitions, sponsors special interest and regional groups, and publishes in all areas of navigation including satellite positioning, navigation and timing. It was granted a royal charter in 2007.

The post Peter Chapman-Andrews New Director of Royal Institute of Navigation appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

I’m inaugurating my new blog, Director’s Cut, at the 2010 Munich Satellite Navigation Summit.

Hope you’ll join me there!

I’m inaugurating my new blog, Director’s Cut, at the 2010 Munich Satellite Navigation Summit.

Hope you’ll join me there!

The post Introducing the editor’s blog: Director’s Cut appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

One of the oldest names in the GNSS industry — Ashtech — is returning to the marketplace as both a corporate identity and branded product line.

Magellan Professional announced January 7 that the France- and California-based company had renamed itself Ashtech, confirming the staying power of a precision technology brand that first appeared in 1987.

One of the oldest names in the GNSS industry — Ashtech — is returning to the marketplace as both a corporate identity and branded product line.

Magellan Professional announced January 7 that the France- and California-based company had renamed itself Ashtech, confirming the staying power of a precision technology brand that first appeared in 1987.

Ashtech’s reappearance reflects business realignments that saw the consumer products division of Magellan’s GPS business sold to Taiwan-headquartered MiTAC International Corporation in December 2008.

Ashtech Holdings and subsidiary companies in France, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere will remain enterprises owned by Shah Capital Partners, a private equity investment firm that acquired the core business from the Thales Group in 2006.

The renaming will enable the 160-employee company to clarify and distinguish itself from Magellan consumer products, which continue as a brand of a MiTAC subsidiary based in Santa Clara, California. “Through 2009 we decided we needed to clarify and strengthen our commitment to the professional business,” says François Erceau, Ashtech’s vice-president and general manager.

In conversations with customers, distributors, and other business partners, company leaders found a unanimous preference for the Ashtech name. The renaming will benefit from Ashtech’s early and deeply rooted presence in the high-precision GPS — and later, GPS/GLONASS — application markets such as surveying.

“It’s a rebirth, but not a comeback,” Erceau told Inside GNSS. “The equity we had in the [Ashtech] brand was so incredible that it would have been a waste not to leverage it.”

Indeed, although under the terms of the agreement with MiTAC the company could have retained its Magellan identify until 2012, company leaders decided to “accelerate” the transition to the new name.

Erceau says the company will focus on communicating the switch to Ashtech during the first quarter of this year before beginning to roll out new and upgraded products with the Ashtech label in the second quarter.

Markets: Application and Geographic
Ashtech has four primary product lines: OEM, with a series of GNSS sensor boards (such as MB500 and AC12); high-precision land survey (Proflex 500 and ProMark 500); mobile mapping, including handheld GNSS receivers (MobileMapper 6) and software targeting geographic information systems (GIS) and related applications; and a marine and sensors product line.

The company will continue to rely on its GNSS design center in Moscow, Russia, that creates the ASICS, sensor boards, IP, and algorithms at the core of the Ashtech product technology. Similarly, solution-level product design will remain at the Ashtech European headquarters near Nantes, France.

GNSS core OEM products represents about 20 to 25 percent of Ashtech’s revenues, Erceau says, and is a market segment that “has been pretty good for us,” adding, “we want to grow this business. The market expects Ashtech to be at the forefront of technology and innovation.”

“It’s one thing to be proud of [the Ashtech name],” Erceau told Inside GNSS, “but the market wants a number of proof points about what [the name change] means and what difference it will make.”

In addition to incorporating GPS and GLONASS technology, Ashtech is also watching the emergence of other GNSS systems, including Galileo and Compass, and assessing the right time to add those capabilities to its products.

Although the company remained profitable during the last year, Erceau notes that “2009 was not the easiest time for the industry.” In particular, the U.S. and Canadian markets proved challenging, with China, India, and Latin America showing more resilience. The privately held company does not disclose its financial results.

“The biggest challenge for us is in the United States, where the economy has made it really difficult,” he says. “Our most striking successes have been in the developing countries.” Nonetheless, the hardest part of the recession may be behind the industry, and Erceau expects 2010 to be “a better year.”

The company expects the new identity will benefit it beyond just product sales. Erceau speculates that some channels will come back to Ashtech and wants the company to be flexible and creative in its partnerships.

“We want to bring innovation not only on the product side, but also on the business model side,” says Erceau.

GNSS Genealogy
The history of the Ashtech name is part of the long story of convergence and divestiture within the GNSS industry over the past 25 years. Indeed, the earliest element of the company arose more than four decades ago with the founding of Sercel, an electronics company that later developed the first European GPS receiver in 1985. The company facilities in Carquefou near Nantes, France, trace back to Sercel.

Magellan Systems Corporation, founded in 1986, introduced the first commercial handheld receiver in 1989 — the single-channel, sequencing NAV 1000. Orbital Sciences Corporation acquired Magellan in 1994 and merged it with Ashtech three years later to become Magellan Corporation.

Meanwhile, Sercel sold its radio-positioning division to Dassault Electronique in 1996, with a joint venture formed under the name Dassault Sercel Navigation Positioning (DSNP). Dassault Electronique, which became the full owner of DSNP in 1998, merged with two Thomson-CSF subsidiaries the following year to become Thomson-CSF Detexis.

In 2000, DSNP acquired MLR Electronique, a radionavigation (and later consumer GPS) company founded in 1980. Also in 2000, Thomson-CSF changed its name to Thales Group, and, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thales Group, DSNP changed its name to Thales Navigation, S.A. Then in 2001 the Thales Group bought Magellan Corporation from Orbital Science and merged it with the French company to form Thales Navigation.

The original Ashtech, Inc., was founded by Javad Ashjaee with 51 percent ownership by the large French high-tech manufacturer Sagem. Ashjaee headed the company for the next eight years until he left to start a series of eponymously titled enterprises, most currently Javad GNSS. Somewhat ironically, the new Ashtech and Javad GNSS will continue to compete in many of the same market segments going forward.

The post The Return of Ashtech: A GNSS Pioneer Leaves Magellan Brand Behind appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.