The Pentagon is seeking an additional $39.2 million from Congress to help develop the United States Air Force’s next-generation GPS ground control system (OCX), reports Inside Defense. Without the additional funding, the OCX would be delayed an additional four months and cost $90 million more to complete, the Pentagon said.
The embattled OCX showed progress in its July 7 quarterly review, according to an Air Force statement. Acquisition Undersecretary Frank Kendall and Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James — “with support of Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, Space and Missile Systems Center commander and Air Force program executive officer for Space — concluded Raytheon has made progress implementing these critical changes.”
On June 30, the Air Force declared a Nunn-McCurdy breach for its next-generation GPS control system. The declaration means that the U.S. Air Force notifies Congress that the program would exceed baseline cost estimates by at least 25 percent, triggering regimented cost control measures.
“Factors that led to the critical Nunn-McCurdy breach include inadequate systems engineering at program inception, Block 0 software with high defect rates and Block 1 designs requiring significant rework,” a statement from the Air Force said. “Additionally, the complexity of cybersecurity requirements on OCX and impact of those requirements on the development caused multiple delays. The corrective actions to resolve these problems took much longer than anticipated to implement.”
The program enters a review period led by Kendall, which is scheduled to conclude in October.
In December, Kendall did not rule out a re-compete, and the Pentagon announced it was delaying initial operations for the ground system until July 2021. The GPS III satellites cannot use their full capabilities with the current ground control systems, but the Air Force plans to use old ground systems retrofitted to work with the GPS III designs until the OCX is operational.
Skyward and senseFly are partnering to deliver a custom operations management software and consulting services package for senseFly aircraft.
The package, available for customers in North America through the senseFly distribution network or Skyward, gives operators a preconfigured Skyward account with senseFly flight log import, senseFly manuals, customized preflight checklists, and other information specific to senseFly operations.
These features are part of the Skyward drone operations management platform that includes up-to-date airspace information and tools to plan and log flight; manage personnel, equipment and flight hours; and meet regulatory reporting requirements.
Customers will also have access to a team of regulatory and drone operations experts and benefit from Skyward expertise to define their flight operations procedures and write related operating manuals.
“Ensuring the highest level of safety and ease of use has always been essential in the design of our lightweight drones,” said Jean Christophe Zufferey, senseFly CEO. “By providing easy access to Skyward, we are now extending this seamless experience toward operation and fleet management. Our professional customers will get an elegant and efficient way to keep up with the constantly evolving regulations, while making sure they operate their fleet of drones efficiently and in full compliance.”
Operators using Skyward and senseFly together are able to meet regulatory compliance and insurance requirements. The partnership will create an end-to-end solution that delivers professional results for drone operators in mapping, surveying, GIS, industrial inspection and agriculture.
“Businesses operate drones because they return value, and senseFly builds some of the best professional drones in the industry to provide that value,” said Jonathan Evans, Skyward CEO. “Many of our customers are flying eBee and albris drones already because, quite simply, they get the job done. We will continue to deepen the technical integration across our platforms to provide a seamless and elegant user experience for our joint users.”
Extraordinary though satellite navigation may be, GPS and other satellite-based constellations are limited when there is not a line-of-sight or near-line-of-sight path to at least three (and preferably more) satellites. These systems also do not provide sufficiently accurate and reliable altitude information for most applications, especially indoors. Finally, power consumption is an issue for user equipment.
It has been easy to overlook these limitations as the enormous benefits of GNSS have become pervasive, but the increasing demand especially for indoor geolocation now requires a robust solution designed for the indoors and urban canyons. Support for Terrestrial Beacon System (TBS) location technologies was incorporated in Release 13 of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). These technologies are complementary to GNSS, and provide a comprehensive solution to these limitations.
One of the TBS in development is the Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS) implementation by NextNav, which is the subject of this article. NextNav is deploying the first MBS network in the United States, using spectrum in the 920–928 MHz band, on licenses that cover about 98 percent of the U.S. urban population.
3GPP is the standards development organization for cellular wireless specifications, and is in part responsible for the popularization of GPS through its standardization in the 3GPP Release ’98 specifications. Release ’98 enabled wireless operators to adopt GPS and bring their economies of scale to GPS positioning.
Release 13 support has similar potential for MBS, enabling support for MBS in any Release 13-compliant LTE network throughout the world. As with the original standardization of GPS in 1999, incorporation of MBS in this release was driven primarily by the need for wireless carriers to provide accurate indoor geolocation for E911 calls.
MBS complements GPS by providing precise geolocation and timing indoors, in urban canyons, and other locations where GPS signals are either unreliable or unavailable. MBS receivers work seamlessly with GPS so they are as transparent to the user as satellite-based systems. MBS can provide floor-level altitude and navigation in indoor environments.
Typical mall experience: green dots show NextNav computed positions relative to ground truth (red line).
How it works
MBS transmitters are similar in many respects to GPS satellites that are deployed terrestrially. Unlike communications systems, MBS is deployed with a view toward minimizing dilution of precision (DOP) so that the signals available at any indoor or outdoor location will meet the unique requirements for accurate geolocation. DOP is an indicator of the three-dimensional positioning accuracy of a radio positioning system’s signals as they are “viewed” by a receiver.
GPS signals are typically 30 dB below the thermal noise floor at the Earth’s surface, and thus GPS receivers require a significant amount of processing resources for acquisition and tracking. Acquisition time can be quite long, up to 12 minutes in the absence of almanac and ephemeris information. Modern commercial implementations with some assistance information is typically closer to 30 seconds.
Mall store accuracy tests depicting indoor tracking performance in suburban mall environment. Dots show MBS-drive information, with no additional data from inertial or other sensors.
Throughout this time the receiver is running at full bore, drawing a considerable amount of current, the bane of any battery-operated device. MBS mitigates these problems because the 30-Watt radiated power of each terrestrially located transmitter combined with a satellite-like link budget provides greater received signal-to-noise ratio.
The result is an acquisition time without assistance information of 6 seconds or less, and 1 second if assistance information is available. The ease of acquiring and tracking MBS signals has significant implications for power draw and power management strategies.
Metropolitan beacon rooftop transmitter.
Although deploying a wireless network of any kind is a complex endeavor, MBS benefits from the ability to cover an area using fewer beacons, thanks to its relatively high RF output power (but much lower than cellular signals) and robust processing gain.
The transmitters typically share space with existing cellular systems on towers and building rooftops and are compact. The antenna is typically a 5-foot, vertically mounted, omnidirectional element.
The system provides for redundancy at both the transmitter and network levels, and the signals are encrypted for security. Like GPS, location can be calculated by the user’s device.
Baseband Change. MBS was designed to be like another constellation on a multi-constellation GNSS processor, and primarily constitutes a firmware change to modern baseband designs. The primary receiver changes are related to the analog components (accommodation for a different frequency band and higher dynamic range).
Enabling MBS in a smartphone requires a few inexpensive passive components and slight modifications to the antenna. From an RF perspective, NextNav’s MBS operating frequency is sandwiched between bands currently used by wireless carriers, so few if any changes to a standard FR lineup is required.
Tackling cellular first
Most of the billions of mobile phones shipped every year incorporate GPS receivers. Because GPS does not work reliably inside a building, however, mobile devices must fall back to ad hoc positioning methods based on communications infrastructure. This has become increasingly important because mobile wireless devices are used predominately indoors at least 70 percent of the time, according to a study by J. D. Power and Associates. This makes reliable indoor geolocation essential for consumer, commercial and public safety interests.
The MBS architecture was designed to integrate into the GPS ecosystem and integrate organically within modern mobile devices, without the need for separate chips or elaborate reengineering.
The additional benefit of determining altitude along with horizontal position is also significant. Indoors, context is determined as much by the vertical as the horizontal — for example, in a multi-level shopping mall. In emergency-response scenarios, critical seconds or minutes can be shaved off of response time if the floor in which an emergency is occurring can be reliably determined.
Control-plane architecture (LTE) for NextNav E2E.
Power and the IoT. The Internet of Things offers substantial productivity gains. Nevertheless, there have been limitations to the rapid adoption of certain IoT technologies. Among these is a fierce battle among competing low-power wireless communication standards. Lower power operations are the key for many IoT implementations, and location is one area where power savings, especially for wide-area location, are critical.
While MBS is generally designed to complement GPS, in IoT operations it has the potential to replace GPS in some cases due to power savings available from the system. Due to its terrestrial nature, the MBS signal is much stronger than GPS, enabling significant power savings. Many applications are expected to be enabled by such a system, whether for very long-life applications with intermittent position reporting to always-on location (that is, persistent tracking). Location capabilities on wearable devices are also very desirable, but because of power constraints, provision of location through GPS has been difficult to realize.
The general benefits of a terrestrial constellation also apply to non-power-limited applications, especially in urban environments and those where altitude is a critical feature. Driverless cars and unmanned aerial systems, for example, rely on GPS but also need precise 3D location accuracy.
Vertical accuracy performance of mass-market devices.Another example of vertical accuracy performance of mass-market devices.
Applications in 5G small cells
The fifth generation of carrier wireless, 5G represents another potentially significant application of MBS technology. Achieving 5G’s ambitious goals — standards are expected to be complete by 2019 — will require a massive infrastructure increase, including small base stations, or femtocells, that must be time-synchronized to avoid interfering with each other. A large percentage of these are expected to be deployed indoors.
This means wireless carriers, neutral hosts and other infrastructure operators will need to bring timing synchronization signals inside. This typically requires GPS receivers to be placed on rooftops with the received signal fed to multiple indoor locations by running cables throughout the facility.
To an operator in a metropolitan area with hundreds or even thousands of indoor small cells, this represents a large investment in capital equipment and limits customer-based installation. MBS can provide a timing signal that can be received indoors through the use of a modified multi-constellation GNSS chipset, a low-cost and convenient alternative.
Beyond cellular
The enablement of MBS in 3GPP has drawn attention from those seeking geolocation for a range of other devices. EF Johnson Technologies, a provider of radios and other equipment for public safety applications, demonstrated the integration of MBS in its Viking P25 (Project 25) radios. As P25 radios are the standard for mission-critical voice in the public safety community, the ability to carry MBS information could be a key feature for first responders.
Elder care, monitoring family members, security guards, assets, and hospitality employees: any application that experiences service limitations due to indoor lack of availability is a candidate to augment service with MBS service, or, if power is a very serious issue, simply rely on MBS alone.
Summary
MBS complements GNSS systems by providing indoor coverage, altitude positioning and lower power consumption. By leveraging the existing GNSS ecosystem, low-cost, high-volume receivers can be adopted and service become seamless among satellite and terrestrial systems.
Other indoor PNT technologies
The 2013 CSRIC Trials administered by the FCC also tested technologies from Qualcomm, Polaris Wireless and True Position.
GPS World plans to publish articles about these and other alternative technologies in upcoming issues.
Horizontal indoor accuracy now, elusive z-axis by end of year
At their advent, mobile phones were conceived to be useful for when people were, well, mobile. And in 1996 when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first required that a handset’s location be sent to 911 dispatchers and meet accuracy performance standards, the FCC was understandably solely interested in calls made outdoors.
Indoor FCC rules
(rmnoa357 / Shutterstock.com)
In recognizing the pervasive use of mobile phones indoors and gains in location-determining technology, last year the FCC adopted new rules that establish accuracy requirements for indoor 911 calls.
The FCC didn’t stop there and tackled vertical positioning, ordering that within six years, the elusive z-axis, or altitude, be added to requirements and meet accuracy standards in cases when there is no dispatchable location. The z-axis is critical in finding a person in a building of more than one story, whether a high-rise apartment building in Brooklyn or a three-story dormitory at a university.
This spring, a testbed for verifying location technologies began operations. The FCC required that nationwide wireless providers create an independently administered and openly transparent test bed to verify location technologies used in meeting the accuracy requirements. CTIA, the trade association for the U.S. wireless communications industry, established the 9-1-1 Location Technologies Test Bed as an independent company.
Testing is designed and administered by ATIS, an industry standards association. The testbed regions are located in metropolitan Atlanta and San Francisco and cover a wide range of building types and terrain.
Indoor testing will be performed in 20 buildings within each test region, spanning four morphology types (dense-urban, urban, suburban and rural). Test bed administrators will not divulge the technologies being tested.
No Silver Bullet. The FCC acknowledges that there won’t be one silver bullet location technology, one size fits all that will be the best location solution in all situations.
In the order released on Feb. 3, 2015, the FCC writes, “To be sure, no single technological approach will solve the challenge of indoor location, and no solution can be implemented overnight. The requirements we adopt are technically feasible and technologically neutral, so that providers can choose the most effective solutions from a range of options.
“In addition, our requirements allow sufficient time for development of applicable standards, establishment of testing mechanisms, and deployment of new location technology in both handsets and networks… Clear and measurable timelines and benchmarks for all stakeholders are essential to drive the improvements that the public reasonably expects to see in 911 location performance.”
The 9-1-1 Location Technologies Test Bed has begun indoor testing of currently deployed horizontal location technologies, and its results will be used as part of location accuracy compliance reporting to meet FCC benchmarks.
Toward the end of this year, location technology vendors will use the Test Bed to test near-term emerging horizontal and vertical location technologies, such as z-axis, that are not currently deployed by the nationwide wireless carriers.
JANICE PARTYKA is GPS World’s contributing editor for wireless. She is principal at JGP Services and provides strategy and marketing consulting to the mobile industry. She reported on a previous round of tests, the 2013 FCC-chartered Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) trials of NextNav, Qualcomm and Polaris technologies. See gpsworld.com/indoor-trial-results-next-fcc-chief/.
User location takes center stage in new Android OS
Raw GNSS measurements from Android phones. Yep, they are coming. At Google we have been working with our GNSS partners to give application developers access to raw GNSS measurements from a phone.
This is really exciting, and marks a new era for our GNSS community. At Google I/O in May, we announced that raw GNSS measurements are available to apps in the Android N operating system, which will be released later this year. This means you can get pseudoranges, Dopplers and carrier phase from a phone or tablet.
When can you get it? Well, it will take some time to proliferate throughout the ecosystem, but the first phone that will provide raw measurements will be the Nexus phone that we will launch later this year, and then next year you will see new Android handsets start to support it, as it will become a mandatory feature in Android.
Tutorial. At the Institute of Navigation’s ION-GNSS+ conference this September, Frank van Diggelen and I will teach a tutorial where you can learn to access and use these raw measurements. This will be a hands-on course where you collect, view and process raw measurements. You will leave the class with the data, Google software tools, and the knowledge of how to use them.
Then, to tailor this tutorial to your own needs, visit this online form and let us know what you’d like us to cover in the class.
The keynote presentation at Google I/O 2016, held May 12-20 at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.
More from Google I/O
Finally, I’d like to give you some highlights from Google I/O, the annual developer-focused conference held by Google in the San Francisco Bay Area.
During the keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made many references to location, context and places. This was really exciting to see. We are innovating and working on a lot. It is amazing, even to me, after more than 13 years in the field of location, arriving at Google just under two years ago, to see how location and a user’s context are at the center of our connected world.
At Google, we are exposing as much as we can to the ecosystem so that innovation can thrive around us.
Sundar Pichai’s keynote address shows that user’s location is at the center for the knowledge graphs that we are building.
Conversational examples were shown on Google Assistant and on how it can be used to get things done in the world. Sundar spoke on how location and context are the key to this future, noting that a user standing next to a famous sculpture can simply ask: “Who designed this?”
All Google I/O talks from the Android Location and Context Team can be found at these YouTube links :
Alaska. “The Last Frontier” is a fitting slogan for this great land. The rugged terrain and harsh winters make an environment that only the bravest inhabitants can stand. Here, one of the latest surveying battles is being fought; not between land owners, but within the professional surveying community itself and pitting technology against historical tradition.
In the beginning…
The United States agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million dollars, or about two cents an acre. In 1959, Alaska, with a land mass larger than Texas, California and Montana combined, became the 49th state in the union.
For the professional surveyor, more than 20 million acres of federal government land is scheduled to be measured and divided for conveyance to the state for eventual sale to private individuals.
Surveying can be a challenging profession, and creating new townships in Alaska is no exception. In addition to the difficult environmental conditions, new procedural and technological advances are contesting historical means and methods of the creation of newly surveyed township tracts. The two main items are:
establishing coordinate values at corners instead of setting monuments.
GNSS and potential issues with atmospheric interference and lack of satellite coverage.
We will discuss the challenges ahead for the future of surveying in Alaska and how it will affect parcel division. While it is too soon to know whether or not this will bottleneck sales of parcels to new landowners, it does bring many technical and procedural questions for surveyors to the forefront.
Challenging historical methods
From the early days of our new nation, surveyors from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) followed long standing procedures and placed retraceable monuments at various intervals along township boundaries for tract establishment, with two mile intervals being the predominant length for parcels in Alaska. The position of these monuments are held by subsequent surveyors to retrace these tracts for the state or individual owners.
During the course of the original field surveys, crews tasked with establishment of the new corners will note natural and artificial features for reference to these new parcel lines. These features may be trees or forestry lines, streams and rivers, mountains or glaciers. Because of these environmental challenges, these surveys take a great deal of time and effort to traverse through the difficult Alaskan wilderness.
However, the physical act of performing the survey is the only way to establish accurate ties to features found along the way. Surveyors will establish permanent markers at the chosen intervals along the township lines with measurements to nearby features for future retracement. Once placed, the monument becomes a corner for the township parcel and its position holds over any distance or angular measurement to other monuments or reference ties.
Performing these surveys is very costly and takes a great deal of time, so finding ways to reduce the budgetary expenditure for this task has been a priority for the BLM. Modern equipment and technology has improved efficiency and cut down on some necessary manpower, but it still takes a significant number of people to traverse through the dense areas of Alaska.
The BLM has proposed the following changes to establishment of township and section corners during property establishment through a system referred to as a “Direct Point Positioning Survey” (DPPS):
Implementation Direction: When preparing official surveys for areas of land selected by the State of Alaska pursuant to the Alaska Statehood Act, exterior boundaries of the selection area will be shown on the official plat by combinations of dependent resurvey, incorporation of record surveys where closure is met, and original survey. For original surveys, all angle points along the exterior boundary of the selection area shall be marked on the ground with a physical monument and shown on the official plat by reported coordinate and reference relationship to the NSRS datum and existing control stations. When deemed appropriate and directed in the Survey Special Instructions, other corner positions along, or internal to, the exterior boundary of the selection area can be reported and fixed by measure using reported coordinate and reference relationship to the NSRS datum and existing control stations and other marked corners of the survey with reported coordinates on the official survey plat. For surveys conducted using DPPS methods, if a corner is not marked with a physical monument, the geographic coordinate reported on the official survey record as fixing the corner location shall be accepted as the only evidence of the original corner position. For corners marked with a physical monument, the geographic coordinates reported on the official survey record shall be accepted as collateral evidence of the original corner position; the actual monumented location will remain the best evidence of the original corner position.
The BLM goes on to state the following conditions for implementation:
Ease of unofficial location of boundaries on the ground by using satellite positioning in mobile devices for groups like miners, oil and gas lessees, recreational users, prospective land owners, etc.
More economical future legal surveys when the need arises to mark the corners of property boundaries
A clear plan for future surveys that will allow efficient procedures for private land surveyors.
Reduced boundary uncertainty and costs due to monument destruction or disturbance.
Compatible and accurate boundary framework for GIS and other geospatial databases.
DPPS methods generate a greater certainty of comer positions and they are correct, consistent and repeatable.
DPPS methods introduce an economy of resources in the future for leaseholders and landowners when additional parcel boundary demarcation is required because geographic coordinates referenced to a known national datum are directly reported on the survey record and do not need to be calculated from the legacy measurement of bearings and distances.
Adoption of DPPS methods avoids spending substantial funds on unnecessary procedures like recovery, maintenance and rehabilitation of physical monuments in future survey work.
Surveys conducted using DPPS methods can be completed much more quickly than surveys completed using historical methods, thereby facilitating quicker patent to the State.
These new policies are reshaping not only how traditional surveyors perform their craft, but also flies in the face of more than 200 years of boundary establishment and case law determination of property rights. Surveyors follow a strict guide when evaluating evidence in legal descriptions and/or property boundaries:
Priority of Evidence Rules:
Possessory Evidence
Seniority of Title
Documentary Evidence
a. Call for a survey
b. Call for monuments
i. Natural
ii. Artificial
iii. Record
c. Distance (or Direction)
d. Direction (or Distance)
e. Area
f. Coordinates
Coordinates have historically always been the last resort for corner positioning and/or retracement use, yet the BLM feels that GNSS measurements have increased in reliability to a place where they can be more heavily relied upon for establishment of section corners and other significant points. This is where the second issue comes to light: positional accuracies using satellite-based measuring devices at high latitudes.
GNSS measurement and environmental challenges
For most of us “regular” surveyors in lower latitudes, our GPS/GLONASS measuring equipment operates with little to no trouble. Newer receivers are taking advantage of not only the U.S. and Russian satellites, but will eventually use the European Union Galileo satellites, China’s BeiDou, the Japanese QZSS and India’s IRNSS. Once these additional systems are operational, achievable accuracies worldwide will increase dramatically but we are still several years off.
The issues GNSS users in higher latitudes face are not only lack of satellite coverage, but several factors of environmental interference within the atmosphere. The result of these conditions and hazards are scintillation, positioning errors and cycle slips. These are very difficult to predict, thus increasing data-collection time and efforts to catch potential errors.
Scintillation occurs when rapid changes in amplitude and phase are observed and directly impacts the signal from the GNSS. Solar radio storms (caused by coronal mass ejection), large- and small-scale ionospheric structures (causing unpredictable values in environmental electrons) and geomagnetic activity (aurora) are also factors that affect signal, create cycle slips, and thus deteriorate the positional accuracy.
Studies performed by several technical teams (including NOAA/NGS) have shown that variations in position occurs often at CORS stations with little or no warning. Ongoing studies are helping to establish potential patterns in the atmospheric intruders, but will require much more analysis.
Some of these issues will be solved with more satellite coverage from the pending systems, but it will also require additional monitoring equipment to help forecast when potential environmental factors are about to occur. These systems will take time and money to develop, and thus increase the budgetary requirement for a new surveying procedure that was planned to save time and money.
But what does this all mean? From the historical side, placing monuments only at perimeter corners and not at township and section corners will place an extraordinary burden on future surveyors to “follow in the footsteps” of the original surveyor.
This flies directly against the duty of the retracement surveyor, so that alone will be a challenge. Studies have shown the instability of GNSS-derived accuracies as performed by highly trained scientists who are well educated at atmospheric recognition. Pairing a revised retracement procedure with providing GNSS-derived coordinate values with potentially faulty data instead of placing monuments is a recipe for disaster.
The biggest issue for most surveyors with implementation of the DPPS method will be for other jurisdictions to follow suit. The main priority of the surveyor is to protect the public. Making a change to allow coordinates to become acceptable evidence will lead to many more boundary disputes and court cases. Too often I hear that one surveyor thinks his coordinates are better than the next (myself included), yet we are dependent on what the receiver gets and the software calculates.
The surveyor tends to believe that GPS is “our” measuring device, and we have exclusive knowledge of its use and application, but we would be hard pressed to tell the client exactly what the equipment does to determine position and distance. A general understanding of your measuring tools is necessary, but it still comes back to knowledge of boundary law and the principles of how to apply them.
While I applaud the BLM for proposing a new procedure to help reduce costs for new original surveys in Alaska, I’m also afraid of the residual effect everywhere else as it establishes a new precedent.
So in the meantime, let the surveyors keep setting monuments and we will revisit the coordinate standard another day. And to quote the surveyor’s favorite geodesist, David Doyle: “Good coordination begins with good coordinates.” So let’s make sure we have accurate data.
A networked radio from Thales is designed to meet soldiers’ need for assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) while on foot.
The MBITR2 is part of a broader defense effort to provide PNT solutions in case of GPS jamming or interference. The MBITR2 is one of a number of devices and technologies, many still in development, to address this need.
For instance, under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Navsys Corporation is testing a network-assisted PNT acquisition algorithm to run on tactical radios such as the MBITR2. The algorithm is designed to provide improved acquisition performance in a GPS jammed environment by leveraging an innovative assisted GPS (A-GPS) architecture where navigation and timing data are shared across the tactical radio network.
The AN/PRC-148B MBITR2 ground tactical handheld radio is small, light and power-efficient. It builds on the legacies of both the earlier narrowband AN/PRC-148 MBITR tactical handheld radio and the wideband AN/PRC-154 tactical handheld radio. It covers the 30–512 MHz frequency range.
When equipped with the MBITR2, dismounted warfighters can connect with the wideband tactical Internet protocol and the voice network via the Soldier Radio Waveform wideband channel, while maintaining contact via the legacy narrowband channel.
The MBITR2 is interoperable with MBITR radios already deployed. More than 200,000 are now in the field, and Thales said the earlier generation radios can be upgraded with a low-risk and cost-effective approach.
Further, the MBITR2 retains compatibility with the existing installed base of ancillaries.
MBITR2 features
Two radios in one
Simultaneous two-channel (narrowband and wideband) operations
Adds a second wideband channel to the AN/PRC-148 to provide networking, data, and video capability
Retains the existing AN/PRC-148 JEM Type-1 capabilities and waveforms
Navsys Corporation received the 2016 James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement Award, the highest honor the Defense Security Service (DSS) presents to cleared industry partners, for its facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Founded in 1986 by Alison Brown, NAVSYS has assisted other small businesses, including partner GPS Source, in establishing security programs for GPS products.
The company conducts research and development on global navigation technologies and specializes in GPS hardware design, systems engineering, systems analysis and software design for government and commercial customers.
Esri has made available the Trimble R2 GNSS receiver for collecting professional-grade GPS data with Collector for ArcGIS.
The GNSS receiver is rugged certified MIL-STD-810G, IP65 rated and compact, Esri says in a news release. The receiver is capable of delivering submeter and centimeter positioning accuracy in real-time to Android or iOS mobile devices via a wireless Bluetooth connection, or USB cable, to support geographic information system (GIS) or survey-grade workflows.
“Today’s geospatial professionals require flexible solutions which allow for configuration to meet their specific job requirements,” says Ron Bisio, vice president of Trimble’s surveying and geospatial Division. “By offering a complete, integrated solution, Esri and Trimble enable our joint customers to build a better and more reliable asset inventory using the mobile device, workflow and accuracy they choose.”
With the upcoming high-accuracy improvements to the Collector for ArcGIS App, Esri says the Trimble R2 GNSS receiver provides total flexibility to choose a solution based on the accuracy and GNSS performance level that suits the application. Now the locational precision of mobile devices can be enhanced via the Trimble R2 GNSS receiver. It is capable of supporting multiple global satellite constellation systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, and delivers GNSS positions in real time without the need for post-processing.
“Collector for ArcGIS is used by organizations to collect and update GIS data in the field,” says Dean Garner, Esri hardware solutions manager. “Many of our customers like the ease of use of Collector for ArcGIS on consumer handheld devices. Paired with the Trimble R2 GNSS receiver and the upcoming high-accuracy enhancements of Collector for ArcGIS 10.4, users can capture GIS data on their smartphones and tablets that meets the more stringent accuracy requirements of their organization.”
Designed for GIS professionals in a variety of organizations, the stand-alone Bluetooth or USB connected Trimble R2 GNSS receiver enables users to collect high-accuracy location data with Collector for ArcGIS on existing technology — whether it’s a modern smart device, such as a mobile phone or tablet, or a traditional integrated data collection handheld or tablet. The receiver can be pole mounted or carried in a backpack.
Nintendo has launched a beta test of a new Pokémon game that takes place in the real world. The beta testing began July 6.
Using Pokémon GO, gamers travel between the real world and the virtual world of Pokémon with iPhone and Android devices.
Pokémon GO is built on Niantic’s Real World Gaming Platform for augmented reality. It uses GPS to encourage players to search far and wide in the real world to discover Pokémon. The game allows players to find and catch more than a hundred species of Pokémon as they explore their surroundings.
Players are represented on an augmented reality map of the real world.
Moving around, the smartphone vibrates when near a Pokémon. When players encounter a Pokémon, they take aim on their smartphone’s touchscreen and throw a Poké Ball to catch it. the player is indicated on a map showing their actual location.
The game encourages users to explore the cities and towns where they live to capture as many Pokémon as they can. Also, PokéStops are located at interesting places, such as public art installations, historical markers and monuments, where players can collect more Poké Balls and other items.
Players can also join teams, and “battle” with their captured Pokémon at “gyms” that can be found at real-world locations.
The Pokémon GO Plus wearable can be removed from the band and worn on a shirt.
The Pokémon video game series has used real-world locations such as the Hokkaido and Kanto regions of Japan, New York, and Paris as inspiration for the fantasy settings in which its games take place. This is the first time the popular game franchise has used the real world as its setting.
While the game is free to play, Nintendo will be rolling out a $35 wearable that enables play without looking at a smartphone, such as for joggers on their morning run.
Insurance company Munich Re uses spatial data-processing capabilities in SAP HANA with predictive analytics to assess risk and identify natural hazard profiles for millions of locations around the globe, so that it can efficiently coordinate loss adjustors after a major catastrophe or calculate hospitals, schools and roads impacted by an impending hurricane or flood. (Image: SAP)
SAP SE unveiled its SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA, at the 2016 Esri User Conference, held June 27 to July 1 in San Diego, California.
SAP Geographical Enablement Framework helps organizations enrich business applications with geographic data from geographic information systems (GIS), such as Esri ArcGIS.
“In many asset-intensive industries such as energy, transportation and public sector, the ability to visualize business objects on maps is critical to improving efficiency and decision making,” says Irfan Khan, GM and global head, database and data management, SAP. “SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA, can help organizations streamline the processing of both enterprise and spatial data for greater location awareness across business processes.”
To develop spatially enabled business applications, organizations can use the framework to:
Enable smooth integration and bidirectional navigation between SAP applications and Esri ArcGIS. Developers can use application programming interfaces published by GIS to fetch geospatial data. Also, business data augmented with geometric attributes can be published as a service, so that GIS users can access SAP business data from within their GIS tools.
Embed a responsive map user interface in a business application to display both business and spatial data simultaneously to provide greater insight.
Store the geometry of any SAP business object in the SAP HANA platform and accelerate spatial data processing in memory to deliver real-time insights, enriched with spatial context, to improve decision making.
Visualize, filter and search for business objects — such as functional location, equipment, linear assets, notifications or work orders — on a map from within a spatially enabled application. From a desktop or a tablet, users can also drill down through multiple map layers to gain better insight.
With continued collaboration between SAP and Esri, organizations can gain contextual insight from business and spatial data, enabling business and GIS users to work within the same multiuser access and editing environment, the company says.
“At EDF Renewable Energy, we have built a truly innovative enterprise business intelligence and data warehouse platform that combines Esri geospatial data along with asset sensor data and ERP transactional data in SAP HANA,” says Devang Shah, manager of database and business intelligence, EDF Renewable Energy. “This provides us with near real-time insights to help us operate more efficiently.”
As an open platform, SAP HANA is certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium, enabling organizations to easily consume spatial data from third-party spatial solutions that also adhere to the standard. SAP HANA also supports synchronous and asynchronous imports of data from any spatial reference system or coordinate reference system to ease access to local, regional or global geographic entities.
Native geocoding delivered by SAP HANA smart data quality helps rapidly convert addresses to latitude and longitude within SAP HANA, the company says.
“Munich Re is one of the leading reinsurance companies in the world,” says Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions at Munich Re. “We use spatial data processing capabilities in SAP HANA, in conjunction with predictive analytics, to assess risk — such as to identify natural hazard profiles for millions of locations around the globe, to efficiently coordinate loss adjustors after a major catastrophe or to calculate how many hospitals, schools and roads may be impacted by an impending hurricane or flood.”
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin worth $344 million to develop and implement a new NextGen technology that will improve the efficiency of departures and arrivals, as well as the movement of aircraft on the ground.
The new technology is expected save time for the flying public and lessen the impact on the environment by reducing emissions and noise.
Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) will replace the paper flight strips that air traffic controllers currently use at most airports to share flight plans with electronic flight strips that will enable faster and more informed tactical decisions. The electronic strips will improve work efficiency, making it easier for controllers to accommodate traffic volume changes, bad weather and other evolving situations.
With TFDM, the digital flight plans used to estimate arrivals, gate push-backs, routings, departures and overall airport demand will be shared in real time among air traffic controllers, aircraft operators and airports to improve the handling of more than 40,000 flights each day.
The shared awareness of aircraft on the ground and in the air will enable arrivals, departures and surface flow to be managed more efficiently, providing accurate, predictive modeling tools to improve flight efficiency from gate to gate.
Other benefits include improved aircraft traffic flow on the ground, which maximizes airport efficiency, reduced taxi-time delays, and enhanced safety through an increase in controllers’ heads-up time.
