Kevin Dennehy, a seasoned GNSS industry conference developer, columnist and writer and a retired Army National Guard officer, has joined Inside GNSS. As managing editor, he will be responsible for reporting online about the GNSS industry and working with Editor and Publisher Glen Gibbons on the print edition.

Contact him with company news and new product announcements at <ke***@********ss.com>.

Kevin Dennehy, a seasoned GNSS industry conference developer, columnist and writer and a retired Army National Guard officer, has joined Inside GNSS. As managing editor, he will be responsible for reporting online about the GNSS industry and working with Editor and Publisher Glen Gibbons on the print edition.

Contact him with company news and new product announcements at <ke***@********ss.com>.

Dennehy developed and produced the 2016 Driverless Conference in San Francisco and was the founder and director of GPS-Wireless, a conference that covered the mobile information markets industry for 15 years.

A journalist with two decades of  experience with GNSS business and technology, he has been a columnist for GPS World; a managing editor for Recon, an international history travel magazine; senior editor for Global Positioning and Navigation News, a biweekly newsletter and GPS Strategic Directions, a quarterly magazine. He co-authored the 2014 guidebook, The D-Day Assault: A Guide to the Normandy Landings after 70 Years.

He has been a reporter and photographer for The Washington Times, the Greeley Daily Tribune, and Alamosa Valley Courier, covering sports, education, local government and federal agencies.

Dennehy retired from the Army National Guard in 2014 with the rank of colonel. He was a Special Forces officer with combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and deployments to Bosnia, Germany, Korea, and the
Horn of Africa.

Dennehy has earned degrees in law, history, and journalism. He lives and works in Denver, Colorado

The post Kevin Dennehy Joins Inside GNSS Editorial Staff appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

>>Sandy Kennedy’s Compass Points

Sandy Kennedy grew up in Miami. Miami, Manitoba, Canada, that is — a town of 150 people with a school, a café, a defunct railroad station, and an ice skating rink.

Now she’s director and chief engineer in charge of receiver core cards at NovAtel Inc., a developer and manufacturer of high-precision GNSS products headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. It’s a long way from where she started, but then again, maybe not.

>>Sandy Kennedy’s Compass Points

Sandy Kennedy grew up in Miami. Miami, Manitoba, Canada, that is — a town of 150 people with a school, a café, a defunct railroad station, and an ice skating rink.

Now she’s director and chief engineer in charge of receiver core cards at NovAtel Inc., a developer and manufacturer of high-precision GNSS products headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. It’s a long way from where she started, but then again, maybe not.

“I am the first generation in my family off the farm since time immemorial,” Kennedy said. Her parents are retired farmers, who were born and raised on farms near the same town where they live in today. Until she was 18 she was part of the family business — raising cattle, but mostly growing corn that ended up as alcohol.

“Ours was a mixed farm,” she says. “At that time it was the most northern point in North America growing distillery-grade corn. We just barely had enough heat units. And we had about 50 head of Black Angus cattle. Memories of the farm are my entire childhood.”

Among Kennedy’s most enduring memories are the sunsets.

“Our lane looked due west; so, you could watch the sunset track from south to north every year. When I learned the scientific meaning of the equinox, it was reinforced by the memory of the sun setting exactly at the end of the lane every March and September.”

An astute observation for a youngster, but agriculture isn’t for dummies, and science of a different sort turned out to be her career. Kennedy grew up to become a top engineer in a field that has made life much easier for farmers everywhere.

As the much younger sibling of two older sisters, Kennedy spent a lot of time exploring on her own with a pony or a dog as company.

She remembers building rafts to float on the pond and constructing “tree structures,” as “tree-houses” would have been “too grand a description,” she says.

Outlandish Fortune
It might seem strange for a funny little girl from a farm in rural Manitoba to end up at the apex of 21st-century technology. But are the two worlds — farm and laboratory — really so far apart?

“The farm is a great laboratory! A spectacularly unsafe laboratory!” Kennedy says. “There was plenty of room to experiment and make mistakes, and lots of phenomena to observe.”

She burned things up, cut down trees, built stuff, did engine repair, and learned welding. Watched her dad in the shop and her mother in the house. Farm life taught her how to troubleshoot and gave her the confidence to make something from scratch

Asked whom she would name as an early engineering mentor, Kennedy points to her father, Alan Kennedy. He was not a trained engineer, but a “fix-it-yourself farmer,” says Kennedy. “I sat and passed wrenches from toddlerhood onwards, and I watched him draw up designs for various farm implements in the notebook he always carried in his front pocket.”

“Dad is a tinkerer. He probably should have been a mechanical engineer, but he decided to stay on the farm where he was provided all sorts of opportunities to invent, and he did.”

Her mother, Dulcie Kennedy, was also very good with her hands. She had a home economics degree — one of the few degrees available to women in the early 1960s. “She was an active farm wife, but she and Dad had a traditional division of labor,” says Kennedy. “But she would have made an excellent quality auditor; she’s a stickler for details.”

Kennedy says the “traditional” division of labor only applied to her parents’ working relationship with each other. With three daughters in the house, there was no girls’ work and boys’ work as in many other farm families. “There was just ‘work,’” Kennedy said.

When Sandy was born, her 46-yearold father gave up waiting for a son, she said, and treated her like a boy instead.

When the time came, “Mom and Dad were very supportive of me going into engineering,” she recalls. “I was a top student and engineering is a good career.”

Pivotal Moments
As part of a working farm, Kennedy first heard of GPS in the mid-1990s, about the same time as the early precision agriculture systems were being introduced. However, she learned about the new technology, not on the farm but as a career option when her high school guidance counselor went to a PD Day — a Professional Development in-service for Canadian teachers — and heard University of Calgary Professor Gérard Lachapelle talk about geomatics engineering.

“I’d made good marks in calculus and physics,” Kennedy says, “and I figured satellites had to use a lot of calculus and physics. I had already decided I wanted to do engineering, so geomatics engineering became my choice.”

Figuring apart, Kennedy says her love affair with GNSS really gained momentum during her undergraduate years at the University of Calgary. As she learned more about it, she saw more of its potential. “I used to joke that if there was going to be a ‘big brother,’ I at least wanted to know how big brother worked,” she says. I read a lot of science fiction back then!”

On her very first day at university, Kennedy met Arlin Amundrud, another future geomatics engineer and now a commissioned land surveyor. The university sponsored an informal program in which new students were paired with older ones for orientation and advice, Kennedy says. “The older student got a beer ticket for each frosh they took on, and I was beer ticket number five for my future beloved.”

They married during the summer she graduated. Her 16-year-old self would have been appalled, Kennedy says, because she had been a “rage-against-the-patriarchal-norms type of girl. It sounds corny, but I always found him calming and we decided to get married after about six months of dating. There was never any question.”

From Corn Field to Oil Field and Beyond
With the first round of fun out of the way, the real exertion could now begin. Kennedy started working with GNSS in 2000, as a graduate student in the Geomatics Engineering Department at the University of Calgary, under Professor Klaus-Peter Schwarz, an expert in inertial navigation and gravimetry and a former head of the department.

Her research area was airborne gravimetry, and the GPS problem — and, yes, it really was just GPS then as GLONASS was not a factor at that time — was how to derive vehicle accelerations with the lowest noise possible by combining with the accelerometer measurements and a normal gravity model, to derive the gravity anomalies/disturbances in a local area.

It was a very specific niche use of GPS, but it exposed Kennedy to the fine details of GPS carrier phase measurements. Instead of differentiating the time series of positions, she differentiated in the phase domain. “It made a slight improvement in overall vehicle acceleration accuracy,” she says, “and had some operational advantages because at that time ambiguity resolution at long baselines (100km+) was not reliable.”

In 2002, with her master’s studies completed, Kennedy joined BJ Pipeline Inspection, now part of the giant oilfield services company Baker Hughes, where she worked on improving inertial surveying techniques for “smart pigs,” known more formally as the Pipeline Inspection Gauge equipment used to detect leaks, corrosion, or other flaws.

In 2004, she was hired as a research engineer by NovAtel, Inc. At the time, the company was looking for a way to position seismic geophones — sensors that may remain stationary under heavy tree canopies for days — to better than 50 centimeters using GPS L1 only.

In order to achieve the accuracy goal, she modified the float ambiguity routines to take advantage of the stationary aspect and to handle the poor measurement quality. The field campaign took place in a research forest in British Columbia, where the team completed a conventional total station survey to provide reference coordinates for verifying the GPS achieved accuracy.

This project resulted in a patent that served as proof of concept for an eventual product. Kennedy says, “That was extremely lucky for my first assignment at a new job.”

Kennedy continued her activities as research engineer at NovAtel, working on carrier phase-based positioning in difficult environments, and GPS/INS integration. She then served as a product engineer, working on GPS/inertial integration, algorithm development, and embedded firmware. Until 2010, she was functional manager and technical lead for the Synchronous Position, Attitude, and Navigation (SPAN) product group, which worked on combining GNSS and inertial technologies.

It was during this stretch that NovAtel launched some of its most iconic GNSS/INS products, including the first non-export–controlled, high-accuracy GNSS/INS system in 2006 (a version of SPAN that incorporated iMAR’s FSAS inertial measurement unit) and 2008 (SPAN-CPT with KVH Industries’ fiberoptic gyro and micro-electromechanical accelerometer inertial components).

In 2010, Kennedy was made advanced development manager for integrated navigation systems, working with a small group of senior engineers on applied research projects. Finally, in 2013, she achieved her current position of chief engineer of core receiver cards.

“In 2013, we launched the OEM625S, the first hybrid civilian GNSS (GPS+GLO) and SAASM [Selective Availability/anti-spoofing module] receiver, developed in partnership with L3-IEC,” she says. This product offers centimeter-level real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning using SAASM measurements, falling back to the civilian solution should the SAASM be un-keyed. “It services the military UAV market, which was an early adopter of commercial RTK.”

And in 2014, Kennedy helped launch NovAtel’s OEM617D, a dual-antenna–input GNSS card offering dual-frequency GPS, GLONASS, and BeiDou signal processing on both antenna fees to provide a very accurate and precise GNSS heading (and pitch) solution.

Life as an Engineer, and an Engineer for Life
Since her husband, his father, and his brother are also engineers, an engineering mindset tends to be the norm in her non-working life as well.

“Building a fence or deck turns into a whole decision matrix of design trade-offs,” Kennedy says. “One is always looking for efficiencies in how the household is set up — minimizing the number trips to the grocery store and food waste. Or, on vacation, you’re enjoying a beautiful seaside view, and the second thought after ‘wow, that’s pretty’ is ‘I wonder what they do for sewage treatment and where it’s located?’”.

It’s not all engineering, though. Kennedy enjoys the great outdoors, with downhill skiing readily at hand in western Canada, as well as scuba diving and travel. “I took a gap year between high school and university and worked as a ‘lifty’ to learn how to ski in the mountains,” she says.

When two intrepid engineers set up house, no one should be surprised at what happened next: intrepid baby engineers.

“My son Anson is four,” Kennedy says. “He definitely shows some early engineering tendencies — like watching how the carnival ride hydraulics work rather than the view. As for my daughter Erica, at six months, she’s too young to tell.”

Indeed, getting the home/worklife balance right can be tricky, Kennedy admits.

“Arlin and I both like our work, and there isn’t really one dominant career. Talking shop at supper is pretty common because we both know enough about the other’s job to discuss things in detail.”

And combining parenthood and a career is particularly tough.

“I can’t work the long hours that I used to because I’m a mom and kids are only young once,” she says. “I am now much more focused on making every minute of my office day count. After all, I’m really only smart for about four to five hours a day anyway.”

And it only works, she says, because husband Arlin is a true partner. “For both kids, I returned to work at halftime after around six months, and Arlin scaled back to half-time for six months to allow me to do that. We switch at noon.”

They both had to negotiate the halftime arrangement with their employers because only full-time parental leave is covered under Canadian law.

“NovAtel has been very supportive, and I do things at odd hours when necessary,” she says.

Half-time, odd-time, all the time, Sandy Kennedy is a great example of where the human side of life meets engineering.

The post Sandy Kennedy: Here to Stay appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

Stuart Riley’s Compass Points

Stuart Riley was born and raised in Nottingham, England, where some of the crucial crossroads in his career appeared quite early.

One such inflection point came when he was just 10 or 11, and it involved a birthday present from his sister, Alison.

Stuart Riley’s Compass Points

Stuart Riley was born and raised in Nottingham, England, where some of the crucial crossroads in his career appeared quite early.

One such inflection point came when he was just 10 or 11, and it involved a birthday present from his sister, Alison.

“She’s two and a half years younger than me,” says Riley. “And, as I was the older sibling, she didn’t necessarily have the same influence on me that an older brother or sister might have, but she was the one that gave me a book about electronics in my pre-teen years, and by doing so she made a real difference in my life and eventual career.”

He had always had an interest in mathematics and science, but the electronics book from little Alison sent Riley over the edge into a full-blown fascination with the subject. He soon started building small circuits and learned how to program a few years later.

Riley cruised through grade school and finished high school in good stead, and then came the insurance detour.

Riley remembers excellent teachers in science and mathematics, but at 18 he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. His parents and extended family were supportive, but none of them had been to university, and “I didn’t think it was for me,” Riley recalls.

He thought he might like working in electronics, but instead, as things go, he ended up getting a job working on commercial insurance policies.

Thankfully, that didn’t last.

“I hated it,” he says, “and I soon realized I couldn’t do it for the rest of my life.” In fact, when the breaking point came, he couldn’t do it for another minute.

So he went ‑ that is to say he ran back ‑ to his old school, got some references from former teachers and, with all the right grades on his record, applied to university.

Riley says working in an insurance office was probably the best thing that had ever happened to him. “I had effectively taken a year out of education when I started at Leeds University, and was highly motivated to succeed so I’d be able to have a career I wanted.”

Growing up, he had never expected to leave Nottingham and was very happy there.

His father, William Riley, worked in a factory for his whole career, operating wood-working machinery to make parts for cars and furniture. His mother, Patricia, had a variety of jobs, along with taking many years out to raise Stuart and Alison.

While university was an unknown within the family, Riley’s parents were happy to see their son getting a good education.

“They very much encouraged me through my university and professional careers,” he says, “although I think they would have been supportive whatever industry or occupation I had gone into.”

Satellite navigation entered his life in 1989, during his final year as an undergraduate when he worked on a project to develop a TRANSIT receiver under Professor Peter Daly. (TRANSIT was the U.S. Navy Navigation Satellite System implemented in the 1960s.) Riley was interested in digital communications and realized that satnav made for a good fit.

After receiving a first class honors degree in electrical engineering, he started a doctoral program, working for Daly. In Daly’s group, Riley, along with other graduate students, worked on multi-frequency/multi-system GNSS receivers, with the focus squarely on GPS and GLONASS. The group was very small but well known in the industry.

“Working with Professor Daly, my specific project was to develop a receiver capable of tracking the L1 and L2 P-code from GLONASS,” Riley recalls. “At the time there were no commercially available receivers capable of doing this.”

Around the time Riley was graduating from the doctoral program, the group won a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop a proof-of-concept receiver for space applications. Riley stayed on to manage the project as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on the architecture and firmware.

After about 18 months he decided it was time to go into industry. He was offered a job with Trimble Navigation Ltd. in California and has worked there every since.

Trimble Navigation was founded by Hewlett Packard engineers in 1978, initially focusing on designing and building Loran receivers. However, that same year the first GPS satellite went up, and Trimble turned its attention to the emerging satellite-based technology, drawing on immature GPS receiver designs that the company had purchased from H-P. By the time Riley joined the company, Trimble had gone public and was innovating rapidly.

The Big Step
Joining Trimble thrust Riley into the midst of these activities. His first project was working on the Everest multipath mitigation technique. Patented in the mid-1990s Everest technology enhanced surveying accuracy near buildings, mine walls, vehicles, trees, water, or other reflective surfaces.

When that was finished, Trimble’s application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design engineer left for another opportunity. Riley had helped develop the digital baseband of a receiver at Leeds and was asked to lead the design of the new digital ASIC.

It was probably his most challenging project at Trimble.

Riley started out as a team of one, and he had no experience with an ASIC flow. Also, this was the first ASIC for Trimble in which Verilog, a high-level hardware description language, would be used rather than a schematic-capture approach.

He built on his earlier hardware experience with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and an overall understanding of GNSS baseband architectures, he extended the older architecture to add the new features.

“As I had spent a significant percentage of my short career developing software, I brought some of the best practices along. For example, source control had not been used previously for ASIC design at the company,” he says.

It was Riley’s first ASIC and he really wanted it to be a success; so, he built a rigorous test bench in “C” programming language — at least as rigorous as was possible with reasonable run time on early 1990s computer hardware — to model the ASIC and automate the testing. Trimble still uses a much-extended version of this today, he says.

“Since the first ASIC I was involved in, Maxwell 3, I have either been directly involved in the design of or have managed all subsequent high-precision devices [Trimble has] built.” After that, Riley and a member of the marketing team, identified a gap in the company’s survey portfolio and they suggested a project that became the GPS Total Station 4700 in 1998.

“I was allowed to develop this myself and designed the hardware, leveraged from other designs, and ported our existing code base to the new platform,” he says. “Once I had a proof of concept and the capabilities of the platform were understood, it became a fully staffed project and a larger team helped to complete it and bring it to market.”

With successful projects now stacking up, Riley was made a manager while still spending most of his time as a hands-on engineer. Over the years he took on additional responsibilities, starting with the ASICs, then adding the digital electronics, signal processing, application firmware, RF engineering, and finally the overall product responsibility, including mechanical, project management, and quality assurance teams.

On more recent projects, Riley has been less involved with the hands-on engineering. For example, the 5800 survey system, where he was more heavily involved in the engineering, has morphed into the R4, R6, R8 and more recent evolutions. He was also responsible for the overall development team of the R10, the Infrastructure NetR9, and OEM boards and modules.

On the construction side, Riley oversaw development of the Site Positioning Systems series of GNSS receivers. Although he has no responsibility for Trimble’s agricultural product line, Riley-led engineers do supply the signal-processing library along with key ASICs.

While still mostly responsible for the overall management, Riley has been involved in some engineering aspects of the development of the Trimble’s integrated multi-GNSS/ inertial boards and modules, including products used for unmanned aerial vehicles, with Trimble’s Terrasat team providing the precision engine and Trimble’s Applanix group providing an inertial engine.

Who He Is
Despite his Silicon Valley success, Riley has never lost touch with his roots. His parents still live in Nottingham, and he returns home to see them whenever he can. There is certainly plenty for him to miss about the East Midlands, especially seeing his family, but Riley really likes the California Bay Area where he now lives and has managed to start a new branch of the Riley clan.

Married for 11 years to his wife, Katie, a Maine native who he met in San Francisco, the couple has a son, Ben, just turned nine. “It’s too early to know what he will do when he grows up,” Riley says of the boy. “Like me, he’s interested in science and how things work. So, if he should decide to become an engineer, I’ll certainly be very supportive, but all I want is that he applies himself and tries at whatever he decides to do.”

Balancing parenthood and a demanding job with a heavy travel schedule is an ongoing challenge to find time to be with his family. “I try to make sure I am as connected as possible to Ben and his school, and I think I’ve gotten better over time.”

The Rileys like to get away when possible for long weekends in nearby venues, longer vacations together, and visits to their extended family on the East Coast of the United States and in the UK. “

So there you have it. A child gives her big brother a book. A boy takes the wrong job, and it leads him apply to university. He finds his place in digital design and engineering and an innovative company thousands of miles from home. All of this happens as GNSS technology and applications explode.

GNSS positioning, navigation, and timing says it all. 

The post Stuart Riley: Right Turn from the Wrong Path appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

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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SIDEBAR: Marc Weiss’ Compass Points

In a career spanning nearly the entire history of GNSS-enhanced metrology, Marc Weiss has been a key participant in projects that laid the foundation for accurate synchronization of atomic clocks around the world.

SIDEBAR: Marc Weiss’ Compass Points

In a career spanning nearly the entire history of GNSS-enhanced metrology, Marc Weiss has been a key participant in projects that laid the foundation for accurate synchronization of atomic clocks around the world.

As a mathematical physics Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado–Boulder, Weiss began working with then nascent GPS technology in the late 1970s. Fast-forward 35 years, and Weiss is still in Boulder, until recently as a career mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Time and Frequency Division. NIST is the United States’ measurement standards laboratory, and the site of the NIST-F1 atomic clock, which serves as the United States’ primary time and frequency standard.

As of January 1, Weiss became a NIST associate and contractor with the ability now to consult with industry. He shares a key patent in the precise timing field, has received prestigious awards for his pioneering research, and continues his work in the areas of telecommunications synchronization and the use of relativity in GPS.

But at its heart, his professional journey has been a pursuit of Beauty.

“I was interested in math as an art form first. When I was a kid, my father got me into this as a way of appreciating pure forms of beauty,” Weiss says. “I wanted to do everything, and decided to study Math and Theater: math got me in touch with all sciences and theater, with all arts.”

Early on, Weiss was influenced by a short book titled The Education of T.C. Mits [an acronym for “the celebrated man in the street”] — a popular treatise on mathematical thinking written by Lillian Rosanoff Lieber in 1942 and illustrated by her husband, Hugh Gray Lieber.

“It postulated that pure mathematics was a garret at the top of a tower of various kinds of math, physics, and engineering, where mathematicians and artists together explored new forms that eventually turn into technology,” Weiss recalls. “It was one of the reasons I wanted to study pure mathematics.”

After getting into the Ph.D. program in the CU math department, Weiss realized that he “wanted to help write new theories at the foundations of physics. It wasn’t until I got a job at NBS that I got connected to anything applied.

From Pure to Applied Physics: Building the First Timing Receiver
The genesis of Weiss’s career in GNSS and timing was one of fortuitous opportunities rather than preconceived planning.

“The only jobs I could have imagined [at that time] were teaching,” Weiss says. He describes a “series of falling-in-love events,” beginning in 1978, that led him to apply his interest in the elegance of pure math to the budding interdisciplinary field of GNSS.

Weiss began working with Dave Allan, originator of the Allan Variance measure of frequency stability, as a graduate student. This work was carried out at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), the precursor to NIST. At NBS, Allan became Weiss’s group leader and they started working on a GPS receiver in 1979. Their goal was to build a receiver optimized for time transfer.

“While there were already GPS receivers available,” Weiss says, “they would not support nanosecond-level time transfer.”

Time transfer is a method of synchronization based on comparing timing data from multiple sources with a common reference. Weiss explains that in navigation receivers, the time delay of signals from the antenna through the receiver is canceled since position fixes are computed from differences between satellite signals. For a GNSS timing instrument, however, the delay must be directly accounted for in order to produce an accurate time.

In 1981 the project team succeeded in achieving time transfer with unprecedented accuracies. Through a partnership with Allen Osborne Associates, Inc., two dozen GNSS timing receivers were initially manufactured and distributed to timing labs around the world to support time transfer over large distances.

This innovative technique directly led to a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of International Atomic Time (TAI), the weighted average of atomic clocks around the world that serves as the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary standard for precise time globally. Their efforts earned the project team the NBS Applied Research Award in 1981. At this point, Weiss was still a Ph.D. student, and says that he still “had no idea” he would stay at NBS (later NIST) for a career.

After the deployment of the receivers in laboratories, Weiss had the opportunity to work on a calibration campaign in 1986. This activity led him to timing labs all over Europe and galvanized his interest in the GNSS field.

“We drove from one national timing lab to another,” Weiss says, “starting at OP [Observatoire de Paris] in Paris, driving to IEN [Istituto Elettrotecnico Nazionale, now part of the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica] in Torino, Italy, TUG [Technische Universität Graz] in Graz, Austria, PTB [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt] in Braunschweig, Germany, VSL [Van Swinden Laboratorium – Dutch Metrology Institute] in Delft, Netherlands, NPL [National Physics Laboratory] in Teddington, UK, and back to OP. I was amazed at how important this had become.”

Another experience around this time led to Weiss’s decision to dedicate his career to the GNSS field. “Dave Allan brought Col. Gaylord Green [director of the GPS Joint Program Office] to NBS for a show and tell,” he recalls. “I was young and unsure, and I gave a talk about some estimation work I was doing, ending with what I hoped for. [Col. Green] said something like ‘and that’s where we’ll get.’ I found it very affirming, and never forgot the feeling.”

Weiss says that work remained to be done coordinating and using measurements after the GPS timing receiver had been built and distributed internationally. NBS created a service in the late 1980s that allowed customers to obtain UTC(NBS) in their labs as a reference for their own master clocks, using GPS satellites in common view between labs as a means of time transfer.

The common-view method simultaneously compares clocks located in different facilities with the time generated by the same GPS satellite’s atomic clock as a shared reference. The data used to generate TAI and UTC by averaging more than 200 atomic clocks in approximately 50 laboratories across the globe are often collected and distributed using this method.

Telecom Synchronization and “The Smart Clock”
In the late 1980s, Weiss’s group at NBS worked with the United States Air Force (USAF) on designing and maintaining the frequency standards for the GPS constellation. His group provided reports and studies to help advance the development of both on-orbit space vehicles (SVs) and next-generation SVs.

At this time, Weiss focused on the problem of ensembling clocks. His team developed a time scale algorithm that derived the best stability of all the clocks at each averaging instant in a given ensemble. This work led to Weiss’s patent in 1993 for “The Smart Clock” concept, which uses an algorithm to enhance the stability of a clock or oscillator by comparing it to an external standard, such as UTC.

The algorithm automatically estimates a correction to the output of the clock and decides when external data are required to maintain the clock’s accuracy. Weiss says that this work also informed NIST’s consulting work on the Global Positioning System, as the Air Force had implemented its own method for ensembling all SV and master clocks to produce the GPS time scale.

In the 1990s, Weiss became involved with synchronization in telecommunications. He worked with Dave Allan on modifying the Allan Variance to meet the needs of telecommunications, creating the time deviation (TDEV) metric that indicates the time instability of a signal source. Weiss says that synchronization has become increasingly important and challenging in telecom systems, and that international networks depend on time and frequency from GNSS. He adds that financial or technical issues can prevent precise time users from directly connecting to GNSS, and that GNSS vulnerability to interference is a big issue for this community.

Weiss founded a conference in 1992, the Workshop on Synchronization in Telecommunication Systems (WSTS), now cosponsored with the industry Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). WSTS, which he considers one of the “major achievements” of his professional life has since grown to include the International Telecom-Sync Forum (ITSF), a sister conference in Europe.

The conference enables the precise timing community to address the evolving challenges of new telecom systems and techniques. For instance, he says, core telecom networks’ movement toward asynchronous packet networks with a more distributed model has required new techniques for transferring time through the networks. One example to which Weiss points is the Precise Time Protocol (PTP), based on the IEEE 1588 standard, which enables precise synchronization of clocks in measurement and control systems.

Connecting the Dots and Relativity in GNSS
A common thread in Weiss’s current projects is the collaborative effort to transfer time through a public network between NIST-Boulder and the alternate master clock (AMC) of the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) at the GPS Master Control Station at Schriever Air Force Base. Weiss sees this project as a first step toward a method of backing up GPS in order to provide precise time to U.S. critical infrastructures. He describes it as a linkage between his work chairing WSTS and participating on committees devoted to protecting these infrastructures from GPS vulnerabilities.

Another current project of Weiss involves supporting the GPS Directorate in developing GPS III, with a particular focus on clocks. Weiss connected the GPS Directorate with the cold-atom clock builders at NIST, which is now working on a prototype for a next generation GPS clock using cold-atom technology. Another new project closes to heart Weiss says is developing new paradigms for connecting data processing with synchronization.

“Timing is fundamentally a physical signal plus data,” he says. “But the progress we have seen in computing and networking has been achieved in the context of encapsulation and layering of function. As functions and systems become removed from the physical layer, if they need sync, it arrives with poorer quality. I hope to build a large, cross-disciplinary research project to make sync a first-class citizen”.

Another area in which Weiss has worked throughout his career involves the role of relativity in GPS. He is collaborating with Dr. Neil Ashby, who crafted the original relativistic terms for the Global Positioning System, on other GNSS relativity projects. These address such issues as why GPS satellites have no “noon-midnight redshift,” why the rates of GPS clocks are independent of the sun’s gravitational field to first order, and how to incorporate relativity factors into the European Atomic Clock Ensembles in Space (ACES) mission that will go on the International Space Station.

But Weiss has not been indifferent to the beauty of a world outside mathematical physics — especially given his strategic location at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. Boulder sits at 5,300 feet; 10 miles due west is the Continental Divide at 12,000–14,000 feet.

“Since I came here in 1973 to go to graduate school, I’ve spent as much time as I can going up to the high mountains,” Weiss says. “I particularly love the area above timberline, in the tundra, before you get so high that it’s mostly rock. The tundra is lush with gorgeous flowers and thick grass, even though it [stays] winter there almost until summer [arrives] in July and August.”

That love of the outdoors is shared by his family. Last summer, Weiss’s son Jesse graduated from high school, and they took a llama trip together before he headed off to college. In 2011 he hired a sailing friend to take him, wife Pam, Jesse, and Pam’s daughter Laura on a charter sailboat cruise through the Pacific Northwest’s San Juan Islands.

After many years in the field, Marc Weiss remains inspired by new innovations and technical refinements. “In the last decade I’ve been privileged to witness some of the technical reviews of new space-atomic clocks being built . . . to go into GPS IIF and GPS III [satellites],” he says. “It is absolutely amazing how the combination of advanced quantum physics flows into intensely examined engineering details, to produce one of the most excellent commercial clocks ever built.”

Looking back on his career in engineering and its influence on his life, Weiss makes the connection between the exercise of the scientific method and the history of science: “I am only more fascinated and amazed by what I have witnessed, what has grown out of the simple curiosity of a long lineage of scientists and engineers, from before we even knew those words.”

Human Engineering is a regular feature that highlights some of the personalities behind the technologies, products, and programs of the GNSS community. We welcome readers’ recommendations for future profiles. Contact Glen Gibbons, gl**@********ss.com.

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Brad Parkinson, who has received many honors for establishing and serving as the first program director of the GPS Joint Program Office (now GPS Directorate), is one of four U.S. Naval Academy graduates who will be honored in a Friday (March 25, 2011) ceremony for lifelong achievement and will receive the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Award.

Brad Parkinson, who has received many honors for establishing and serving as the first program director of the GPS Joint Program Office (now GPS Directorate), is one of four U.S. Naval Academy graduates who will be honored in a Friday (March 25, 2011) ceremony for lifelong achievement and will receive the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Award.

After graduating from the naval academy in 1957, Parkinson served for two decades in the U.S. Air force, earned a master of science in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.

As the award notes, during his final assignment on active duty with the Air Force, Parkinson directed the effort to develop the GPS, which today is used by more than two billion people worldwide, and led the fight to gain Department of Defense approval for the program. For his efforts, he received the Defense Department Superior Performance Award as the best program director in the Air Force.

An emeritus professor at Stanford University, Parkinson continues his work with GPS in the private sector, now residing in San Luis Obispo, California, near his six children and five grandchildren. He is a member of the Inside GNSS Editorial Advisory Council

Other 2011 recipients of the alumni award are Corbin A. McNeill, Jr., Lt. Gen. Matthew T. Cooper, and Rear Admiral Robert H. Shumaker.

The U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association is a non-profit, independent, self-supporting corporation with more than 55,000 members. For more information on the program, this year’s event and the 2011 honorees, please visit www.usna.com.

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Alliant Techsystems has named Major General U.S. Air Force (Ret.) James B. Armor Jr., a former director of the NAVSTAR GPS Joint Program Office (GPS JPO, now the GPS Wing), as vice-president of strategy and business development for spacecraft systems and engineering services for the company’s Space Systems unit.

Alliant Techsystems has named Major General U.S. Air Force (Ret.) James B. Armor Jr., a former director of the NAVSTAR GPS Joint Program Office (GPS JPO, now the GPS Wing), as vice-president of strategy and business development for spacecraft systems and engineering services for the company’s Space Systems unit.

Armor will be responsible for all strategic direction, competitive intelligence, business development, and proposals within ATK’s spacecraft systems and services business.

Following a 35-year career in the Air Force, Armor retired from the Air Force in 2008. His last position was serving as Director of the National Security Space Office, Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, where he was responsible for integrating and coordinating defense and intelligence space activities and advised the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Director, National Intelligence, on matters affecting national security space capabilities.

Armor served as GPS JPO System Program Director from July 1996 to October 1999. Other top positions that he held during his career include director of the Signals Intelligence Systems Acquisition and Operations Directorate, National Reconnaissance Office, and vice-commander, Warner Robins Air Logistics Center.

Among other GPS-related programs, ATK is competing for the Army’s Army’s Precision Guidance Kit (PGK) program, using the L3/Interstate Electronic Corporation (IEC) TruTrak Evolution GPS receiver.

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Juliana P. Blackwell has taken up responsibilities as the new director of the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), where she will oversee the nation’s spatial reference system.

Blackwell takes up the post after serving for the past three years as chief of the NGS Observation and Analysis Division. She is the first woman to head the nation’s oldest federal science agency, established by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 as the Survey of the Coast.

Juliana P. Blackwell has taken up responsibilities as the new director of the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), where she will oversee the nation’s spatial reference system.

Blackwell takes up the post after serving for the past three years as chief of the NGS Observation and Analysis Division. She is the first woman to head the nation’s oldest federal science agency, established by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 as the Survey of the Coast.

At the Observation and Analysis Division Blackwell supervised a staff of 60 employees responsible for maintaining the nation’s spatial reference positioning system. Prior to that assignment she successfully managed NOAA’s height modernization program, which has improved the efficiency and accuracy of height information used in surveying, mapping and modeling nationwide. She also served as the National Geodetic Service’s deputy director since August.

NGS is part of the National Ocean Service, which is an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.

Blackwell is a 1988 graduate of Tufts University where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. She received a master’s in business administration from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business in 2007. Blackwell has been at NGS for 16 years.

Blackwell succeeds Dave Zilkoski who completes a 34-year federal career, all of it in service to NOAA and the geodetic survey. His NOAA service includes the past three years as head of NOAA’s Office of National Geodetic Survey.

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GPS civil signal design innovator Christopher Hegarty has been elected 2008-9 president of the U.S.-based Institute of Navigation (ION). Hegarty is the director of spectrum management for the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development, based in McLean, Virginia, USA.

Founded in 1945, ION is a professional society for military and civil engineers, students, and others interested in air, space, marine, land navigation, and position determination. It is affiliated with the International Association of Institutes of Navigation.

GPS civil signal design innovator Christopher Hegarty has been elected 2008-9 president of the U.S.-based Institute of Navigation (ION). Hegarty is the director of spectrum management for the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development, based in McLean, Virginia, USA.

Founded in 1945, ION is a professional society for military and civil engineers, students, and others interested in air, space, marine, land navigation, and position determination. It is affiliated with the International Association of Institutes of Navigation.

Hegarty has made important contributions to civil aviation augmentation of GPS. He served as the Federal Aviation Administration’s GPS modernization project leader in 2000 and was technical advisor to the U.S. government in a number of international forums working on the compatibility of GPS with other GNSSes.

Earlier, he developed a technique to provide accurate corrections for rapidly varying GPS errors over low data rate channels, one used today with the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation system (WAAS). His other contributions include studies on GPS topics ranging from atmospheric effects to cost-benefit studies of alternate GPS-based landing systems.

He has been editor of ION’s quarterly journal, Navigation, since 1997 and received the organization’s Early Achievement Award in 1998 for his work on improvements to the civil GPS signals. In 1999, he was a recipient of MITRE’s President Award for his civilian GPS improvement work.

Hegarty was elected in January at the ION National Technical Meeting in San Diego, California, USA.

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Matthias Ruete has been named as director-general of the European Commission’s Directorate- General for Energy and Transport (EC DG-TREN), which has overall responsibility for implementation of the Galileo program on behalf of the European Union (EU). He replaces François Lamoreaux.

Ruete is very familiar with the Galileo program, having served as director of DG-TREN’s international relations, trans-European transport and infrastructure networks directorate from 1998-2000, which oversaw development of Europe’s GNSS program during its middle years.

From 2001 to 2004 he was a director in the EC’s Directorate-General for Enlargement, involved with negotiations and preparations for nations entering or applying to become members of the EU.

Last year he was a director with the DG for Enterprise and Industry directorate responsible for coordination of competitiveness.

Copyright 2006 Gibbons Media and Research LLC

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