South Korea’s military has reported that North Korea disrupted GPS signals from border areas for the fifth consecutive day, impacting numerous civilian flights and maritime vessels. This interference originated from the western border cities of Kaesong and Haeju, North Korea.
According to NBC News, the GPS jamming affected the West Sea (Yellow Sea) area. While the exact number of affected flights and vessels was not specified, the disruption was significant enough to prompt warnings from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to aircraft and ships operating near the western border.
“We urge North Korea to stop GPS interference provocations immediately and strongly warn that it will be held fully accountable for any resulting consequences,” South Korea’s joint chiefs said in a statement.
The incident occurs amidst escalating tensions between North and South Korea. It follows recent provocations by North Korea, including test-firing of advanced solid-fuel ICBMs, launching balloons carrying waste and propaganda into South Korea and allegations of North Korean troops being deployed to support Russia in Ukraine.
Aviation specialists have expressed concerns about the risks posed by these jamming activities, including potential dangers to commercial airlines flying in poor visibility, complications in airline operations, and violation of international conventions on navigational safety.
The GPS jamming is seen as part of North Korea’s electronic and psychological warfare tactics, highlighting the vulnerability of South Korea’s critical infrastructure, notably the Incheon International Airport.
Experts warn that jamming attacks can lead to serious incidents, including potential aircraft accidents in worst-case scenarios. The ongoing situation underscores the complex security challenges in the Korean peninsula and the broader implications for regional navigation stability.
Xona Space Systems has partnered with QASCOM to integrate Xona PULSAR into QASCOM’s GNSS software-defined radio (SDR), the QN400-P. The integration is designed to strengthen positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) resiliency in the face of persistent threats.
The partnership seeks to deliver security, jamming and spoofing resistance and next-gen accuracy for industries such as UAV navigation and defense.
The QN400-P receiver offers multi-frequency, multi-constellation GNSS capabilities, including GPS and Galileo. Additionally, it includes measures for the mitigation of jamming and spoofing and is compatible with low-Earth orbit (LEO) PNT services, such as Xona’s PULSAR.
The demand for more robust, secure and accurate navigation is increasing across various industries, including agriculture, construction and autonomous systems. The integration of Xona and QASCOM technologies aims to deliver solutions for these sectors, as well as for other relevant applications and use cases.
Aerodata AG has been granted a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) for its advanced GPS anti-jamming and anti-spoofing solution. The certification applies to installations integrated with Garmin 5000 avionics in a Cessna Citation Latitude jet.
With the growing threat of GPS jamming and spoofing in both civil and military aviation, Aerodata has developed a robust solution to offer continuous GPS availability. As attacks on GPS systems continue to increase, this anti-jamming and anti-spoofing technology is crucial in maintaining safe and reliable aviation operations.
Aerodata’s solution seeks to enhance its special mission capabilities, especially in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions and flight inspection, where continuous, highly accurate navigation is crucial.
Aerodata’s GPS Anti-Jamming and Spoofing Solution also positions Aerodata to reduce the vulnerability of its unmanned solutions to GPS interference, ensuring operational integrity across a wide range of manned and unmanned platforms. The newly certified system has undergone comprehensive testing and validation, and Aerodata is working on extending its capabilities to other aircraft platforms, targeting both civil and military applications.
The Pentagon’s first batch of new and more capable GPS satellites, part of the GPS IIIF program, is facing significant delays. The first batch is eight to eleven months behind schedule, which the U.S. Space Force attributed to manufacturing difficulties encountered by contractor Lockheed Martin, particularly with complex components necessary for the satellites’ operation. Originally expected to be available for launch in April 2026, the first satellite’s delivery has now been pushed to November 2026.
The GPS IIIF program is a $9.2 billion initiative aimed at deploying up to 22 advanced satellites. The first ten satellites in this series are designed to enhance the GPS system with improved accuracy and jamming-resistant signals. These satellites will serve both critical defense applications, such as guiding smart bombs, and civilian uses, such as turn-by-turn navigation.
The new F-model satellites promise increased navigation accuracy, a signal compatible with similar European satellites, greater resistance to cyberattacks and jamming and civilian search-and-rescue capabilities to detect and locate emergency beacons.
“For the average driver using GPS navigation,” the new satellites will provide “enhanced route planning and navigation, reducing travel time and improving fuel efficiency” and a “consistent GPS service even in urban canyons and areas with tall buildings,” according to the Space Systems Command.
According to the US Space Force, The primary obstacle appears to be the production of the Mission Data Unit, a crucial new component for improved navigation. Bloomberg reported that the subcontractor, L3Harris Technologies, manufactures this unit and is experiencing technical issues.
Despite these setbacks, Lockheed Martin is reportedly on track to meet the contracted delivery dates, even if they miss the Space Force’s preferred “available for launch” schedule.
Lockheed Martin’s fixed-price contract includes incentives for meeting schedules and keeping costs below U.S. targets. However, the Space Systems Command has indicated that some criteria have not been met, resulting in reduced profit for Lockheed Martin. The exact amount of lost payments has not been disclosed.
The Space System Command notes that these delays occur against global inflation and supply chain challenges. While these factors have affected industries worldwide, the Space System Command emphasizes that Lockheed Martin, as the prime contractor, is responsible for managing all aspects of the GPS IIIF satellite development and production.
The GPS IIIF program remains a critical component of the U.S. Space Force’s efforts to modernize the GPS constellation, ensuring its continued reliability and effectiveness for both military and civilian applications in the face of evolving global challenges.
In the early 19th century, as the sun moved across Britain from east to west, people set their clocks to local mean time, so that noon in Greenwich would occur about 16½ minutes before noon in Plymouth. Back then, travel on foot, by horse, or by coach was slow and inconvenient, so having to adjust their pocket watch, for the few who even had one, was the least of travelers’ concerns.
However, with the advent of railway travel, keeping track of time differences became confusing and impractical. In 1845, Henry Booth, a railway businessman involved with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, petitioned parliament for a “Uniformity of Time,” arguing that when “the great bell of St. Paul’s strikes ONE, simultaneously, every City clock and Village chime, from John of Groat’s to the Land’s End, strikes ONE, also.”
In addition to rail travel, advances in industrialization and automation also increasingly required time standardization, synchronization, and optimization. With the advent of satellite navigation, the requirement for accurate time reached the order of nanoseconds, because a signal delay of one nanosecond corresponds to roughly one foot of distance on the ground. This is why atomic clocks were one of the enabling technologies for GPS.
In turn, atomic clocks on GNSS satellites became the most convenient way to calibrate and synchronize local clocks on the ground and to meet the stringent timing requirements of financial institutions, communication and broadcast networks, power utilities, transportation networks, weather radars, and a variety of scientific, commercial, military and consumer systems. Even though computer networks use PTP and other synchronization protocols, they all ultimately tie back to GNSS timing receivers to synchronize them to a global clock. This has made GNSS timing receivers ubiquitous and indispensable. Yet, the T in PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) is invisible to most people and often an afterthought even for many of us in the industry.
I discussed some of the challenges of GNSS timing with representatives of five companies:
Paul Skoog and Eric Colard, senior technical engineers of product marketing, Microchip, frequency and time systems business unit
Jeff Gao, GM of communications, enterprise and data centers, SiTime
Farrokh Farrokhi, founder and president, etherWhere
Beacham Still, director of business development and operations lead, SyncWorks
For the full transcripts of my interviews for this article, visit here.
Positioning vs. timing
The first step in using GNSS signals for time synchronization is to process them to extract pseudoranges in the same way as for positioning — except that the signal from a single satellite is usually sufficient, because the position of the phase center of the receiver’s antenna is determined once and for all when it is installed.
However, most timing applications require much more accurate timing than positioning applications. “In GPS, let’s say that position accuracy is one meter with a clear view of the sky,” said Farrokhi. “That translates to a few nanoseconds of error. To achieve that over, say, a 24-hour cycle requires much tighter jitter on the receiver. So, the challenge for a timing application is to do a much better job of removing sources of errors compared to positioning. In the past, a requirement of 20 ns jitter in timing may have been enough for many applications. However, as the communication systems’ bandwidth and throughput increase, the requirement for timing becomes more stringent. We must come up with new algorithms and new architectures to reduce jitter and improve accuracy.”
Another difference is that most timing receivers — such as those in a cellular base station — are stationary and connected to an antenna with a clear view of the sky. “There are methods to extract and remove most uncertainties and inaccuracies,” said Farrokhi.
“Since it’s not moving, many satellites feed into the equations that help you solve the math to get you very accurate timing,” said Skoog.
”Finally, most GNSS positioning applications don’t require holdover, while for GNSS timing “holdover is a universal requirement,” said Gao, “ranging from four hours, for an edge data center or a small facility, all the way to 24 hours for a large cluster of servers or, in some extreme cases, even 48 to 72 hours for deployment in or near a hostile environment, where you expect jamming and all those bad things to happen.”
Accuracy requirements
etherWhere’s ew 6181 multi-GNSS timing receiver has a very low jitter across a wide range of temperatures.
The main critical applications for GNSS timing can be roughly grouped by the accuracy they require — but they are changing. “For example, for cellular systems up to 30 ns jitter used to be enough,” said Farrokhi.
“As we move to 5G and 6G, this spec becomes tighter and tighter. We now must be below 5 ns for 6G. As we increase the bandwidth and must support higher throughput, we are more sensitive to timing inaccuracies.”
“5G probably has the clearest requirement because you need 130 ns of relative time accuracy from one tower to another, mostly for handoff,” said Gao. “The accuracy requirements increase as you start to provide different services. For example, if different carriers want to aggregate some services, you start moving from 130 ns down to 65 ns, maybe even down to something more accurate.
“Today, what’s driving the growth of our business is all in data centers and artificial intelligence (AI),” said Gao. “That ranges from traditional front-end server infrastructure and back-end AI workloads to edge data centers.” Timing requirements for data centers differ from those for other applications in terms of accuracy, reliability, and distribution to different locations, not all of which can have an antenna on the roof. “It’s a very interesting, multi-dimensional problem.”
The requirements for financial services are defined in the United States by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and in Europe by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). To be legal, timing must have an audit trail all the way back to UTC and not diverge from it by more than 100 μs at the transaction level — the servers and the routers, said Gao.
Additionally, in the United States, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) requires financial institutions to be 50 ms to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “That’s a hole so big you can drive a bus through it,” said Skoog. “However, if you want to trade on a stock exchange in Europe, you’re down to 100 µs. People typically will get a time server that will get them down to where they’re doing all their time stamping at better than a microsecond, but they put in a rubidium oscillator, so that if GPS goes away they can still finish that trading day and be better than 100 µs to UTC.”
“For the bigger data centers there are no industry-wide standards,” said Gao. “Cloud service providers can each define their own requirements. What they care about is the window of time uncertainty: whether at the server level I have an error of 1 ms or 5 ms. You can go to 1 μs of error or down to 10 ns of error, each of which will enable you to provide a set of services. At 100 μs, for example, 99% of all your services are running. At 5 ms, you may have to start shutting down some services. More accurate time on the server also enables you to minimize the network traffic. So, conceptually, you can look at data center requirements anywhere from 5 ms all the way down to hundreds of nanoseconds, or even more accurate.”
“Many markets have a lot in common, because they have communication networks,” said Colard. “For example, train and subway networks have communication networks very similar to those of telecoms. In the power industry, you have a communication network and a substation network. In the defense sector, you have confidential communication networks that are very similar to those from AT&T or Verizon. So, all these markets have the same requirements and the same features and challenges.”
“Probably the number one reason why people put in a Stratum 1 NTP time server is to make sure that their log file time stamps are accurate,” said Skoog, “because that makes their network management systems more accurate and reliable.” However, accuracy is not the only concern. “The clocks are pretty accurate, but they connect to the network. All the network guys — the people who manage these networks — cannot plug this clock in until the security people give their stamp of approval.”
Microchip Technology’s Precise Time Scale System (PTSS) is traceable to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) and does not depend on GNSS.
Clocks and oscillators
For all these accuracies, the key mechanism is GNSS timing. “In a typical data center,” said Gao, “you’re going to start with two grandmaster clocks, which are boxes that combine GNSS timing with locally accurate timing. That’s probably going to provide 5 ns to 10 ns of accuracy. More importantly, in addition to that, they have extremely good local oscillators that could be OCXOs, even some atomic clocks, that enable them to hold over if they lose GNSS timing for four, five hours, or 10 hours — up to 24 hours or 48 hours for a huge facility with many AI clusters.”
Likewise, many financial services units don’t have GNSS antennas for every server, router and network card. “It just gets tremendously expensive to distribute the signal to each server,” said Gao, “because most of them are housed in huge warehouses that don’t have access to an antenna. They typically have a grandmaster clock.”
“The GPS receiver itself is one product for all the segments that we sell into, but configured depending on how many timing outputs the customer wants and which frequency outputs,” said Tommey. “We also put a holdover oscillator into the unit that — if, for whatever reason, the GPS signal is lost — continues to provide valid time outputs for days, weeks, or even months.”
“The advantage of GNSS is that over a long period of time it is extremely accurate,” said Gao. “The accuracy of an oscillator depends on how much holdover time you require. GNSS has a natural resolution of roughly 20 ns. At 5 ns, you start to rely on your local oscillator to do the next level filtering. For a base station or a core router, you need to get to 5 ns or better. So, you have GNSS native, you have an oscillator to do filtering to get a better accuracy and holdover, then you have network-based timing in a time scale of some sort.”
“A data center, core network, or edge network never relies on a single source for timing,” said Gao. “GNSS is always viewed as extremely stable timing that everybody needs when you have access to the receiver and the antenna. Then you rely on the local oscillators and 1588 network timing as complementary technologies to ensure that you will always have timing all the time at a given accuracy.”
Networks
Increasingly, timing is distributed over a network. Some markets are more focused on Network Time Protocol (NTP), which has an accuracy of a few milliseconds, while others, such as telecoms, are more focused on Precision Time Protocol (PTP), which follows IEEE standard 1588 and is traceable all the way to a grand master somewhere. If someone just needs NTP, “it’s pretty easy to get 1 µs to 10 µs time accuracy between an NTP server and an NTP client,” said Skoog. “They may not even need 1 µs to 10 µs, but they’re going to take it if they get it, because log file correlation is very useful. Then when you get to PTP, it brings in a lot of hardware, time stamping and on-path assistance to get rid of some of that asymmetric delay. Now you’re down to sub-microseconds, and even approaching low nanoseconds. Then, if you must be down to 1 ns or something smaller, you’re into a 1 PPS application.”
PFT3207A GNSS receivers in 1+1 configuration with a ptf1207A redundancy switch to provide timing and frequency reference signals to sub-systems in a satellite Earth station installation.
Jamming and spoofing
Any infrastructure that must always be in service requires redundancy and resiliency. “We build rubidiums, cesiums, hydrogen masers and so forth,” said Skoog. “For years, the cesium was the domain of the metrologist. Those days have passed. Sure, metrologists buy them. But you need a plan B for what you’re going to do if GPS goes away, so you can connect pretty much all our products to a cesium clock.”
When it comes to the impact of jamming and spoofing on timing, perspectives vary substantially between companies. “We’ve only ever had one customer who thought they’d been jammed or spoofed,” said Tommey. “We honestly don’t see very much of that at all.” However, according to Still, in the United States, a common problem is the proliferation of personal GPS jammers. “You see this through people with corporate vehicles and a fear of being tracked — similar to the rise of VPNs. Our power distribution systems, our substations, our telco central offices are in the communities they serve.” The problem arises, for example, “at substations located next to truck stops, night clubs, bars, all the different places that folks might not want to have pop up on their corporately tracked vehicles.”
Often, when network operators see anomalies on their GNSS-based timing systems, it is challenging for them to identify and effectively mitigate the source of that interference. “You can naturally go to the site and try to do audits, and there are tools to try to measure and monitor this,” said Still. “What is more common and practical for network operators is designing and deploying their GNSS networks with the expectation that they’re going to encounter some form of interference.”
Current wars have spurred great interest in distribution of timing over optical networks, said Colard. “Close to Russia, China, Israel, any of the conflicts in the world, there have been attacks on these networks every day. Spoofing is the main concern that I’ve seen. Anti-spoofing or anti-jamming are not enough. You need to find alternate time references for when GPS fails for any reason, so it’s an architecture discussion. For example, assisted partial timing support (APTS) has been used for years. It connects to other PTP grandmasters in the network and provides PTP input while GPS is down. Another alternative is to rely less and less on GNSS in general.
“The alternative to using GPS receivers everywhere is to limit them to very specific strategic points and distribute time over optical networks,” said Colard. “There are segments of hundreds of kilometers in many countries without any GPS receivers. There are also enhanced primary reference time clocks (ePRTCs), which are usually connected to GPS and cesium clocks for resiliency. Often, carriers now are not even using GPS there. They’re using metrology labs and the national time coming from NIST or similar national time agencies as the time reference, instead of GPS, to limit the use of GPS as much as possible across the network.”
A traditional GNSS-based clock for time-division multiplexing (TDM) services in a telecom’s central office.
Multipath
As with the impact of jamming and spoofing, perspectives vary regarding the impact of multipath on timing. “We haven’t seen issues with multipath, except where users don’t do a good job of positioning their antenna or antennas,” said Tommey. Conversely, Gao said that “multipath is extremely relevant to timing. Let’s say, to give an extreme example, that you’re locking onto a single satellite. Depending on whether you have an unimpeded line of sight and no multipath or the signals are bouncing off a building, the difference could be 100 ns to 500 ns.”
“Multipath might be a problem in a GPS antenna for timing, which usually sits on the roof,” said Skoog. “If you can keep this signal from reflecting up to the antenna in the first place with an adequate ground plane, that’s probably the singularly most effective thing you can do. I’ve been in GPS a long time. It used to be a very big deal. I never get asked about it anymore. It’s an old problem that’s sort of been solved.”
Many people who have static antennas do not understand “that their sky view changes over the course of the year, and their visibility throughout the seasons and the winter solstice will be different than in the summer,” said Still.
Transition
The telecom industry is transitioning how it times and synchronizes networks from the time-division multiplexing (TDM) method that it has used for decades to IP and packet-based networks. “Particularly in TDM networks, the idea of UTC-traceable time of day was not really a focus until the advent of NTP, but ultimately it was all frequency synchronization,” said Still. “The idea was that if your network was in a frequency lock, and the phased alignment was good, your network would all drift together. So, TDM networks were also inherently synchronous, in a Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) environment. You can distribute that frequency again throughout your network and pull it down from the overhead. By comparison, packet networks are inherently asynchronous, so it breaks the frequency chains that we’ve long relied on to distribute and synchronize our networks, and ultimately requires a new approach.
“Modern networks and applications are increasingly reliant on precision time from GNSS-derived sources — high speed, low latency, high throughput, all being deployed to meet current and future needs,” said Still. This requires new sources of time, such as UTC-traceable time of day. Global networks and edge applications will all rely on time of day. “Not only are you trying to keep all your own networks synchronized, you must also have a relative accuracy to the rest of the world. So, some significant changes are taking place, particularly for engineers who have spent their whole career on TDM or SONET networks.”
Now, Still said, “we can be more accurate using PTP on the edge than we can be with GPS. On the edge GPS now is an option. We keep those in place, distributed throughout the network, in case of bi-directional fiber cuts or losing some of the transport that we use to distribute precision timing, but you can be more accurate, more secure and more stable by using PTP than we can by relying on GPS.”
Conclusions
GNSS timing receivers are central to timing vast swaths of our industrial societies. Yet, as with positioning and navigation, growing concerns about jamming and spoofing are motivating some sectors to reduce their reliance on GNSS for timing and to develop alternative time references, including low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and eLoran. Meanwhile, many networks are transitioning to a new way of distributing timing.
Inertial Labs has introduced the RESEPI Ultra LITE, a lightweight payload combining lidar and camera technology for advanced surveying and mapping applications. The system integrates the XT-32 lidar scanner to offer users advanced data accuracy and point density across various operational modes.
The RESEPI Ultra LITE has a compact design with a 5MP colorization camera, making it ideal for small unmanned aerial systems (SUAS) with strict volume constraints. It can be used for aerial and ground-based applications, including utility mapping, construction volumetrics, precision agriculture, forestry, site surveying and mining.
Designed for seamless integration, the system is compatible with a wide range of platforms such as Freefly, WISPR, DJI, Sony and mobile setups. Inertial Labs’ proprietary SnapFit adapters ensure quick and secure mounting to enhance the system’s adaptability.
Astranis has been selected as one of four prime contractors for the U.S. Space Force (USSF) Space Systems Command’s (SSC) new Resilient GPS (R-GPS) program. This initiative aims to augment the existing GPS constellation with small, low-cost satellites to enhance resilience for both military and civil users. The program’s initial phase, Lite Evolving Augmented Proliferation (LEAP), aims to launch up to eight satellites by 2028.
As part of this effort, Astranis has been awarded an $8 million contract for concept development. The company plans to leverage its expertise in manufacturing and operating low-cost, high-orbit satellites. Specifically, Astranis will utilize its MicroGEO satellite design and Octane Software-Defined Radio hardware to advance the R-GPS spacecraft design.
The R-GPS program is characterized by a rapid development timeline. It utilizes the “Quick Start” authority, which allows for contract awards in under six months. Ultimately, the USSF envisions a proliferated fleet of over 20 small GPS satellites to enhance navigation and timing capabilities.
These satellites will incorporate the latest GPS signals, including M-code, to offer optimal performance even in contested environments. In addition to Astranis, other contractors involved in the initial phase include Axient, L3Harris and Sierra Space.
A graduate student analyzing publicly available drone data in Mexico unexpectedly unveiled a vast ancient Mayan city hidden beneath a dense jungle in Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico. The findings, published in the academic journal Antiquity, reveal an extensive urban complex covering an area approximately one-and-a-half times the size of Washington, D.C.
Luke Auld-Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University, stumbled upon this while browsing the internet, according to NBC News. The data, originally collected by a research group studying land-use patterns, was captured using UAV mapping technology and lidar. Auld-Thomas applied archaeological analysis methods to the survey data, leading to the identification of the ancient city.
Unraveling the mystery
The research team named the newly discovered city “Valeriana” after a nearby freshwater lagoon. This urban center consists of 6,674 structures, including pyramids reminiscent of those found at Chichén Itzá in Yucatan and Tikal in Guatemala. Valeriana likely housed between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants at its peak.
Researchers believe Valeriana flourished during the Classic Maya period (AD 250 to 900) and likely collapsed between 800 A.D. and 1,000 A.D. The city’s decline is attributed to a complex set of factors, with climate change playing a significant role. Marcello Canuto, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, explained that climate variability caused stresses and adaptations, leading to systemic unrest in densely populated areas.
Valeriana’s discovery highlights how surveys and lidar can be used in archaeological research. This newly adopted method uses laser pulses to penetrate forest canopies and capture detailed images of hidden landscapes. Canuto describes it as a form of “digital deforestation,” allowing researchers to uncover extensive, previously unseen layers of history in remote and inaccessible regions.
Timing — the unglamorous yet essential T in PNT (positioning, navigation and timing) — has been called “the invisible utility.” In fact, it’s been a long time since we last put a GNSS-timing receiver on the cover. (Partly that’s because, like with simulators, it’s hard to come up with a visually compelling image that conveys the role of such a device.)
From St. Augustine (“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”) to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (who argues that time is “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”), time is both one of the greatest mysteries of nature and one of our most practical concerns. For satellite navigation, time is both essential to its functioning and a fabulous by-product. As David Wells and Alfred Kleusberg wrote in the first “Innovation” column, in the first issue of this magazine, “One of the by-products of getting an SPS [Standard Positioning Service] position fix is that a clock in the user’s receiver is automatically synchronized to clocks in the GPS satellites to an accuracy of one ten-millionth of a second. Therefore, any GPS receiver is a very accurate time distribution device.” (“GPS: A Multipurpose System,” January-February 1990.)
As Richard Langley wrote in another early “Innovation” column, “Thanks to minute energy changes in individual atoms of cesium and rubidium, humankind possesses the ability to synchronize clocks anywhere in the world to better than 10 nanoseconds. But given this amazing ability to measure time, we still don’t know what time actually is.” (“Time, Clocks, and GPS,” November-December 1991.)
I procrastinated the task of writing this editorial and now another aspect of time is here to impose its claim: our production deadline. So, just one anecdote and a final quote, and I will be done, just in time.
The anecdote. A quarter century ago, during my first time around on this magazine’s staff, when Glen Gibbons was the group editorial director, Alan Cameron the senior editor, and I the managing editor, we had just one meeting a month, called “edit check,” a couple of days before the deadline to send each issue to the printer. We printed out all the pages, laid them down in order around a large conference room table, and walked around the table examining each one and making notes about small final corrections and revisions.
Only one page routinely had a large empty area: It was the one for Glen’s monthly editorial, which he always finalized (wrote?) at the last possible moment. I once joked that it would be blown in at the printing plant like the magazine’s subscription cards. Well, as I finish this editorial, we are at T minus two days for the November issue. Enjoy it!
Oh, and the final quote, again from Rovelli: “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English. They crowd around chaotically like the Italians.”
The Royal Navy has successfully tested a new quantum sensing technology designed for underwater detection. Conducted off the coast of Plymouth aboard HMS Magpie, the trials aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of this quantum-sensing system in identifying submerged objects.
The technology leverages ultra-cold atoms to measure subtle variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, which indicate underwater objects. This method allows for the detection of items that traditional sonar systems might miss, enhancing the precision of underwater surveys.
During the tests, the system identified various targets, including a concrete block weighing one ton, and demonstrated sensitivity sufficient enough to detect objects as small as a soccer ball.
This project is part of a broader collaboration involving the Royal Navy, the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and industry partners. It reflects ongoing efforts to integrate advanced technologies into naval operations, aligning with the UK’s strategic focus on quantum technologies.
Future plans include further development and miniaturization of the quantum sensing system to enable its deployment on various naval platforms, such as ships and submarines, as well as autonomous underwater vehicles. The successful trials indicate that this technology could significantly improve the Royal Navy’s capabilities in maritime security and underwater exploration.
GPS World Editor-in-Chief Matteo Luccio sat down with Anthony McClaren, product marketing manager of geospatial technologies at Trimble, to discuss Trimble’s new R980 GNSS receiver and its implications for the geospatial surveying industry.
What’s your position?
I am on the Trimble Geospatial Go to Market team. Product marketing managers are more customer-facing, while product managers are more engineering-facing. I’m based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and I’ve worked at Trimble for almost two years, but I worked with Trimble equipment for 16 years before that for a dealership and for almost 20 years in the geospatial surveying industry. The rest of my team is based in our Westminster head office.
What’s new about Trimble’s R980? What markets does it target?
The Trimble R980 takes over from the R12i GNSS system as the flagship product in the Trimble GNSS receiver portfolio. New features include a communications update. The R12i had only a 450 MHz radio. The R980 also has a 900 MHz radio. That’s very beneficial for people who find themselves on large-scale construction sites where they use 900 MHz radios, particularly in North America. These radios are much easier to license than 450 MHz radios, which outweighs the disadvantage of having a shorter range.
The R980 can be used as either a base station or a rover, correct?
Yes. The R12i had a 3.5G modem. The R980 has a 4G LTE cellular modem. So, it’s a global cell modem and the 4G network across the globe is far more expansive than 3G or 5G. 4G LTE also offers enough data downloading for things like VRS and Trimble’s Internet Base Station Service (IBSS), a new feature in Trimble Access software that the R980 is also capable of using. IBSS is a user’s Network Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (NTRIP).
So, you have a base station with a SIM card in the receiver. You start your base station as normal, and data is streamed to a Trimble data center. Then, you take your Rover, as we do today with a VRS survey. It has a SIM card, either in the receiver or in the controller, and you can connect directly to your base station via the Internet and stream your own corrections.
It is particularly useful if you’re not in a VRS environment or if you want to get the range of using a cellular network instead of radio. It also means that you don’t have to consider where you’re going to put your repeater, such as on the top of a hill. You don’t have to worry about these sorts of things anymore, because we’re using the Internet to stream out corrections rather than a radio.
You’re also uploading data to the office in real time.
That’s handled separately, via Trimble Connect on your data collector. It’s transferring data directly to a project.
This is your top-of-the-line, survey-grade receiver, right?
Absolutely.
In terms of cost and other considerations, for what other applications is it practical?
We’re seeing a lot of our topline receivers being used in civil construction, transportation, infrastructure projects, and mining — because the Trimble receivers are tracking all the currently available satellite signals. It means that surveyors working in an open-cut mine can be at the bottom of the pit and still achieve survey-grade results because they’re tracking so many satellites. It is also used by the more traditional, everyday land surveyors who are out there walking the streets, because the R980 with Trimble ProPoint GNSS technology allows our users to measure in the most rugged GNSS environments, such as urban canyons.
Speaking of walking down the street, the R980 is for either static deployment or slow-moving platforms, not for vehicles, right?
Correct. The mobile mappers that we see on vehicles have very high-end inertial measurement units (IMUs) to provide heading, pitch and roll and use lidar or laser scanning to take the measurements. The R980 has an IMU to enable very accurate tilt compensation up to at least 30°.
Looking at the broader trends in the industry, how do you see requirements changing? Of course, it depends on the market…
One thing that doesn’t depend on the market — I have learned this since joining Trimble — is that globally a lot of the industry is facing the same issue, which is a massive shortage of surveyors to meet the demand for them. In Australia alone, I think we’re short about 2,400 surveyors for next year. So, it’s quite a significant number. Our customers on the ground are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less.
So, Trimble’s goal with our products — whether it’s our top-of-the-line GNSS, total stations or something more entry level — is giving our customers the most productive equipment that we can so that they can do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why we have such things as Trimble Connect.
So, it’s not just about single point measurement anymore. It’s about using the ecosystem to be as efficient as possible. Once I’ve taken a measurement, what am I going to do with it? Beyond that, it’s in my data collector, which is using Trimble Connect to sync to the office, where I have Trimble Business Center software. So, the surveyors and the draftspeople at the office can start work on that straightaway and keep the guy in the field working.
Concern keeps growing about spoofing and jamming, mostly for defense and life-critical applications. How do you see that affecting some of your civilian markets?
Currently, in civilian applications, most of the jamming that we’re seeing is ad hoc and unintentional, not nefarious. For example, a truck driver who uses a consumer-grade jammer plugged into his 12-volt outlet so that his boss can’t track him. It’s unpredictable. I’ve also seen banks transmitting their data back to the head office near an antenna for a CORS site and jamming it.
Trimble receivers have anti-spoofing and anti-jamming solutions. They deal with spoofing in a multi-layered way. Number one is rejection of spoof signals in the digital signal processing. Essentially, that means that a spoofed signal generally comes through with a higher correlation peak, because the transmitter is probably closer than a satellite 20,000 km away, so the receiver can isolate that signal and reject it from the positioning algorithm. Also, when it comes to spoofing and jamming, it tends to be a particular constellation and not a particular satellite. So, if you’re experiencing jamming or spoofing generally, it’s going to be all the GPS or Galileo constellation — not, say, satellite 32.
Our survey-grade receivers use the Maxwell 7 technology, which can also cross-check orbital data from multiple sources. So, it’s detecting the orbital parameters transmitted by each satellite, and it can then check if any of those have changed unexpectedly, or if they fall outside of reasonable bounds, and exclude them.
Are you utilizing any non-GNSS PNT sources, such as signals from LEO satellites?
Not today. Is there a place for them in the future? Absolutely. Is Trimble aware of such things as Xona low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites? Yes. Obviously, we would love to be using those, when they’re ready and when we have products ready.
What about AI?
AI is an interesting one. That’s obviously a hot topic, isn’t it? Today, we don’t necessarily use AI. When it comes to such products as the R980, we use mixed reality — where you have data overlaid by the camera in your controller and using your receiver and turning around, you can see your digital environment as well as your physical environment — but we are not using AI as such today. We overlay CAD data on what is physical, and it’s still three-dimensional. So, regardless of whether I turn this way or that, I can see my design in the real world.
The National Standards Authority of Ireland’s National Metrology Laboratory (NSAI NML) has launched Europe’s first verified GPS/GNSS Data Stream (VGDS) service, designed to enhance the National Timing Grid of Ireland. This initiative, developed in collaboration with Timing Solutions, seeks to provide users with secure and reliable GNSS data.
The VGDS service provides verified GNSS data via the Internet through Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services (RTCM) packets. This allows users to verify their own GNSS data streams to mitigate risks such as jamming and spoofing. The service is crucial for various sectors, including government organizations, public institutions, communications, energy, transportation, financial services and cloud data centers, as it provides accurate time and location data.
David Fleming, NSAI Technical Manager for Time and Frequency, emphasized the significance of this service, stating, “As Ireland’s digital economy continues to grow and more services and public safety aspects are dependent on GNSS/GPS data, the importance of verifiable GNSS/GPS data in Ireland is paramount.” The VGDS service aims to improve the resiliency of Critical Infrastructure sectors by providing safe GNSS/GPS data and signals.
