Category: Opinions

For more than 41 years, many of us who were there in the beginning have been discussing the attributes, capabilities, enabling features and shortcomings of GPS and other space-based PNT (position, navigation and timing) systems. You have likely heard most of them; historically they go something like this:

• The signal is weak.
• The signal is easily jammed.
• The signal can be spoofed.
• The signal is subject to atmospheric perturbations.
• The signal doesn’t penetrate buildings.
• The signal doesn’t penetrate dense canopies (urban or natural).

I am sure you have heard most of these. Now, allow me to update the situation with some of the developments enabled by modern signals, new techniques, and multi-frequency, multi-GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) “all-in-view” receivers. All of the above bulleted statements are still true, but to a lesser extent, virtually each day. As some well-known pop musicians once sang, “It’s getting better all the time.”

• Today,  multi-GNSS signals in a fully modern multi-GNSS receiver can to some degree resist interference — intentional (jamming) or unintentional — and  spoofing. It is extremely difficult for a jammer or spoofer to disrupt GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou all at the same time. And more help is on the way.
• Today, multi-GNSS signal corrections remove a large amount of error due to atmospheric perturbations and can sometimes deliver centimeter and millimeter accuracy in real time (in the case of short-baseline real-time kinematic (RTK) using only L1 carrier-phase as data, and/or in some other special situations.)
• Today, multi-GNSS signals and augmentation signals show some improvement in penetrating dense canopies and canyons by virtue of their multiplied numbers and dispersed geometry.
• Today, new ground-based technologies show promise at penetrating buildings to provide indoor location. When combined with GPS/GNSS, this is starting to get us closer to the Holy Grail, the ubiquitous PNT solution.

Debate

The future looks bright for PNT solutions, ground and space-based. I know it all sounds like a debating society, and you may have heard some of these arguments before. My point, my premise if you will, or bottom-line-upfront in military parlance, being: the GPS (space-based) limitations of the past are gradually giving way to the improved multi-GNSS capabilities of today and the combined ground-based and space-based PNT technologies of the present and rapidly arriving future.

Unfortunately, there are many uninformed so-called PNT pundits who love to posture for the press — and who are living in the past. The future is right in front of them, or in many cases in their hands, and they cannot or will not acknowledge its existence.

It’s all in the numbers

Current estimates are that more than 4 billion users depend on PNT daily for position, navigation and timing, or the multitude of services each of these resources enables. More than half of that number is attributable to smartphone users, which means, at a minimum, more than 2 million PNT users have a two-way communications device incorporated into their PNT receiver/sensor.

Let’s look at current high-end smartphones as examples of commercial multi-frequency, multi-GNSS “all signals available” devices. The user has a true multi-GNSS device incorporating:

• GPS — Global Positioning System, United States government
• GLONASS — Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema, the Russian space-based PNT system
• BeiDou — the Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, a regional system now, soon to be global (2020 the advertised date).

with augmentations such as

• WAAS — U.S. Wide Area Augmentation System
• EGNOS — European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service
• Other SBAS — additional Satellite-Based Augmentation System signals by region
• Wi-Fi — Signals compatible with a set of broadband wireless networking standards.

The latest high-end smartphones incorporate an inertial system, a digital compass, a rate gyro, and a pressure sensor integrated with pedometer software that keep track of position, heading and velocity when  external signals are lost. Add cellular tower and network-enabled positioning and timing technology, and you have a two-way communications and PNT-based multi-GNSS sensor that, as long as it has power, is never lost.

Atomic numbers

The rubidium-based (atomic-reference system) timing signals from GPS satellite vehicles (SV) are among the most stable timing frequencies ever broadcast from space. The true accuracy of the signal in space is classified, but approaches an accuracy 10 times better than what was once thought to be adequate for our warfighters.

The best clocks in any current GNSS system are the passive hydrogen masers of Galileo. Thus a PNT set-up that adds Galileo to GPS improves in more ways than one.

Ephemeris numbers

Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. military kept track of GPS satellite orbit locations (known as the ephemeris of the satellite) using actual GPS measurements at the control segment tracking stations. The GPS satellite ephemeris was known to a much lesser degree of accuracy than now. At the time, that accuracy was  considered good enough.

Today, the ephemeris is known much more precisely, and this can be on the order of some centimeters. This has to do with not only the location of the satellite’s center of mass (c.o.m.), but the actual location from which the signal is broadcast. The position of the satellite’s broadcast antenna is known reasonably well most of the time, by very high-end users, after correcting for the arm lever between the c.o.m. and the antenna phase center. The c.o.m. itself can vary by some centimeters over time because of depletion of onboard expendables, but here we are getting into very high-order minutiae.

Suffice it to say that certain multi-GNSS scientific high-precision receivers today are used to measure tectonic movements on the order of centimeters over the course of a full year.

Number of signals

Just recently, with the addition of certain QZSS signals (the Japanese Quasi-Zenith Satellite System) along with the Indian (GAGAN) and Russian (SDCM) equivalents of WAAS and EGNOS, the number of multi-GNSS PNT signals available to a truly international multi-GNSS receiver exceeds 200. For example, one set of global commercial receivers routinely receive and process more than 190 PNT signals in a six-hour period. The receivers are both static and dynamic, and they are networked. The static receivers know their actual location to within millimeters, and use this location as a truth set from which all other signal data is compared.

Accuracy numbers

For our example (and all parameters are software-defined and user-programmable), the location parameter may be set at 10 centimeters, meaning that any position derived from PNT signals or augmentations that differ by more than 10 centimeters from the “truth set” are immediately rejected, and that data is broadcast on the systems network, which keeps the dynamic receivers in sync as well.

The individual receivers each contribute to their own and a networked website with metadata usable by Kalman filters to which other users may choose to subscribe. This makes the multi-GNSS receivers not only receivers, but system and PNT monitors and sensors that can detect  jamming, interference and spoofing attempts, which are reported.

This monitoring and tracking system is constantly evolving and incorporating new technologies while becoming more secure everyday. This is not a totally new concept, as the core system is a mature enterprise system that has been in operation and commercially viable for more than seven years.

This should be comforting information for those of you who stay up at night worrying about the safety of autonomous vehicles on land, sea and in the air.

Don’t let me give you the impression that GPS is just waiting around for other GNSS to come to its aid. GPS is aggressively modernizing itself. In Air Force parlance, “GPS III space vehicles will introduce new capabilities to meet higher demands of both military and civilian users.” As stated by GPS III contractor Lockheed Martin, the modernized system will:

• Deliver signals three times more accurate than current GPS spacecraft.
• Provide military users up to eight times improved anti-jamming capabilities.

Augmentations and improvements

The bottom line is that a greatly increased number of space-based PNT platforms — along with quantum improvements in computing power, cheap non-volatile memory and software-defined capabilities — have produced a multi-GNSS PNT capability that increases availability via sheer numbers, with more security and reliability on the way.

We are rapidly developing a PNT system that goes far in countering the naysayers. It takes advantage of augmentations and complimentary systems such as newer versions of Loran, (Long-Range Navigation System) and local PNT implementations such as Locata, just to name a couple of examples.

These ground-based systems are critical to the future of PNT, and have very strong signals. For instance, eLoran is extremely difficult to jam, if not actually unjammable. If a monstrous sunspot were to temporarily knock out the majority of space-based systems, the ground-based systems would more than likely still be available, if — big if here — they are fully developed. At the moment, this is not a sure thing. It is a work in progress.

Ground-based augmentations and complimentary/backup systems can in the future add a level of security for GPS and other space-based PNT systems: Why bother trying to knock out these space-based systems when there is a suitable and readily available ground-based system as a backup?

The U.S. government maintains a number of monitor stations around the globe. However, it has not historically taken advantage of the incredible capabilities of multi-GNSS receivers and sensor technology. Although NASA and other U.S. non-military agencies have been involved with multi-GNSS — specifically the Russian GLONASS — for the past 20 years or so, the use has not been widespread. Fortunately, recent changes now permit multi-GNSS receivers for government users, including the military, in certain non-targeting activities, and the government would do well to take advantage of the changes. The good news is that the majority of the capability is in the receiver design, a capability on which the current director of the GPS Directorate at the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) “made his bones.”

To all those critics who take every opportunity to denigrate space-based PNT, both inside and outside the government, I say: Pay attention to multi-GNSS. Stop your diatribes, because the future is arriving. Secure space-based PNT systems are here to stay.

They continue to improve and become more secure as they incorporate space- and ground-based augmentations, new PNT technologies, software-defined capabilities, multi-GNSS signals, and enhanced computing.  “It’s getting better all the time.”

Allow me to repeat myself all over again. Space-based PNT is here to stay.

Until next time, happy navigating, and remember: GPS is brought to you free of charge by the United States Air Force.