The open access portal for NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation is now live at live at navi.ion.org.
“ION has partnered with HighWire Press to host its new open access portal for NAVIGATION giving readers a sophisticated platform that offers superior search tools, advanced research capabilities, new citation tools and article alerts,” said Lisa Beaty, ION’s executive director.
“NAVIGATION’s open access portal will allow for the rapid dissemination of cutting-edge, high-impact research across the breadth of the field of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) as well as all related areas intersecting with PNT,” Beaty added.
PNT researchers, academicians and industry members can now access free and open research through NAVIGATION’s new portal. The portal makes it easier to:
download NAVIGATION open access papers for reading, sharing and citating
The appropriation for fiscal year 2022 enacted this month included $15M for “Position navigation and timing [PNT] technologies and global positioning system [GPS] backup” in the Department of Transportation (DOT) budget. At first glance, this might seem like a small but important step toward establishment of the system or systems President Bush mandated in 2004, the Obama administration promised in 2015, and called for by law in 2018.
Make no mistake, having the issue mentioned in the act is a very positive step. Unfortunately, a careful read of the report that came with the appropriations act shows the funds are not for solving, but for continuing to admire, the problem.
Here’s what the appropriation report says (in italics) and what it means. This is based on our reading of the text and conversations with hill insiders who said they had a tough battle with the administration to get any funding or mention of PNT or “GPS backup” in the budget at all.
“The agreement provides $15,000,000 to establish a program…” – This is not really a lot of funding for any federal effort. It is enough to hire several people, set up an office, and maybe do a few studies.
Notice that the appropriation language talks about “[leading] to wide adoption of multiple technologies.” It makes no mention of establishing any systems or signals.
Theoretically, this might be done by following the path in the Trump administration’s 2020 Executive Order on responsible use of PNT. The order addresses critical infrastructure and encourages such users to protect themselves with alternate PNT services they find on their own.
DOT might try this with all users to achieve “wide adoption,” though there are many obstacles. Principal among these is that GPS is free while commercial services are not. Providers of alternative PNT services have long recognized that it is impossible for them to compete with free GPS and argued that the government needs to be the customer.
“…Funding will enable, among other things…” An interesting turn of phrase that seems to say, ‘you must do all of this, but if you have any money left over you can do other things.’ This is pretty much a throw-away phrase since, with this worklist, they won’t have money left over for anything else. In fact, they will probably come up short.
“…the development of safety-critical PNT requirements and standards…” In other words, study the problem some more. Developing requirements and standards is important, but it doesn’t provide anything for the United States to use when Putin jams GPS or there is a huge solar storm.
“…vulnerability and performance testing…” Again, more study and little to no progress implementing solutions.
“…certification protocols for safety-critical functions”… Still more study.
“…the procurement of services as deemed appropriate by the Department…” Some might see this as a ray of hope. It could, conceivably, allow DOT to contract for PNT signals from space, fiber, or terrestrial broadcast and move toward establishing one or more systems. Unfortunately, $15M isn’t much for such an effort, even if DOT didn’t have to also create an office and do all the required studies and standards. In this context “services” almost certainly means contracted staff to help with administration and hiring think tanks.
“…and user adoption models in order to facilitate the responsible use of resilient PNT services to meet Federal requirements for widespread adoption.”
Since there are no “federal requirements for widespread adoption” to meet, this seems like another throwaway phrase that someone thought sounded actiony and proactive.
Additionally, we are not sure what a “user adoption model” is.
The best translation we can come up with is “DOT must figure out how to get Americans to adopt alternate PNT services that are either expensive or haven’t been invented yet. All in the absence of a government mandate for them to do so.”
Most in the PNT community have long recognized the need to “get the bullseye off of GPS” by making it a less attractive target, while at the same time protecting the nation against a wide variety of threats to satellites and signals. For them, the language in this year’s appropriation bill can be discouraging.
Yet there is some reason for hope. At least the problem was discussed in the bill, and some money was put toward it, regardless of how flawed the underlying assumptions and mandated actions might be.
Maybe we should all take comfort in the old Hollywood maxim – “It doesn’t matter what they say as long as they are still talking about you.” Let’s all keep the conversation going.
A new Android app released by the European Space Agency (ESA) turns smartphones equipped with dual-frequency GNSS receivers into instruments for crowdsourced science.
The CAMALIOT app, developed through ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP) with the support of the GNSS Science Support Centre, is suitable for more than 50 smartphone models.
Using the CAMALIOT app, the phones will record small variations in satellite signals, gathering data for machine learning analysis of meteorology and space weather patterns.
As well as helping to create new Earth and space weather forecasting models, participants are also in with the chance to win prizes including new phones and Amazon vouchers. This four-month “citizen science” campaign runs until the end of July.
“The precisely modulated signals continuously generated by the dozens of GNSS satellites in orbit are proving a valuable resource for science, increasingly employed to study Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and surface environments,” said ESA navigation engineer Vicente Navarro. “Our GNSS Science Support Centre was created to help support this trend.”
For instance, tens of thousands of permanent GNSS stations are continuously recording GNSS data. As the satellite signals travel down to Earth they are modified by the amount of water vapor in the lower atmosphere, helping to forecast rainfall in particular.
GNSS signals also undergo delay and fading — known as scintillation — as they pass through irregular plasma patches in the ionosphere. This electrically charged upper atmospheric layer is continuously changing, influenced by solar activity, geomagnetic conditions and the local time of day. Dual-frequency GNSS receivers can compensate for this effect by comparing their two frequencies.
“The combination of Galileo dual band smartphone receivers and Android’s support for raw GNSS data recording is what opened up the prospect of supplementing data from these fixed GNSS stations with tens of millions of smartphones, vastly increasing our density of coverage,” Vincente said. “We took inspiration from the famous ‘SETI@home’ initiative, where home laptops help seek out signs of extraterrestrial life.”
The results can then undergo a Big Data machine learning approach, seeking out previously unseen patterns in both Earth and space weather.
“This is our first step in enlarging GNSS data acquisition using an internet of things data-fusion approach, employing novel sources such as fixed sensors and drones as well as smartphones,” Vincente said. “A wide range of other applications are also possible for the system, including improving the performance of GNSS systems.”
Formally known as the Application of Machine Learning Technology for GNSS IoT Data Fusion project, CAMALIOT is run by a consortium led by ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in collaboration with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
“The CAMALIOT effort was underpinned by Element 1 of our NAVISP research programme, spurring innovation in satellite navigation,” said Pierluigi Mancini, ESA’s NAVISP program manager.
A link to the live event will be sent to you two hours before the event. Your personalized event URL will be automatically generated by the ON24 system. To ensure receipt of the email, please whitelist this email address by adding it to your contacts: [email protected].
This presentation will begin at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT on Thursday, April 28. A recording will also be sent to you the following day so you can watch it on-demand.
Audience members may arrive 15 minutes prior to live time. If you have any questions, please contact event producer Aurora Harris at [email protected].
A “BeiDou positioning system for subways” began construction March 20 on the Beijing subway capital airport express line. The project will cover a 30-kilometer-long section of the express line, including five stations.
To provide positioning, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) will be combined with 5G for indoor positioning or in areas where the satellite signals are blocked.
The system will improve the positioning accuracy in subways to less than two meters, making it available for vehicle dispatching, passenger transport organization and emergency response. In addition, it allows passengers to use their phones to navigate and position in complex environments in subway stations through three-dimensional navigation.
“We will combine indoor and outdoor positioning in subways, that is, Beidou and its augmented reality technology will be used outdoors to achieve high-accuracy positioning, and indoor positioning technology integrated with 5G will be used to allow users to receive indoor positioning signals,” said Lin Luzhou, vice president of the GNSS and LBS Association of China.
The project is the largest indoor space navigation and positioning system in China, according to ECSN.com, and is expected to be finished within this year.
Monitoring the constantly changing shape of the sea surface is important for scientific and societal applications such as ocean current forecasting, climate research, ship routing, cable laying and debris tracking.
A project supported by the Discovery element of ESA’s Basic Activities recently investigated a technique to precisely measure sea-surface topography. The project was based on an idea submitted by the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) through the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) — ESA’s place for your space ideas.
The technique involves GNSS reflectometry — signals that have been reflected off of the sea surface at very low angles. At these “grazing” angles, waves and surface roughness have little impact on the reflection process; the sea surface acts as a very smooth mirror.
“In a mirror-like reflection the phase of the signal can be tracked — it is continuous,” explained IEEC’s Estel Cardellach, principal investigator and submitter of the OSIP idea. “Different surface heights result in different phase measurements. It gives a very precise measurement of the surface altitude at a few centimetres’ precision.”
Balearic Islands Project
The ESA-funded activity involved developing a GNSS receiver and setting up an experiment in the Balearic Islands to collect GNSS signals reflected off the sea surface. The team — made up of IEEC, imedea, SOCIB and DLR — then processed the signals for optimized measurements of the shape of the sea surface.
“Thanks to OSIP and ESA Discovery we have been able to conduct this experiment on grazing GNSS reflectometry under monitored conditions,” said Manuel Martin-Neira, ESA technical officer for the project. “We have linked the coherence of the reflected signals to wave height and the elevation angle of GNSS satellites. These results have been very useful for preparing the PRETTY mission.”
ESA’s PRETTY (Passive REflecTomeTry and dosimetry) CubeSat mission is a small satellite that will carry out grazing angle GNSS altimetry from orbit. It is due to launch later this year.
Expected to be available in the second quarter of this year, Trimble’s RTX service will enable superior location capabilities in premium Android smartphones worldwide.
The integration of Trimble RTX GNSS technology, a correction services platform, with Snapdragon contributes to a higher quality, more accurate location-based user experiences such as car navigation with lane-level guidance.
Coupling the Trimble RTX technology with premium Snapdragon Mobile Platforms will enable smartphone manufacturers, service providers and application developers using Snapdragon to provide mobile users with robust meter-level accuracy (or about 3 feet) when used with a Trimble RTX-based correction service. This represents a five times improvement in location accuracy compared to typical accuracy.
Location information accuracy can significantly improve the smartphone’s user experience when using mapping, driving or other mobile applications. For example, with more accurate positioning for a ridesharing app, both driver and rider can have a better experience when the pick-up destination is more precisely displayed. In addition, lane-level accuracy enables drivers to gain greater map detail and more accurate directions when using real-time navigation applications.
The new collaboration expands Trimble’s existing relationship with Qualcomm Technologies to provide high-accuracy positioning solutions for connected vehicles, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving solutions to automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.
“Trimble and Qualcomm Technologies have a history of innovation in mobile location technologies, both separately and collaboratively,” said Lisa Wetherbee, general manager of Trimble Advanced Positioning. “Together, we are boosting premium Android phone functionality, helping mobile applications provide better information about the user’s immediate surroundings.”
“Precise positioning, where accuracies are down to a meter or less, is a necessary capability in next-gen premium Android phones, providing better mapping, more accurate navigation and new exciting services to consumers,” said Francesco Grilli, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies. “Snapdragon is again taking location-based experiences to a new level through this collaboration with Trimble.”
No cause for the abnormalities has been determined, but the vicinity to the Russian border during the Ukraine war seems to indicate intentional interference. In particular, interference occurs near the Russian province of Kaliningrad situated between Lithuania and Poland, both NATO members.
An aircraft operated by Lithuanian carrier Transaviabaltika has been unable to fly from Tallinn to Savonlinna for three days.
Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, has received numerous occurrence reports regarding GPS signal interference observed by aircraft. The interference began during the weekend and is still continuing.
On Tuesday, several aircraft reported GPS signal interference in the region around Mikkeli, Jyväskylä and Kuopio. An aircraft operated by Lithuanian carrier Transaviabaltika has been unable to fly from Tallinn to Savonlinna for three days.
Kaliningrad is the capital of the Russian province of the same name, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania along the Baltic Coast. (Map: Google)
After receiving reports about GPS interference, Traficom on Monday requested Fintraffic Air Navigation Services Ltd (Fintraffic ANS) to issue a Notice to Airmen for pilots flying in the area.
“Flying is still safe. Airlines have procedures they follow if the GPS signal is lost,” said Director Jari Pöntinen. “Aircraft can use other systems to navigate and land safely. Air traffic control supports aircraft pilots with the help of other landing systems.” For final approach, traditional approach systems do not require a GPS signal.
Airlines make their own decisions on whether they can operate in an area where there is known to be interference to the GPS signal.
Traficom does not know what is causing the interference, but stated it will continue to monitor the situation and gather more information on the matter.
Combined geospatial solutions improve operations using location intelligence and mapping
Locana and Bent Ear Solutions are collaborating to provide location-based solutions that help customers improve their performance and decision-making across the organization, including their operations center. Locana was formerly known as Critigen.
The companies will work closely with clients and identify issues, challenges and mission priorities to modernize their geospatial capabilities and improve organizational effectiveness using location intelligence and mapping.
“Leveraging the complementary skills and expertise each company provides, clients gain tremendous value with focused and optimized technology, services, training, and support,” said Mike Eggenberger, VP, North America Sales, Locana. “Locana and Bent Ear Solutions understand the power of location for gaining an accurate understanding of circumstances and acting with clarity and precision.”
Bent Ear Solutions maintains deep domain expertise in operations, crisis management and business continuity. The organization has a track record of providing configured, situational awareness based on geographic information systems (GIS) combined with targeted workflows that support multiple requirements.
Locana has an extensive history of successfully designing and delivering robust, large-scale geospatial projects. Integrating business systems with scalable GIS, Locana helps clients spatially enable their enterprise with location analytics and high-powered mapping.
“Locana and Bent Ear Solutions are both dedicated to being a trusted partner for our clients,” said Chris McIntosh, CEO, Bent Ear Solutions. “We have a unique opportunity to combine our areas of excellence to address their complex challenges. We believe our collaborative approach will help them maximize the value and use of GIS across the enterprise.”
Locana and BES combined will deliver tailored GIS solutions and integration that organizations need to overcome system silos and enable situational awareness. The partnership will supply strategic and tactical planning, workflow development, team-building processes, documentation, procedural support and systematic training and exercises.
The result is long-term value in the form of access to sophisticated analysis and actionable intelligence, the companies said.
Linx Technologies has introduced seven GNSS active ceramic-patch antennas. These antennas support global GNSS applications including GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou, NavIC and QZSS systems in the L1/E1/B1, L2/E5/B2B, and L5/E5/B2A bands.
Each antenna integrates a high-gain low-noise amplifier (LNA) and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP) to provide a high-performance solution for GNSS signal reception. Each active GNSS antenna has either a 60-mm or 100-mm coaxial cable terminated in a MHF1/U.FL-type plug (female socket) connector.
“Linx Technologies continues to expand our popular GNSS antenna portfolio by adding more L1 options to serve our customers’ varied size and performance requirements,” said Linx CEO, Tolga Latif. “Our new active ceramic patch GNSS antennas also meet the need for multi-band L1/L2, L1/L5, and L1/L2/L5 GNSS offerings.”
The new active GNSS antennas are available now via Linx Technologies’ distributor and manufacturer representative networks. For larger quotes, contact Linx Technologies at [email protected].
Galileo second-generation satellites will be constructed at the Integrated Technology Centre (ITC) at Friedrichshafen, Germany. (Photo: Airbus)
Airbus satellite design passes important project milestone, preparing for industrialized manufacturing concept
Airbus has successfully completed the preliminary design review (PDR) for its system concept for the second-generation Galileo navigation satellites. During this important milestone, Airbus’ proposed preliminary design and the customer’s system requirements have been fully reviewed and agreed upon. Galileo is managed and funded by the European Union.
This milestone paves the way for further verification, acceptance and qualification at the equipment and module levels. Verification at the payload level is already in full swing, with the critical design review (CDR) for the satellite structure due shortly.
In parallel, the Airbus site in Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance, is preparing for an industrialized production line for six second-generation Galileo satellites. The satellite integration center is being upgraded to meet requirements for these satellites.
Galileo Second Generation Batch#1B satellites. (Image: ESA).
Airbus is bringing to the project more than 200 highly skilled space engineers. The first Galileo second-generation satellites are expected to launch in 2024.
The second-generation Galileo satellites will make the Galileo service more accurate, secure, dependable and adaptable. Weighing 2.3 tons, each satellite is designed to operate for about 15 years. The all-electric medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) platform from Airbus reuses building blocks from the company’s telecoms and Earth observation programs. The flexible and modular navigation payload is also based on telecom elements for beam forming and signal generation.
MetaGeo has launched a geographic information system (GIS) platform to enable organizations of all sizes to host, analyze, find and share 3D map datasets among any internet-capable devices.
The platform processes location-based map or sensor data from the real world, combines it into a single 3D virtual environment, and streams it to any device or mapping platform.
The affordable and easy-to-use platform can load data from multiple sources: satellites, drones, mobile devices, public and crowdsourced repositories, internet of things (IoT) sensor data, 3D models and topographic maps.
The data is then processed by the MetaGeo platform into a 3D world and streamed to any internet-connected device, enabling live collaboration between the office and field via mobile or AR device. A plug-in software development kit (SDK) allows for third-party tools to scale and fit user needs.
Applications include academia, architecture, engineering, construction, energy, natural resource management, environmental monitoring, utilities and public safety. Uses include planning and managing construction sites, organizing layouts of events, creating maps for public safety, and visualizing inspection imagery from drones and mobile devices.
