Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
SIDEBAR: Mike Veth’s Compass Points
Over the course of Lt. Col. Michael Veth’s 20-year career in the U.S. Air Force (USAF), certain navigation technologies may have changed dramatically, but working toward increased accuracy has remained a constant.
By Inside GNSS
Anyone who has gone to college is probably familiar with the idea of a capstone course. A final hurdle to clear in receiving a degree, students take such a course to demonstrate their practical knowledge by pulling together all of the main concepts taught throughout the program of study.
By Inside GNSS
The navigation world is booming with new ideas at the moment to meet some of the greatest positioning challenges of our times. To realize demanding applications — such as reliable pedestrian navigation, lane identification, and robustness against interference, jamming and spoofing — we need to bring these different ideas together.
By Inside GNSS
The GPS program has taken a fiscal hit that will delay critical plans to begin multi-satellite launches and could ultimately hamper the Air Force’s ability to keep the constellation at its current level of service.
The shortfall is just one of the challenges facing the program over the next four months as the current six-month budget extension winds down, the government’s ability to borrow runs out, and, barring a fast political deal, the onerous budget cuts set up under sequestration kick in.
By Dee Ann Divis
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Various designs of inertial/GNSS integrated navigation systems exist, with different architectures depending on the quality of sensors, the mission, the dynamics of the vehicle, and the non-linearity of the dynamics model, measurement model, or both.
By Inside GNSS
Working Papers explore the technical and scientific themes that underpin GNSS programs and applications. This regular column is coordinated by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günter Hein, head of Europe’s Galileo Operations and Evolution.
In the last 30 years, satellite navigation applications have grown in number and kind, entire new systems have emerged, and existing systems have modernized.
By Inside GNSS
Legal filings suggest the U.S and the United Kingdom may be well on their way to working through a heated dispute over patents that, if left unresolved, could scuttle efforts to make GPS and Galileo interoperable.
By Dee Ann Divis
Finding your way will be even easier with a new smartphone app from two Portuguese research institutes that augments GNSS with ultra-low magnetic field communication (ULF-MC) for reliable navigation in office buildings, airports, underground parking garages and other indoor locations.
By Inside GNSS
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is expected to ask its top advisors on signal interference to help map out the allowable power limits for applications using frequencies close to those used by the satellite navigation community.
By Dee Ann Divis
In one of three separate filings on Friday (September 28, 2012) would-be broadband provider LightSquared asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set “operating parameters” leading to “revised technical rules” to enable it to operate in the lower of the two frequency bands where tests last year showed its operations would interfere with GPS.
Those rules and parameters should, the filing intimated, include standards for GPS receivers.
By Dee Ann Divis
With the debacle surrounding LightSquared’s now-stymied proposal still reverberating through Washington, federal agencies are studying ways to repurpose the spectrum adjacent to the satellite navigation frequencies without causing debilitating interference to GPS receivers.
By Dee Ann Divis
A public-private partnership created to reduce the financial burden involved in implementing the nation’s GPS-based, next-generation (NextGen) air transportation system has raised its first rounds of financing and is now negotiating contracts with its charter customers.
“We have . . . closed our first tranche of equity,” said Jim Hughey, senior vice-president of the NextGen Equipage Fund. The fund has secured a total of $100 million in commitments with some $40 million of that coming from leading aerospace companies.
By Dee Ann Divis
Working Papers explore the technical and scientific themes that underpin GNSS programs and applications. This regular column is coordinated by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günter Hein, head of Europe’s Galileo Operations and Evolution.
By Inside GNSS
