Phil Ward - Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design

Phil Ward

Phil Ward is an electrical engineer and president of Navward GPS Consulting, which he founded in Dallas, Texas in 1991. He has worked in the navigation field since 1958 and with GPS receiver design since 1976.


Phil Ward is an electrical engineer and president of Navward GPS Consulting, which he founded in Dallas, Texas in 1991. He has worked in the navigation field since 1958 and with GPS receiver design since 1976.

He was senior technical staff member at Texas Instruments Defense Systems and Electronics Group for more than 20 years, where he developed five generations of GPS receivers including, in 1982, the first to enter the commercial market: the TI 4100 NAVSTAR Navigator Multiplex Receiver. For this pioneering work, Ward received the Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow Navigation Award in 1989, the highest award given by the Institute of Navigation (ION).

Ward holds nine patents and has published more than 30 technical papers, mostly in the field of GPS technology. He is a co-author of Understanding GPS: Principles and Applications, edited by Elliott D. Kaplan and Christopher J. Hegarty, Artech House (Second Edition 2006).

In 1967, Ward took educational leave from TI to work with the Apollo Guidance Computer design team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Lab (now the Charles Stark Draper Lab). Ward is a fellow and former president of the Institute of Navigation. He served as ION’s first congressional fellow in 2001-02. He is also a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

Phil Ward’s Inside GNSS article page

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