Inside GNSS editor Glen Gibbons and HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Dan Charity photoInside 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.
