Robert Lutwak, Symmetricom, winner in the Product category.
New Advances in Receiver Performance and Reliability
Editor’s Note: This article reproduces the acceptance speeches given by the winners of GPS World’s 2012 Leadership Awards, at the Leadership Dinner in Nashville in September. The Leadership Dinner was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Deimos Space.
Remarks by Robert Lutwak, Symmetricom; Chief Scientist, winner in the Products category. His expertise is practical advances to overcome the intrinsic physical barriers to affordable chip-scale atomic clocks, enabling precision time and time transfer in mobile GNSS and communications systems.
Thank you to the awards committee and especially to the individual who nominated me.
I would be remiss if anyone left here with the impression that the development of the chip-scale atomic clock was in any way a solo effort. On the contrary, while I have had the privilege of being the front man, the success of this program can be attributed entirely to the fantastic collaboration between three highly disparate groups, from very different industries and cultures: our Research Group at Symmetricom’s Technology Realization Center, in Beverly, Massachusetts; the MEMS group at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, led by Mark Mescher and Matt Varghese; and the optoelectronics group at Sandia National Laboratories, led by Darwin Serkland. If any of these groups and people had been anything less than extraordinary, both technically and personally,I would not be standing here this evening.
With this introduction I can say, with little loss of humility, that the chip-scale atomic clock (CSAC) is a really cool device. Depending on where you’re coming from, it’s either 100 times lower size, weight, and power (SWAP) than traditional atomic clocks or it’s 100 times more accurate than quartz oscillators with comparable SWAP. Regardless of your perspective, it clearly represents a disruptive technology and a paradigm shift for portable battery-powered navigation, communication, and timing applications. For comparison, the CSAC can run for a day on a full cellphone battery charge, whereas the next lowest power clock of comparable performance will run down a car battery in an hour. The CSAC is not an evolutionary improvement in SWAP, it is revolutionary in that it enables previously untenable system architectures, mission scenarios, and network topologies.
Since Symmetricom introduced the first commercial CSAC, roughly two years ago, the market response has been overwhelming. Despite having done our due diligence to predict the market demand and despite having nearly doubled our manufacturing output every quarter, our shipment backlog remains strong, and I am frequently surprised by innovative customer applications that we had not envisioned at the product launch. We have to date shipped many thousands of CSACs to more than a hundred different customers, representing vastly different markets and applications. While many of the novel applications are still in the early stages of prototype development and evaluation, it is clear that CSACs will be ubiquitous across diverse applications within the decade.
I am fortunate, in my position, to interact directly with the technical integrators of the CSAC and learn the details of many of the applications. My general impression is that the timing and frequency stability performance of the CSAC is adequate for most of the emerging applications. The most common requests that I hear from customers are for reduced cost, power consumption, and size, in that order. It is not surprising that size is at the bottom of the list. In most applications, the batteries are still larger and heavier than the CSAC, so small improvements in power consumption are generally more valuable to reducing system SWAP than size reduction of the CSAC itself.
As in any new technology, the cost will come down naturally with increased volume and improved manufacturing efficiencies, both at Symmetricom and at our vendors. While it is unlikely that you will get a CSAC in your next free cellphone, I do expect that the cost will progressively decrease over the next several years, and the technology will become cost-viable to an exponentially increasing spectrum of applications. Similarly, we continue to evolve our electronics and algorithms for improved power consumption, aided by external advancements in microwave and microprocessor electronics driven by the smart-phone industry. It is my expectation that a factor of 2X improvement in power consumption is likely within the next three to five years.
To date, most of the commercial products that have emerged, based on CSAC technology, have been in the timing and frequency calibration space. It is not surprising to me that the time and frequency community was the first to adopt and exploit the technology, as many of them have been closely monitoring the development program and had the internal expertise and experience to rapidly exploit it.
I admit, though, that I am a bit disappointed to see that there are no papers with “CSAC” in their titles at the 2012 ION-GNSS, but I am confident that this will change in the years to come. Adoption of CSAC by the navigation community has lagged behind the timing community in large part, I believe, because the technology has caught the community somewhat off-guard, and the benefits of the CSAC to INS and GNSS are just now beginning to be realized.
The most obvious and straight-forward application of CSAC to GNSS is rapid P(Y) acquisition; we have demonstrated 15-second time-to-subsequent-fix (TTSF) after two hours of GPS denial. This was a fairly simple demonstration that consisted of jamming time into an unmodified GPS receiver, but I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. With access to the core navigation algorithms within the receiver, precise knowledge of time could improve the receiver performance and reliability on other levels, including (at least):
◾ Improved uncertainty of the navigation solution
◾ Navigation with less than four (or less than three) satellites
◾ Anti-spoof and anti-jam detection
◾ Seamless co-integration of GNSS and INS systems
Another navigation area that I believe is ripe to benefit from CSAC technology is in self-assembling navigation systems, such as a local ad hoc GNSS-like network which self-assembles from handheld timing beacons/receivers. Such a system would have value for safety-of-life applications in GPS-denied environments, such as indoor firefighting and mine safety.
Thank you again for the recognition and opportunity of this award.
As consolidation of GNSS and related companies continues throughout the industry, it may be useful to look at some of the notable steps taken by some of the key movers and shakers. Trimble, Hexagon, and recently u-blox have used an acquisition strategy to accelerate their growth. As companies are absorbed and product lines merge, it’s interesting to look at where some companies came from and where they might be headed.
Acquisitions, mergers, IP and product-rights buy-outs, and joint ventures — all signs of consolidation in the GNSS Industry — are everywhere nowadays. Its not unusual to hear of someone absorbing someone else, or two or more organizations joining together to take on a particular market segment; we hear these reports almost every week. Now that the industry is becoming more mature, start-ups-that-were are becoming acquisition targets for the bigger fish as they become profitable or have unique technology and/or market access.
The industry’s acquisition machine — Trimble — had apparently already acquired four companies by June during this year alone. Since 1989, according to Trimble’s website, the company has acquired 47 companies, bought four company IP/product-rights, and formed seven joint-ventures (JVs) — some of the most notable recent JVs being with agency-companies in Russia and China.
Trimble’s BD920-W3G receiver and communication module, part of Trimble’s GNSS OEM portfolio.
If we think back over the years at how we may have gasped at some of the companies Trimble acquired, some still stand out to me — maybe more so because they may have had personal impact, or because I was close to the market segment at the time:
The Spectra Precision Group acquisition in 2000 helped Trimble become a leader in positioning solutions for the construction, surveying, and agricultural markets, and brought laser and other optical capability to the emerging industry leader.
In 1990, when Trimble became the first GPS company to go public on NASDAQ, we all recognized that the GNSS industry had arrived.
When Trimble and Caterpillar formed their joint venture in April of 2002, we knew that ag and machine control would never look the same again. They went on to strengthen this JV with another in October 2008.
I was working on inertial/GPS integration in Canada in June of 2003 when Trimble acquired Applanix Corporation — also Canadian and market leaders in integrating inertial navigation systems (INS) and GPS technologies.
The acquisition of Pacific Crest in January 2005 really shook the differential and RTK wireless link requirements of the GNSS industry. Where were we going to buy our wireless links now?
Acquisitions continued through the intervening years, but in May of 2009, the JV between Trimble and the China Aerospace Science & Industry Academy of Information Technology (CASIC-IT) signaled a significant change in the Chinese market and presumably gave Trimble a leg up to address Compass. This was followed by another JV for the Chinese railway segment.
An equally market-changing JV followed with the Russian Space Systems Rusnavgeoset which was announced on June 1, 2010. Our own commercial efforts in Russia at the time cooled very quickly as a consequence.
I was working on an article on Locata and its ground-positioning infrastructure in the summer of 2011, and the earlier Trimble acquisition in October 2010 of the similarly functioning Novariant Terralite assets created a great deal of conversation during those discussions.
The recent April 2011 acquisition of Ashtech’s technology, resources and facilities has established an enviable foothold for Trimble in Asia, Europe, and Russia, and significantly added to its technology inventory. Who would have ever thought during the early days of GNSS that Ashtech would eventually become part of Trimble?
And just as I got immersed into the world of unmanned vehicles, Trimble’s April 2012 acquisition of Gatewing in Belgium has the potential to influence the market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for photogrammetry and rapid terrain mapping applications.
Since 1999, Trimble’s revenues have grown from approximately $270 million to more than $1.6 billion in 2011, so its not hard to see how they have had sufficient “fuel” to maintain their aggressive acquisition strategy, and to continue to expand their extensive technology and product portfolios.
Alongside this GNSS acquisition marathon, the rest of the industry appears to be ultra-conservative, but there are several other stories which we might want to consider.
With headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, and London, UK, Hexagon has subsidiary companies around the world, and has become a leading global provider of integrated design, measurement and visualization technologies.
When Ola Rollén joined around 2000 and became president and CEO, he identified measurement technologies as a focus area, and subsequently the Hexagon acquisition strategy has gone on to pull a significant portion of our industry into the Hexagon family. With 13,000 employees in more than 40 countries, net sales are reported to be around €2.2 billion ($2.8B US).
Hexagon’s focus has been on high-precision measurement technologies, which also rapidly provide access to large amounts of complex data via engineering and geospatial “visualization” software. As the Hexagon’s website says, an extensive range of products and services work together to provide a constant flow of data, and transform raw data into useful information and actionable intelligence. Acquisitions form part of Hexagon’s long-term growth strategy.
The Hexagon foray into our neck of the GNSS “measurement” business really seems to have begun in 2005 with its acquisition of Leica Geosystems in Switzerland. Leica has become one of the big movers in geomatics/survey, and has capabilities that reach across almost every industry that has the requirement to measure anything, and GNSS has become only one portion of the technology involved.
However, as the relationship between Leica and NovAtel grew over time, it was probably inevitable that Hexagon would want to have the source of a significant part of Leica’s GNSS receiver technology within the Hexagon/Leica group. So this was cemented in 2007 as Hexagon acquired NovAtel along with 15 other measurement-related companies. Notable other GNSS companies acquired in those 2007 acquisitions included Allen Precision Equipment in the U.S. and Elcome Technologies in India.
Then in 2010 one of the largest acquisitions in the industry followed when Hexagon brought Intergraph into the company bull-pen at a cost of $2,125M US. Today, Intergraph geospatial products include industry-leading desktop GIS, remote sensing, and photogrammetry software, as well as the synthesis of these technologies in server-based products specializing in data management, spatial data infrastructure, workflow optimization, web editing, and web mapping.
Heavy stuff, but the recent acquisition that caught my eye was the purchase of Fastrax in Finland by Swiss u-blox. Founded around 2000, Fastrax has provided the market with ultra-low power, high-sensitivity, small form-factor GNSS modules which have helped revolutionize the market and facilitate the explosion in mass-market positioning and tracking applications. This was ongoing virtually in parallel with u-blox’ development efforts — the company released its first surface-mount GPS receiver in 1998. Fastrax brings a seasoned team of GNSS experts to u-blox, as well as new products and technologies such as multi-GNSS modules with integrated GPS/GLONASS antenna.
In the late 1990s, u-box management saw that there would be a major market for low-cost GNSS module solutions and set out early to establish its own in-house semiconductor IP. This has led u-blox to become a leading fabless semiconductor provider of embedded GPS/GNSS receiver chips and modules for the consumer, industrial, and automotive markets. As it succeeded with this strategy, u-blox set out on a parallel activity with embedded wireless 2G and 3G modules that work seamlessly with their positioning products to support applications such as vehicle and asset tracking, which rely on a tight integration of the two technologies.
u-blox’ MAX, NEO, and LEA-7 GPS/GNSS modules support all available satellite positioning systems.
Their market has evolved so that today u-blox addresses fleet and asset management, vehicle, marine and personal navigation systems, consumer electronics, smartphones, recreational devices, industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) and security systems, and industrial precision timing. Products include both chips and modules based on u-blox 7, the company’s seventh generation GNSS satellite positioning platform with extremely low power consumption and really fast acquisition time. The company’s global positioning receivers are compatible with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, and Compass, and also support the WAAS, EGNOS, and MSAS satellite based augmentation systems.
Since the company’s founding in 1997, u-blox’ GNSS R&D strategy had been organic and internally driven, and remained that way through its IPO in 2007 on the SIX Swiss Exchange, until its first acquisition in 2009 of Italy-based NeonSeven. That acquisition added wireless 2G/3G module know-how to the company’s IP. That’s a long time on their own, during which they established a large customer base that today has grown to more than 3,500 OEM manufacturers worldwide in the consumer, automotive and industrial markets. The company estimates its products are currently integrated into more than 10,000 types of devices used by 40,000,000 people and machines around the globe.
Additional purchases in the wireless domain quickly followed, with San Diego-based FusionWireless (CDMA modules) acquired in 2011, and UK-based Cognovo and 4M Wireless (4G chip and stack technologies) in 2012. This has allowed u-blox to quickly accelerate growth in the wireless modem market. And then with the u-blox acquisition machine fully primed, u-blox brought the complementary GNSS capabilities of Fastrax on board in October 2012.
But why go after Fastrax now? Well, clearly profitable with 2011 revenue of $133M US, u-blox has achieved the structure and capabilities to achieve a higher growth rate. Fastrax gives them the means to grow even “Faster”. Fastrax modules exploit the best of four leading GNSS chip vendors and include advanced antenna modules, something the company did not have prior to the acquisition. Its products complement u-blox’ existing product and technology portfolio and will benefit from u‑blox’ economy of scale. Adding u-blox’ advanced R&D capabilities, semiconductor technologies, global sales channels, established supply chain, and high-volume manufacturing capabilities provides customers a more attractive choice, while streamlining operations and lowering costs. At a purchase price of $13M US, u-box may have found an ideal, cost-effective way to accelerate its business expansion.
This is just a snapshot of some notable and recent consolidations that our industry has experienced. There are other acquisitions and mergers, maybe on a larger or smaller scale which have already happened, and even those which are probably being negotiated right now. We should expect this to continue, and hopefully our industry will become stronger and the careers of the people in it will thrive.
Some acquisitions don’t work because the adjustments required by the organizations are too big, too difficult, and as a consequence too costly to overcome. But good groundwork and hands-on research prior to the deal means most acquisitions are between compatible organizations, and integration is successful and everyone benefits. But as everyone hopes in the acquisition business, the sum of every acquisition has the potential to be significantly larger than its constituent parts. Let’s hope there are more of these positive benefits as we move forward with the evolution of the GNSS industry.
Ray Kolibaba, Raytheon VP and Program Manager for OCX, took part in a candid conversation with Don Jewell, our defense editor at GPS World. Kolibaba gives us an unprecedented look at the GPS ground control segment, warts and all, as it exists today. His updates about a viable program are good news because at one time the OCX program was close to being terminated. Join us now for a look at OCX today and the way ahead for the GPS ground control segment.
By Don Jewell
Ray Kolibaba, Raytheon vice president and program manager for OCX.
DJ: Ray, thanks for taking time to be with us today. Perhaps we should start off with your title, your bona fides if you will, and just what you do at Raytheon in Aurora, Colorado.
RK: Don, I am a vice president at Raytheon here in Aurora and the GPS OCX program manager.
DJ: Concentrating on the OCX program, how many people do you oversee and how many people do you have on your team including sub-contractors? In other words, just how big an effort is OCX when it comes to manpower?
RK: We currently have 450 people at Raytheon working OCX, and with our subs, an additional 300 personnel. Altogether we have 750 personnel working GPS and OCX issues. This does not include the military and civilian personnel at AFSPC and SMC. [ed. Air Force Space Command and Space and Missile Systems Center].
DJ: It sounds like a thousand people when you account for all the different players. An important part of the Raytheon team has to be your subcontractors. Let’s talk about your subs and the roles they play, just so our readers have an idea of the expertise required for OCX to succeed.
RK: Don, our subs are a critical part of our team and we could not succeed without them. First of all, our major subcontractors on board include ITT Exelis — their primary role is navigation, along with JPL [ed. Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. JPL is active in the Kalman Filter area. Key management and global monitoring station receivers are also part of Exelis’ efforts. They are based in New Jersey and have been a key part of this team from the beginning. I am happy to say they survived the recent storms and did not miss a beat. For the overall GPS enterprise, ITT Exelis also supports the navigation side with Lockheed Martin for the space vehicle.
We have a number of small company subcontractors — all experts in their chosen fields of endeavor. First, we have Infinity Systems, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and they do primarily training, technical documentation, and opscon [ed. Operations Concepts] work. We are also teamed with Braxton Technologies, which you know well, also out of Colorado Springs. Braxton does our modeling and simulations as well as the command and control or C2 segment. We also have Soladyne Solutions, from Colorado Springs, supporting C2 and mission management and some of our infrastructure support. Geologics Corporation primarily provides staffing support and other key resources. RT Logic is on board for front-end processor work. All in all about 10% of the entire OCX program is being handled by our small business partners.
We also have several large subcontractors such as Boeing out of Aurora and Colorado Springs. Boeing is focused on the transition from AEP, the current operating C2 system, to OCX as well as operational activities, such as networking and data storage. Then we have our own Raytheon Network Centric Systems (NCS) folks out of Fullerton, California, who are our key connectivity into the FAA [ed. Federal Aviation Administration] and the civil world. NCS developed the GPS-based Wide Area Augmentation System or WAAS for the FAA and similar systems for Japan and India.
So, as you can see, this a very specific and highly qualified team put together to address OCX requirements.
DJ: Thanks, Ray. Perhaps this would be a good time to review the history of the OCX program and how we arrived where we are today.
RK: Absolutely. The history of OCX at Raytheon goes back much farther than you might think. There are actually two aspects of the history. Let’s start by looking at the OCS, or the operational control system for GPS that came on board in 2007.
When I was here at Raytheon in the 2002-2003 time frame, one of the primary objectives that we had was based on my and others experiences in space and ground development projects. The issue was this — the majority of space programs’ critical decisions were primarily based on the need to support the space segment. Most space programs contracted with a single space prime to build the ground, payload, and space segments. When push came to shove, decisions were made favoring the space and payload needs thereby often depriving the ground segment. Too many trades were made from the space segment perspective. For most of my career in the US Air Force and in the aerospace industry, decisions were made the same way. In other words, the ground segment would suck it up and do whatever it had to do to make it work with what assets remained.
DJ: It sounds like you are saying the ground segment was often an afterthought.
RK: Exactly, Don. It was truly an afterthought. When additional money was needed to pay for issues on the spacecraft or payload side, it was always an easy decision to go pull money out of the ground segment, because management was always primarily spacecraft or hardware guys. Now many of these decisions may have been the best decisions given the flexibility of the ground segment and its ability to respond to changes in space, but the ground was not always an equal partner when it came to system level trades. Now I have to admit that the hardware, the spacecraft, and the sensors are sexy because it is great to be able to go out and touch and feel something, but it just does not work without the core capability of the ground segment and software that makes the system truly operational. This mindset, as I said, goes all the way back to my ops days in the Air Force in Sunnyvale, California, in the 1970s. Some of the stuff I saw back then helps me with OCX today from an ops viewpoint, because knowing what it takes to build and deliver a system and then make it operational are often two totally different areas of expertise. So having operational experience in running a ground control system and seeing what it takes to get there is important.
Don, this brings me to an item concerning testing that I will talk more about later, but in Sunnyvale in the 1970s we often found system software deliveries with numerous problems. We were launching three vehicles a year and had 30-60 days between missions. We had issues primarily because the software developers — and this goes back to a whole “day in the life” testing, or “test it as you fly” paradigm — did not test software against real life databases or actual flight commands, like we do today. So in the ’70s we went down to the contractor’s integration facility and started running our own tests before the software ever officially came into the facility; this added step greatly improved our capability to test and run the system. They delivered the right stuff the first time and it actually worked.
These are the types of things that, when you have a ground segment and operations background, help you improve the overall system. That history is part of the motivation for the changes we are looking at with the government today; it applies to OCX as well as other space programs. There is a genuine need to separate ground and space acquisitions. So that is part of the history of what this organization, Raytheon, started to do and was pushing for in the early 2000s in Air Force Space Command. Fortunately for GPS, we were able to get the ground segment broken out as a separate acquisition. This is a concept we have been chasing and pushing since the early 2000 time frame.
For instance, in 2007 the competition for OCX was between Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. I think our separate ground approach really helped us put together a winning bid and a system and capability that in the end will optimize and drive the overall system performance so that we all benefit. We have a very operable system, and we support the navigation needs of the civil and the military user.
DJ: So, Ray, what you are saying is that Raytheon, since the early 2000s, came to the realization that just because a company knows how to build a rocket does not necessarily mean they know anything about the ground system, the command and control system, or even the satellite and payload. They may have some expertise in those areas but it is not a given.
RK: That is absolutely correct, Don. Those are all different specialties, and as you go forward you need people that are smart in all regimes so you can figure out how to optimize the system and work from the system perspective.
DJ: Ray, you mentioned your Air Force career several times and the perspective it gave you. Give us just a bit more background and clarify how you wound up as the OCX PM.
RK: Sure, Don, I was very fortunate. I spent from 1971-79 in the U.S. Air Force. The first couple of years I attended graduate school at AFIT in Dayton, Ohio, at Wright Patterson Air Force Base [Ed: Air Force Institute of Technology]. Then I went off to Sunnyvale, California, to the Air Force Satellite Control Facility, or the Blue Cube as it was often called at the time, for four years, where I did my satellite operations stint. I did satellite ops in the days when we generated our command messages to the satellite on an old IBM 29 keypunch card and a CDC 3800 computer. We used telephone networks to transmit the data to the remote tracking stations where it was uploaded to the satellites. It was a totally different world of Command and Control in the days before relay satellites. We had remote tracking stations. We were ready with our data every ninety minutes in a message format that was sent up to the vehicle. It taught us a lot about schedule and timeliness and the ability to respond to the needs of the system.
After Sunnyvale I went down the road to Los Angeles to work in the Special Projects Organization. I worked the mission SPO and the ground systems for some future space capabilities. I spent two and a half years in LA, and then got out of the Air Force after nine years. I really enjoyed my time in the Air Force and I learned a great deal, but I made a personal decision to get out based on family considerations. Plus I really did not enjoy moving all the time.
I kept working in the industry and I worked for a small company doing orbit determination and mission management work for a number of programs. We had an opportunity to support a couple of programs in the Denver area with the old Martin Marietta Company, and one thing led to another, and in 1981 we moved to Colorado and we have been here ever since. I worked various programs for Martin Marietta and then Lockheed Martin. Then I worked for the Hughes Raytheon Group, and Northrop Grumman, basically working ground support systems for DoD and intelligence programs.
I left Raytheon in 2006, spent five years with Northrop Grumman, and decided to retire. I quickly got bored with retirement, and Bill Jones at Raytheon allowed me to come back as his deputy. So I returned in February 2011, and since we were making changes on the OCX program, I volunteered to run the program. I really thought I could come in, make a difference and help. I came to this job last December [ed. 2011].
I know you want to talk about the management changes made back then and why they came about. I can only give you Raytheon’s viewpoint. You should talk to the government about its changes. For Raytheon, part of the reason for change is because there is a huge difference — as I found out when I was working for Lockheed Martin with some really creative people who know how to put a concept and a message together concerning what you should build and why — between the planners and marketers and how you actually get it done. The same group that sells the program is not always the best group to go off and execute and make a program successful.
DJ: So, Ray, even though some old-school types make think this is heresy, you’re saying that a good or even great capture manager does not always a good or great program manager make.
RK: Yeah. Most of my background has been on the mission execution side of the house. When management discussed making changes, I talked with Bill Jones and Lynn Dugle about OCX and managing the program to see if we could move it in the right direction. So far, we have been successful in making changes that have benefited the program. We have more challenges to tackle, but that happens on big programs — and GPS OCX is a big program. We are making progress.
The changes we made on the program would not be possible without the partnership of an exceptional government team. They have solid program management and development experience. In particular Mr. Leonard, who is running the ground system for the GPS Directorate, and Lt. Col. Blevins [ed. USAF] who is our COTR or Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative, understand what it takes to build a complete system. Still, we continue to work through the new mindset of separate ground segment development. This is the first major program where the Air Force has separate space and ground primes. It takes a strong partnership across the enterprise to make this work.
DJ: Ray, pardon my interruption, but I think you are being a bit too modest. You have been on board since last December, and I will frankly tell you that my sources, and they are considerable and closely connected to the GPS program, indicate that a year ago OCX was in dire danger, some would even say imminent danger of being cancelled. The PMs for both Raytheon and the government were both pointing fingers at each other, acrimonious arguments ensued, and I’m told the Raytheon PM at the time blamed the customer for most of the problems. It was, so my sources say, a “my way or the highway” paradigm on the part of Raytheon… Then you stepped in and changed all that. It was a sea-state change of major proportions and a complete change of attitude, a more mature attitude if you will. Of course the government also changed its program managers around the same time, and now things seem to be back on an even keel. Plus, since you successfully negotiated Milestone B, things are looking up.
In all seriousness, I am sanguine that a year ago the whole OCX program was within a hair’s breadth of being cancelled, and you have to or should take some of the credit for saving the program. It goes back to the earlier assertion that a good capture manager does not always translate or make the transition to a good program manager. It is nothing for anyone to be ashamed of, and in my opinion the positions just require different strengths. Raytheon obviously saw the need for a change, and I for one think and the evidence bears out that they made the right decision.
RK: Don, in all modesty, I do too, but once again if it had just been a change with me coming over I am not sure if we would have been successful. The government made changes as well, and it is a partnership at this point, and that is how we have been able to work with the customer and that is the only way we are going to be successful on this program. And we have been successful. As you said we successfully negotiated Milestone B and we have to keep our nose to the grindstone and make it happen if we are going to continue to be successful. We still have a lot of work to do. We also needed our technical team to buy into a new way of doing business on the program. We have an excellent team that is building a quality product and, we and the government, are focused on program execution. This was demonstrated by our achievement of program performance milestones that were used as part of the Milestone B decision.
DJ: Ray since you took over, there have been several programmatic changes. Capabilities have been modified, deleted, and moved to the right in some cases. Talk about what Raytheon originally hoped to achieve on OCX and how the contract changes and modifications have affected those original goals and if they are even achievable today.
RK: Don, part of what we originally wanted to achieve with OCX goes back to my earlier comments about expertise. We demonstrated that separating the ground from the space segment and making the ground segment agnostic from the space segment is important…that is really objective one as we get into working with different GPS vehicles. Particularly as we look at the future and installation options, one of the abilities we have, here at Raytheon, is that we continue to build that agnostic mindset, and let’s say an expandable ground system. So if we come in with different kinds of smaller vehicles, different kinds of obits with different capabilities, we are in a position to build architectures that are able to accommodate those. We are not tethered to a given hardcore set of requirement. I think that gives the government a lot of capability in the future to transform GPS operations and really make it a much more active and dynamic kind of environment that provides the necessary data for both civil and military users.
We truly need to look at how we automate and allow easier access for the end user to some of the navigation data. We are looking at this as part of our CIP team or Capability Insertion Program. We are looking at future enhancements to expedite the process rather than requiring everyone to go to a central node to get things taken care of.
A little bit more on CIP: Today all major developments, on a back-to-basics approach, have a CIP to help mature technologies for on-ramping new capabilities in the program. In fact, Don, if you remember, you actually saw the outcome of one of our CIP demos at the National Space Symposium last year.
The key is getting data to the user faster and helping them in their situational awareness and planning activities. These are the keys we have in place and now we need to perform and demonstrate that the concepts we had up front make sense for the Air Force and the civil community.
DJ: Ray, that is an excellent historical synopsis, and with that perspective, just where are we today in the OCX program? Outline some recent highlights and give us a current status.
RK: One of the highlights is successfully passing Milestone B — which, while it is not an official contractor event, it is a government event and it is certainly a strong message that we do have an executable program. We now better understand what it is going to take to get us there. The government has the FYDP [ed. Future Years Defense Program] budget dollars to make it happen. I think that message, especially given the concerns we had with the program less than a year ago, is a substantial highlight for the whole program.
DJ: Ray, did you read the tea leaves as many of us did — had Raytheon failed to successfully negotiate Milestone B, recognized official pivotal event or not, it could have spelled the end of the OCX program?
RK: Yep, we understood that and so there was pressure. And I will once again say that I really admire the work accomplished by the program office to prepare and get us there. They busted their tails in making sure they responded to all the requests from OSD [ed. Office of the Secretary of Defense].
DJ: As you said previously, both sides are now cooperating to make OCX a success. However, there are still major issues concerning cyber and information assurance. Almost every program today is struggling with these requirements. Is OCX any different?
RK: During the whole Milestone B process, there were issues regarding information assurance or IA, and whether we have the right approach. Initially, there was clearly some doubt. I will say that some early comments were not necessarily clear…they were misinterpreted or misstated, which led folks to say, “gee we don’t think you have a solution.” Consequently, we got to spend a quality day with the OSD CIO [ed. Chief Information Officer] team. Actually I think that was probably one of the most beneficial days we spent with any of the government review groups. When the CIO group came in… Well, to say they were skeptical is probably an understatement. One of the statements from the chairman was, “I don’t know why I’m here… I don’t think you have the right answer.” That is how it started.
At the end of the day, and again I give credit to Lt. Col. Blevins and the government team, the IA team had a solid understanding of exactly what we were doing for information assurance, how we were looking at things. How we ensured that all the STIG [ed. Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guides] updates came out and how we updated and drove forward with our coding standards. We had the right approach to work the security vulnerabilities for our legacy code, which is still an issue, in that we have a lot of old C and C++ that was never designed to operate in this kind of IA world; even with test plans, and I know we will spend more time with them on test plans. I think getting the acknowledgement that we have a solid activity going forward was a big message. Then last week we learned that, according to Lt. Col. Blevins and Mr. Leonard, it now appears our IA program is the poster child for DoD and space programs.
DJ: Ray, my colleagues and I have been hearing those same IA and cyber concerns and what you just said is huge for OCX. It appears that you made believers out of what is known to be a tough bunch of critics from OSD and even 24th Air Force.
RK: Success can be good and bad, Don, because it now puts additional pressure on us and gains us additional visibility from DoD, but I think it also speaks for the quality of the Information Assurance activity. And let’s face it, IA and cyber security are critical for the enterprise given the dependence of the system by both the DoD and civil users.
DJ: You alluded to the fact that many IA concerns are due to code reuse, which if I remember correctly was a large part of your response to the initial RFP for OCX. In other words, reusing legacy code is a big part of your program and planning going forward. Correct?
RK: Indeed, some concerns were over code reuse. We showed what we had accomplished to solve problems with regards to code reuse and how we isolate and treat vulnerabilities. Some issues are simple, like typically when you use C and C++, memory leaks are a common occurrence, but with IA you can’t allow that to happen. If you go to some of the old C-code stuff, one of the big issues is that C-code typically requires a root authority or a system administrator authority for the code, and you can’t do that in an IA environment. So we need to solve those issues going forward in the legacy code. Now, let’s face it, as you said, there is a lot of legacy code in the OCX program and we need to address it. There is a lot of COTS [ed. Commercial Off The Shelf) code on this program, and the COTS and the hardware require a lot of capabilities be built in to support hardening and configuring the system. So there is a lot of effort going into these solutions. We must ensure we’ve got the secure coding standards right as we develop our modified or new code going forward and most importantly we have to test it all.
DJ: Ray, that is a testimony to all the hard work Raytheon and the government team have put into the OCX program. I can tell you that a year ago most pundits thought if OCX was going to be a poster child, it would be simply be for how not to conduct a program of this complexity and magnitude. However, it appears you have turned it around. I think we all better understand the comment by General Shelton during our conversation last month when he said, he was sanguine that, “OCX had turned the corner.”
RK: Thanks, Don, and we hope he is right. Another important event is Exercise One. Exercise One completed in August of this year, and it was our first exercise with Lockheed Martin and the GPS III Team. Actually, it was amazing because we started delivering data back in April that were crucial to the August test. Exercise One was the first of five exercises and five rehearsals that led up to the first launch of a GPS III space vehicle. Exercise One was primarily a command and telemetry exercise utilizing Lockheed simulators and our Iteration 1.4 core system. Part of the importance of the Exercise One process is the HMI [ed. Human Machine Interface]. We used the event to sit down with Lockheed Martin and make sure they understand the HMI, focusing on how to inject commands into the system, how to build command plans that go into what we call “procs” or procedures that basically are a linked number of commands that will command, in this case, the simulator, or ultimately the vehicle, to do whatever…turn on the command unit, turn on power or heat… whatever is required. We ingest command measurement lists from Lockheed, which are basically here are the commands and here is the format, back to bits in zeroes and ones to send out, and then these are the responses or telemetry coming back. Then we look for the nominal or yellow and red range where you would have the telemetry. Getting that done was Exercise One, a huge event for the enterprise. It put everybody, all segments of the program, in a great position going forward.
Next is Exercise Two, which is scheduled for January or February. Exercise Two moves into mission management aspects: planning, scheduling, orbit determination, maneuver determination, and maneuver simulation. It demonstrates some of the navigation capabilities, but the real test is to make sure we have all the capability to do the launch and checkout of the GPS III system when it is ready for launch in 2014.
Along the way we are going to do a significant amount of parallel testing and ultimately when we deploy the system there will be parallel ops with regards to OCS and OCX. We will conduct parallel ops until folks say, “OK, I am ready to start the real transition.” During that time, we will do some basic forward and backward data migration to ensure that ultimately with the switch over to OCX we have not lost access to the historical data the program requires.
DJ: I am assuming that, while you can run the systems in parallel, only one can be active. They can’t both be active and simultaneously commanding the GPS constellation, correct?
RK: That’s right, they can’t. We run parallel for testing only, and that is why the actual transition needs to take place sooner rather than later.
DJ: Ray, I was present for the whole buildup phase and ultimate transition from OCS to AEP, and while it went well, it was not without issues. I personally never cared for the metaphor of changing an engine on a car traveling down the freeway without the driver noticing. That is simply ludicrous, and the transition did not go that smoothly. Plus, if the users do not notice the difference, then why are we spending a billion dollars to make the change? I would hope your philosophy on transition is a bit more realistic and is built around dealing with the contingencies that invariably arise.
RK: I totally agree, Don. We are looking at it now, totally separate from the development of the minimized crew manning and automation study, and how we move forward. Reportedly the government will brief General Shelton [ed. Commander AFSPC] on these issues sometime just before the holidays.
DJ: Ray, since you took over as the new PM, there has been talk of capabilities and functions that have been deleted or moved to the right on the schedule to make the program more affordable and timely — fact or fiction?
RK: Frankly, I cannot address some of these issues in this venue. I will tell you that neither we nor AFSPC have moved much functionality to the right. The most important program that has moved is global M-code.
One of the areas that is straightforward and we can address here concerns ground antennas. OCX will use the ground antennas we have today. There will be a toggle switch, determining whether the ground antennas support OCX or OCS, and we will toggle that switch as necessary. We are working out the protocols for exactly how that will work and who makes the decisions on the position of the switch. It sounds like a simple thing, but frankly nothing is simple. Except for maybe the AFSCN [ed. Air Force Satellite Control Network] where OCS and OCX are totally transparent.
DJ: Ray, one of the big issues from a user standpoint is that OCX is currently not tasked to support the remaining active and residual GPS IIA satellites when transitioned. Rumor has it that IIA functionality is delegated to one of your subs, Braxton Technologies, which conducts LADO [ed. Launch, Anomaly, and Disposal Operations] today and maintains the residual satellites as well. We currently have GPS IIA satellites that have been in orbit and operating for more than 20 years. There could still be quite a few GPS IIAs in orbit if OCX sticks to the original deployment schedule. Any comment?
RK: Don, I knew you would ask about GPS IIAs, and right, that issue is still up in the air. As soon as these issues are finalized we can have a discussion about GPS IIAs and residual satellites. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
DJ: So now to a more timely topic, cost and schedule. Where is the OCX program in the budget and do you think it will be affected by sequestration, should it occur? Plus what is the RTO date? Is it the date OCX comes on line, or the date you do a DD250 handover to the government?
RK: Basically we are nearly on cost for the OCX contract. The current contract value is $925M; the original cost estimate was $886M. We are driving forward on that and the Block 1 date or Ready to Operate (RTO) date. Right now, the customer team is working on finalizing a new enterprise schedule that will show the PMD [ed. Program Management Directive] dates. So, we don’t know the exact date the government envisions. I expect an official date either late this year or early next year. I encourage you to ask Colonel Gruber [ed. Director GPS Directorate] this question and maybe then we will also get an answer. We have given them our recommendations.
Concerning sequestration, I am not worried. I believe we have a reasonable level of support from Congress to maintain and continue OCX. That doesn’t mean something won’t change. Our Washington folks tell us that OCX appears to be on solid footing. The Air Force FY13 RDT&E [ed. Research, Development, Test & Evaluation] budget request for OCX, to include Raytheon, support contractors, the GPS Directorate, FFRDCs [ed. Federally Funded Research and Development Centers] and the like, was $371.6M, and the CR or Continuing Resolution amount was $369.4 — given the current budget environment that is strong Congressional support.
DJ: Whether you know it or not you are echoing General Shelton’s comments in our last conversation when, to paraphrase, he indicated that in his view space programs were so important to the nation that he thought they would fare well in the budget debates and allocations.
Now Ray the bottom line is, so what? What will the successful deployment of OCX mean to civil and military users? Where’s the real bang for the buck?
RK: Don the successful completion of OCX will make a huge difference on a number of fronts. For instance even though the FAA and DOT don’t have a whole lot of funding to ante up, we are going to make a difference in how they operate in the future. Some actions are transparent, but not all, as we implement their requirements and as we move forward with OCX.
For example, you and I both do a lot of flying in our respective jobs; the sooner we implement the true capabilities of GPS on airliners and stop adhering only to the fixed air routes, the sooner we will start saving time and money with a vastly more efficient and flexible air routing system.
So, from the civil side, there is certainly a difference, and when we bring other signals in they will be key for us, such as L2C, L5, and L1C. We have the solutions to do that with our receivers at this point in time and I think it is fairly low risk. Indeed that is probably another of my unofficial milestones.
We accomplished a lot of work with ITT Exelis to ensure we have a good solid solution in Block 1 and Block 2 for URE or User Range Error. We are working to get the receiver elements deployed, which at one point was considered to be a high-risk item, but that is now in the works. This will allow all users to achieve greater accuracy.
I have not addressed the navigation side, but GPS accuracy will noticeably improve, and we will use a new Kalman Filter. We are working the new Kalman filter with ITT Exelis and JPL to enhance capabilities. Couple that with better information assurance, increased integrity and predictability, along with system safety, and you have many of the key differences in the OCS system going forward.
DJ: Ray, Steve Moran from Raytheon and I were in meetings last week where we discussed the requirements for and capabilities and accuracy resulting from adding a significant number of new GPS monitoring stations to the mix. Will OCX be able to handle the increase?
RK: We will accommodate them. We can always add more nodes to the system and building additional receivers is not an issue, unless you are an anti-tamper guru.
DJ: More pragmatically we have an arbitrary 31 PRN limit on the current AEP system. Can you tell me what the number of permissible PRNs will be with OCX, everything else being equal? Without any artificial constraints, what will OCX support?
RK: We are required to support 40 PRNs at a minimum, with growth potential to 63 PRNs, and we may be able to support more. I’m not sure there is a limit on the system as such.
DJ: Ray, thank you for your time today, and this wonderful conversation about one of my favorite topics. Considering there are more than 3 billion GPS users worldwide, it should be the favorite topic for lots of folks. Any closing comments?
RK: Having dealt with space programs all my career, I can say that it is not often that you see a program that generates developments in your career that make such a difference.
GPS and its utilization is such that the people in this country and around the world would not know what to do without it. How many cars or cell phones do you find today that do not have GPS? Something that started as a program to support military objectives has made such a substantial change in everyone’s lives around the world, whether they realize it or not.
Unfortunately, GPS is a lot like NASA space programs: most people don’t realize the impact these programs or other space programs have on their lives. It is truly a unique program from that aspect. Most of the stuff I dealt with earlier in my career has stayed behind closed doors and that is where it will remain. The GPS program is out there where you can see the benefit for everybody in the global community. That has probably been one of the best parts of the last 10-12 years in my career, because GPS supports so many of the programs I worked. What we do from space today, supporting this country and the rest of the world, along with the real applications that enhance activities and benefit individuals, is phenomenal and I think we have just scratched the surface.
My conversation with Congressman Pearlmutter’s Legislative Director was interesting from the aspect that he looked at what we could do concerning Tropical Storm Sandy. For instance the subways in New York pump over one million gallons of water out of the tunnels on a normal day. Using GPS, you can now determine vulnerable areas with respect to tidal and wave actions. It is amazing what you get when you connect weather and GPS data; it allows you to prevent some events that typically occur during these storms. Hopefully, the next generation will be able to use this data much more effectively.
There are people like Dr. Penny Axelrad at the University of Colorado and Professor Per Enge at Stanford, that I work with routinely on GPS matters, and I know they are working to make GPS data more useful and effective for all users. GPS adds extreme value to what we can do as a country at home and around the world. I am proud to be part of that.
So, that’s the story on GPS OCX, past, present and future.
It’s all about knowing where people are located. The government and private companies are taking hundreds of millions of geo-coded photos of license plates creating huge databases of where you’ve been. Meanwhile, hyper local mobile ads don’t work when ad networks sometimes receive grossly inaccurate locations of targeted consumers. Xad has developed a way to evaluate and score the accuracy of location positions they get from publishers. Also, mobile ad spending may reach $2.6 billion by year’s end, and Nokia is fighting back against rivals with a new mapping solution for Apple users and automating 3D mapping collection through a purchase of Earthmine. Keep reading for details.
License Plate Snapshots. There hasn’t been much of an outcry over privacy from a huge location tracking operation that doesn’t require consent of the subject. Hundreds of millions of geo-coded photos are being taken of license plates throughout the country. These databases are being created by private companies and the government who use vehicle-mounted cameras. Records include a photo of the vehicle, license plate numbers/letters, time and location. Over two years the Riverside California police have collect two million unique license plate pictures using 49 camera-equipped vehicles. A citizen filed a California Public Record Act request and received a report containing 112 images of his cars. In some of the pictures he can identify car occupants and even the clothes they are wearing.
Private companies that started photographing license plates were initially in the business of repossessing vehicles. With a mounted license plate camera, they drive as many miles as possible through back alleys, parking lots and streets. An alert sounds when a license plate matches the repossession database. Some of these companies are evolving to focusing solely on license plate data collection and have gathered hundreds of millions of photographs. One of the companies, MVTrac , claims to have geo-coded photos of the majority of U.S. registered vehicles.
The data can be used for ill purposes. It can show who may be present at a political gathering, parked at a rehab center, or located at a cancer treatment center. In 1998 a police officer in Washington D.C. pled guilty for extorting owners of vehicles parked at a gay bar. The databases will grow. The Department of Homeland Security has provided more than $50 million in federal grants to police for more cameras.
A Drop in the Advertising Bucket. Advertisers will pay out $2.6 billion for ads on phones and tablets in 2012, predicts eMarketer. This is a small fraction of total ad revenue, less than two percent of advertisers’ overall spend. Yet, mobile ad spending is growing; it is currently triple 2010 spending. The king of mobile advertising is Google, which receives 56 percent of all mobile advertising.
Disparity among Apps. The amount of revenue from mobile advertising varies greatly among applications. Facebook reported 14 percent of its total ad revenue in the third quarter came from mobile. Almost 60 percent of Pandora’s ad revenue came from mobile in the second quarter. Twitter indicates that some days the majority of its ad revenue has come from mobile.
Problematic Location Accuracy. One of the issues of mobile advertising is the accuracy of the mobile user’s location. It is problematic to send a hyper local ad if the ad network receives a grossly inaccurate location position, perhaps a geo-code at the center of a zip code. xAd, a local mobile advertising network, has developed a technology that analyzes the multitude of location signals being passed by each publisher and scores them according to accuracy and performance. “The industry cannot take location signals at face value,” said Chi-Chao Chang of xAd. “What we have found through our SmartLocation technology is that location inputs are often inconsistent on a per ad request basis. In fact, some of these signals are just plain wrong.” As a result, ad campaigns may be running on inventory that is not suitable for granular targeting, resulting in wasted ad impressions and overall lackluster performance.
Automated 3D Mapping. Nokia, fighting to get back to the top of the heap, is acquiring 3D map-technology maker Earthmine and revamping Nokia’s mapping tools to win back customers from its rivals. The company announced a new mapping app for Apple mobile devices and unveiled the new brand name “Here” for its location services and website. Earthmine will provide Nokia with a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street-level imagery. “This will add competitive advantages and increased differentiation to HERE‘s Location Content and Location Platform, sustaining competitiveness in B2B (e.g., data for in-car navigation systems) and drive highly engaging user experiences,” reads a blog on the Nokia website. The company believes that the Earthmine data collection vehicles are massively scalable and expect to be using them in 31 countries next year.
The month of October and now into November was filled with several conferences, but not a lot of location news. A few news snippets, while not blockbusters, were important. One was Waze’s decision to offer its own location-based advertising. Another was a milestone for Ford, which said its Sync information system is now in five million vehicles. On an end-of-an-era note, of which there have been quite a few in the last two years, Sprint has decided to drop the Nextel name. Nextel was one of the innovative companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, placing location capability into mobile phones and jump-starting an industry.
Waze recently said it is offering a global location-based advertising platform that will be directed to its 30 million users. Waze, founded in 2009 in Israel, says smartphone users can try the service for free — the profit for them is ad revenue from local and large brands.
GPS World’s LBS Insider recently reported that Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, actually endorsed Waze as an alternative to its own mapping service after users were experiencing problems with it. Waze, which is offering the advertisements in the United States, said it saw a jump in downloads after the announcement.
Some industry analysts say it may be a mistake for Waze to swim in the deep end of the pool to compete with such mobile advertising giants as Google.
Waze raised a total of $67 million from investor Kleiner Perkins and Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing. They cite big partners such as Circle K, Dunkin’ Donuts, MACS, Kum & Go, Wyndham Hotels, Jamba Juice, and P&G.
Palo Alto-based Waze is probably best known for its driving directions based on user input. The company says that its users spend an average of more than 7 hours in their vehicles a month.
The company, in order not to annoy users, is minimizing the number of pins on a map advertisement. According to published reports, the company said its advertisements will include coupons.
From the Waze blog: “We don’t want to bombard you, so you’ll never see too many businesses crowded on the map at once. Instead, the algorithm that powers Waze Ads aims to bring you a helpful selection of the various retailers around you on your daily drive.”
Waze is also making advertising inroads in Europe. It recently announced a partnership with Lumata, an Italy-based mobile marketing company. The deal allows Lumata to have a an exclusive right for advertising on Waze’s app in Italy, according to published reports.
Waze announced in June that car models will soon integrate the company’s mapping software. The company’s iOS and Android app’s users contribute road data while they drive, share accident reports, police speed traps, traffic jams and other data.
Five Million Sync Units in Five Years…
Ford and Microsoft’s Sync infotainment system has been installed in five million Ford and Lincoln vehicles. The unit, which was rolled out at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, was one of the first products to allow smartphones to work with car components.
Sync was innovative in that it bundled turn-by-turn navigation, hands-free calling, text message reading, and other features. Earlier aftermarket products, such as Clarion’s AutoPC, were busts — but perhaps five-to-seven years too early for the market.
Ford jazzed up Sync with touchscreens and voice recognition since it rolled out its first model, which only used push buttons. It integrated other features such as audio, air conditioning/climate control, and navigation. Soon the newer version, MyFord Touch, offered video streaming, music, and a voice-activated climate control system.
Ford announced earlier this year that it was working with State Farm to add all Sync-equipped vehicles to the insurance giant’s Drive Safe & Save approved vehicles. A customer, through a voluntary sign up, can run a Vehicle Health Report that sends information to State Farm. Potential insurance savings for a customer could be 40 percent.
Ford is working with several industry companies, including Pandora and TeleNav Scout, through its AppLink program, which was globally offered earlier this year.
In other LBS news:
Sprint’s recent decision to drop the Nextel name was the end of an era, but not a surprise. It was Nextel, before its 2005 merger with Sprint, that truly innovated consumer and enterprise applications and markets on the mobile handset. In the wake of Japan’s Softbank purchase of 70 percent of Sprint, the Nextel part of the Sprint name will go away in mid-2013. The new name will be Sprint Corp. The Nextel brand was known for its iDEN technology and network, which is gradually being shut down by Sprint.
The recent U.S. presidential election had an LBS story. Foursquare had an app that had the goal of encouraging users to vote. The “I Voted” app allowed users to find their local polling station on Election Day and check in to show they cast a vote. Foursquare, trying to show that it offers more than “check-in” capability, recently announced a rating system for businesses. It is not clear whether the service, with 25 million users, is going after companies such as TripAdvisor and Yelp for a share of the evaluation/services market.
Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S III managed to knock Apple’s iPhone 4S off the pedestal as the world’s most popular smartphone, in terms of sales, in the third quarter, said Strategy Analytics. Samsung sold around 18 million S III phones during the quarter, compared to Apple’s 16.2 million iPhone 4S units. The Galaxy S features a large touchscreen and GPS for location-based services.
Firing on all cylinders — to use a slightly outmoded technological metaphor — GNSS moved forward on virtually every front in the past month. GPS made major advances both on the ground and in space, Galileo took a giant step, Compass continued on its roll, GLONASS has good news pending in only a day or two (knock on wood), and GAGAN is settling into space. But the best news of all is a very quiet, indeed somewhat hidden item: the UK patent applications against the interoperative GPS/Galileo signal design appear to have been dropped.
Let’s eat dessert first, since life is uncertain.
Patent Dispute Evaporates
Vague rumblings emerged throughout spring and summer this year that two British technologists, backed by the U.K. Ministry Defense, had filed patents on the future interoperable GPS and Galileo binary-offset carrier signal designs. If granted and enforced, the patents would have severely disrupted modernization plans for both systems and levied unexpected costs upon receiver manufacturers. And in fact a company called Ploughshare Innovations Ltd. Started dialing up said manufacturers and asking for payment of royalties, based on the patent filings.
After significant uproar and negotiations before and behind the scenes, it now appears that the initiative has been quietly scuttled. The file on application number 11/774,412, Modulation Signals for a Satellite Navigation System, on the U.S. Patent Office’s website, now reads “Expressly Abandoned — During Examination.” The status is dated September 16, 2012, some time ago, but that I’m aware of, no parties involved, whether as filers or negotiators, ever made any kind of announcement about it.
Checking the European Patent Office and its registry — which by the way is no trivial task of website navigation — I found a note under the docket for EP1830199, Modulations Signals for a Satellite Navigation System stating “Patent surrendered.” Dated September 24, 2012. A few days later, another note: “Lapsed in a contracting state announced via postgrant inform. From Nat. Office to EPO,” with further information to the effect of “lapse because of failure to submit a translation or the description or to pay the fee within the prescribed time limit.” And for good measure, a final docket not on October 3, “Lapsed due to resignation by the proprietor.”
However abstruse and arcane, we’ll take good news however we find it. Another bullet dodged.
GPS Ground Segment Benchmark
The GPS Directorate announced on October 26 that the U.S. Air Force and Raytheon have successfully met all requirements to enter into the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the Next-Generation Operational Control System (OCX). OCX will replace the current GPS operational control segment in managing the satellite constellation and providing command and control for all modernized signals.
OCX is being developed and fielded in blocks of GPS capability, to align with GPS III and military equipment deliveries.
OCX Block 0, also known as the Launch and Checkout System, scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2014, will allow OCX to support the launch of GPS III satellites.
OCX Block 1, scheduled to transition to operations in the first quarter of 2016, will deliver the operational capability to command and control the entire GPS constellation including GPS II and GPS III satellites. This block will also control the legacy civil and military signals, as well as two modernized civil and military signals, L2C and L5.
OCX Block 2 will specifically support advanced capabilities for civilian and military signals, the international civil signal, L1C, and the military signal, M-Code. OCX Block 2 is currently synchronized with modernized signal broadcast and timing.
GPS Block IIF-3 satellite.
GPS Block IIF Satellite Rises, Reaches Station, and Transmits
On October 11, The L5 transmitter aboard GPS Block IIF-3 satellite SVN65/PRN24 was switched on, transmitting the civilian safety-of-life GPS signal, designed to meet demanding requirements for safety-of-life transportation and other high-performance applications.
A day earlier, SVN65 began transmitting L1 and L2 signals as PRN24 on October 8. A number of stations of the International GNSS Service are tracking the satellite. As of press date for this magazine (October 25) the satellite is included in broadcast almanacs although it is set unhealthy and will continue to be so until satellite commissioning is completed. The satellite is drifting towards its designated orbital position of Slot 1 in Plane A.
The launch of the GPS Block IIF-3 satellite took place as scheduled October 4, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Galileo Turns Four. Validation Satellites, That Is.
The Galileo control room.
On October 12, a Soyuz launcher carrying two Galileo In-Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites deployed its twins into orbit within four hours after take-off, at close to 23,200 kilometers altitude. They join two earlier IOV spacecraft launched in October 2011. Once all four are operational in space, they will provide the minimum number of satellites required for navigational fixes — enabling system validation testing when all are visible in the sky.
A week after the dual liftoff from Kourou, French Guiana, the two satellites completed the critical Launch and Early Orbit Phase on October 19-20.
Satellites FM3 and FM4 satellites were handed over from the joint ESA/CNES Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) team in Toulouse, France, to the Galileo Control Centre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, from where Spaceopal will manage operations of the Galileo constellation.
Three orbit maneuvers were conducted for each satellite to start them on drift orbits towards their operational positions, where they are expected to arrive on November 10 (FM3) and November 12 (FM4) after a series of drift-stop and fine-positioning movements.
The satellites were configured into a secure mode shortly after handover. While underway to their final positions, they will also undergo a series of tests to confirm the performance of their subsystems before switching on the payload.
The satellites were built by a consortium led by the Astrium division of EADS, which produced the platforms and has responsibility for the payloads, while Thales Alenia Space handled assembly and testing.
Compass up to Eleven
The two BeiDou-2/Compass satellites launched on September 18 reached their circular medium-Earth orbits on October 1 and started transmitting navigation signals. Several stations participating in the International GNSS Service’s Multi-GNSS Experiment as well as some in the Cooperative Network for GNSS Observation started tracking the satellites on September 26.
Although semi-official rumors had circulated that China was preparing for the Compass G6 (G2R) satellite launch on October 25, we have not found any announcement that the event has occurred.
The November issue of GPS World will appear in a few weeks’ time, with a cover story on “What Is Achievable with the Current Compass Constellation?” The technical article by Chinese researchers gives data from a 12-station tracking network distributed through China, the Pacific region, Europe, and Africa. It demonstrates the capacity of Compass with a constellation comprising four geostationary Earth-orbit (GEO) satellites and five inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) satellites in operation. The regional system will be completed around the end of 2012 with a constellation of five GEOs, five IGSOs, and four medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellites. By 2020 it will be extended into a global system.
GLONASS News in a Day or Two
As we go to e-press with this e-newsletter on October 30, we look forward to a Russian rocket rising on November 2 with a Luch data-relay satellite payload to service the the Russian satnav system. The second of a set of three geostationary satellites launched to reactivate Roscosmos’s Luch Multifunctional Space Relay System, it will also carry transponders for the System for Differential Correction and Monitoring (SDCM), Russia’s satellite-based augmentation system. The transponders will broadcast GNSS corrections on the standard GPS L1 frequency using C/A PRN codes assigned by the GPS Directorate. According to the most recent announcement, it will be positioned at 16 degrees West longitude, joining Luch-5A, already in an orbital slot at 95 degrees East longitude.
GAGAN Unfolding
The Indian Space Research Organization announced on October 3 that orbit-raising maneuvers placed the GSAT-10 satellite, launched September 30, in an orbit with 35,000-kilometer high orbit, with an orbit period of 23 hours 50 minutes, and a designated location of 83 degree East. GSAT-10 contains a payload to support the Indian GPS and GEO Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) satellite-based augmentation system. The satellite will likely use PRN code 128.
Another Dispute Headed for Resolution?
Finally, another pink dawn on the horizon. The European Union (EU) and China will reportedly meet in December in Paris to discuss overlapping radio frequencies both plan to use for their future encrypted government/military satellite navigation services.
The meeting will be conducted under what the Joint Statement on Space Technology Cooperation specifies as the ITU Framework. ITU is the International Telecommunication Union of Geneva, a United Nations affiliate that regulates satellite orbital slots and frequencies.
The statement was signed as an annex to a broader EU-China summit held September 20 in Brussels. The two sides continue collaboration on satellite navigation despite the signal conflict, which has been a subject of debate for at least two years.
The 27-nation EU and China have agreed to continue the China-Europe GNSS Technology Training and Cooperation Center.
It was thirty years ago today, Cheremisin taught the band to play. They’ve been going in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to raise a smile. So may I introduce to you the constellation here for years, Vladimir Putin’s GLObal NAv Sat System!
While in our booth at INTERGEO in Hanover last month, I heard Andrey Kupriyanov say it was GLONASS’s 30th birthday today, that particular today being October 12. “First satellites launched,” he recalled.
“Then it is the 30th birthday of GNSS as well,” I replied. “First GPS, then GLONASS. One plus one equals two: GNSS.” Andrey Kupriyanov nodded agreement, then told me a bit about his involvement in the program back then.
After graduating from the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography in 1972, he obtained a Ph.D. in geodetic astronomy, taught for a while, then worked in the U.S.S.R. Ministry of the Merchant Marine, taking part in the development, testing, and application of new operational equipment for mid-Earth orbit satellites.
We’re Vladimir Putin’s GLObal NAv Sat System, we hope that you enjoy our show. We’re Vladimir Putin’s GLObal NAv Sat System, sit back and let PNT flow.
GLONASS achieved full operational status with 24 satellites in 1995, a year after GPS hit that milestone. The constellation subsequently declined to six operational satellites in 2001.
Andrey Kuypriyanov kept busy, representing Ashtech, Magellan, and Thales Navigation in Russia, and participating in research involving GPS and GLONASS monitoring, interaction, and eventual interoperability.
A recovering economy early this century enabled Russia to invest significantly in satnav again. Renewed launches and new spacecraft designs with longer lifetimes restored the constellation to full operational capability, with worldwide availability and greater accuracy.
Vladimir Putin’s global, Vladimir Putin’s global, Vladimir Putin’s GLObal NAv Sat System!
Andrey Kupriyanov is no longer the young man he once was (who among us is, really?) but he stays involved as executive director of the GLONASS-GNSS Forum and as NovAtel’s regional manager for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill. You’re such a lovely user group, we’d like to take you home with us, we’d love to take you home.
Andrey Kupriyanov Olkgovich is of course only one of many, many long-laboring soldiers in the international GNSS brigade: engineers who made devices, product managers who carried them forth to market, users who embraced them. But on this 30th birthday of GNSS — we’re only just now hitting our stride, entering our golden years — let’s give him, and all of us, a rousing chorus.
I don’t really want to stop the show, but I thought you might like to know, that the singer’s going to sing a song, and he wants you all to sing along. So let me introduce to you the one and only Kupriyanov, and Vladimir Putin’s GLObal NAv Sat System!
In a repeat performance, USGIF (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) put on a superb conference that was really informative and well executed. GEOINT has always been a serious conference with very little partying, but this year was more so with the leadership even eliminating the traditional closing night social. The social events never were excessive in the past but no one wanted even a hint of over indulgence. It wasn’t missed, because quite frankly there was too much to see and too much to do to spend time on frivolity.
As in past years, there were so many noteworthy presentations. With more than 248 exhibitors in the Expo, it was impossible to see and hear it all. So this is just one man’s limited view of a mega conference. Luckily, many of the key presentations are on the USGIF website as daily summaries. See ShowDaily 1-5 and videos clips (make sure select the 2012 clips and not previous years).
Director of National Intelligence and keynote speaker James Clapper
The opening keynote was delivered by the director of National Intelligence, The Honorable James Clapper, who directly addressed two elephants in the room — sequestration and his take on the Benghazi attack. First he discussed several issues: the INCITE program to have an enterprise data model in the “cloud” by 2018, which he said was moving along nicely. He tied in the need for multi-int data such as GEOINT, SIGINT, MASINT, etc. and also expressed his concern that improvements were needed to speed up the clearance process. He cited reciprocity, so clearances would carry over from one agency and contract to others as a big issue.
Then he got to elephant one — sequestration. He said that it would be devastating to the intel community because there is no way to prioritize programs. Important programs would see the same cuts as less critical programs which could prove very dangerous.
The second elephant was the recent attack at Benghazi and death of four diplomatic staff members including the Ambassador. Director Clapper took a jab at our politicians and quoted a recent article by Paul R. Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that he said was thoughtful and resonated well with him.
“Information about lethal incidents is not total and immediate. The normal pattern after such events is for explanations to evolve as more and better information becomes available. We would and should criticize any investigators who settled on a particular explanation early amidst sketchy information and refused to amend that explanation even when more and better information came in. A demand for an explanation that is quick, definite and unchanging reflects a naive expectation — or in the present case, irresponsible politicking.” You can view Director Clapper’s full keynote here.
NGA Director Letitia Long addresses the opening session crowdNGA Director Latisha Long
Director Clapper was followed by NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) Director Letitia Long, who discussed current efforts at NGA. She cited continuous creation of ever more capable applications. One example permitted a single user to locate a hard-to-find feature in imagery that took 10 minutes, which previously would have taken several analysts days to complete. She stated that during the past year NGA had developed more than 150 apps that are currently in their “app store.” Her goal was to have the majority of future apps created by commercial developers. They are even considering an “Apple iPhone like” commercial model that would pay compensation to developers based on the number of downloads and users rather than cumbersome and limited contracts.
Additionally, she spoke of their work to build a Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for NGA and DIA, which will soon top 2,000 users and is expected to grow to 60,000 users by the end of 2013. She said that through streamlining and redundancy elimination about 40 percent of their geospatial content is available to her users with a goal of 100 percent by next year.
This conference was an eye opener in that it was surprising how fast topics that were just sidebar discussions last year are moving to the forefront. Topics like human geography, social media, and pattern of life mapping seemed to be part of many presentations and some exhibitors. A few presentations stretched my concept of geospatial technology and tradecraft.
One of them was by Jeff Jonas, an IBM Fellow and chief scientist for IBM Entity Analytics, who gave a lunchtime keynote explaining work he was doing at IBM to help decipher seemingly duplicate data to cut processing time. He used a puzzle metaphor to explain his work with “big data.”
“Some of the pieces are missing, some of the pieces have errors, some of the pieces have fabricated lies,” he said, but by merging many different datasets a filtering occurs. He then explained an ultimate filter by using an example of two theoretical twins with the same IDs, same DNA, same accounts, etc. He said that with current technology we can now track the movements of individuals through their smartphones, and that unless the twins are joined at the hip, “Space time movement data is the ultimate biometric” and is one way to differentiate one person from another. This capability is also going test our concepts of privacy.
The GEOINT Expo
In the Expo area, there were more than 248 vendors ranging from the big companies such as Lockheed, Boeing, SAIC, and others to small start-ups at the fringe of the exhibit hall. Several were showing human geography / social media tools and numerous data storage and management solutions. I didn’t see much new hardware of note other than Ball Aerospace, who was showing the latest and greatly improved version of its Flash aerial LiDAR that can create 3D models draped with imagery continuously and in real time. This was so impressive that I’m going to learn more and write a column about it in the near future.
Klee Dienes, president of Hadron Industries and former medical helicopter pilot, demonstrated Hadron’s work developing hand-gesture language to use Oblong computer control equipment to navigate maps. Oblong Industries has developed equipment that permits touch-free control of applications just through the use of hand gestures, very much like in the science-fiction movie Minority Report. Oblong not only has equipment that can follow hand gestures using a special glove, but the technology has progress to tracking hand gestures in free space without special gloves. They also developed a special hand-gesture language called g-Speak. This technology is hard to describe and is best understood viewing video clips at the Oblong site.
There were numerous presentations on the growing use of human geography and the growing need for not only geospatial technicians but of all things, social scientists. The only “wet blanket” attendee that voiced a concern during a question-and-answer session was an academic researcher who voiced a concern that social scientists were being used for intel work. He said that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) may have a problem with “weaponizing” social science. The speaker had a good answer in that he asked “How could the AAA have a problem with preventing war and reducing human misery?” My feeling, considering the stellar high-paying job market for social science majors, is why bite the hand that could feed you?
There was so much to cover in the human geography realm that in next month’s column, I will focus on the human geography aspect of GEOINT.
October was a month of shows, rumors and announcements. Testing of competing indoor location positioning technologies is being planned by the FCC; prospects for some companies will ride on the public results. Apple may be turning to TomTom to save it from its mapping inaccuracy issues, dubbed Mapplegate. This month’s CTIA show was flat; attendees were wondering if it was the last chapter of the fall show. Interesting industry tidbits were heard at the MforMobile Location Business Summit. New Google Ad Word rates may be created that are also based on the distance between the handset and advertiser’s location. History can be harsh, remembering an unfortunate calculation by a location industry giant. Marketers continue to be frustrated by the mobile industry’s continued difficulty to completely measure ad results.
The FCC sees indoor location as a critical safety concern for E911 emergency response. The commission has tasked an advisory committee to evaluate indoor location positioning technologies. TechnoCom has been chosen to conduct the independent testing as a neutral third party. The test bed is in about 20 structures of various types, in locations that range from highly dense urban to sparse landscape. The following companies are submitting technology for the testing: Qualcomm (AGPS/AFLT/Cell ID), NextNav (GPS-like terrestrial beacons), Boeing (LEO satellites using the Iridium constellation), and Polaris (RF fingerprinting). Additional companies submitted technology, but later withdrew. Test results should be made public in March of 2013. A public workshop on this testing is being held at the FCC on October 24 and can be watched online at www.fcc.gov/live.
Indoor Mapping. At the Location Business Summit, it was clear that the retail and hospitality industries is anxious to start exploring indoor marketing based on real-time location. They seem to expect it will start out working flawlessly. It won’t. In addition to the indoor positioning being early stage, mapping quality is uneven. The gold bar of quality assurance for outdoor mapping is aerial fly-overs and street driving. In some situations crowd sourcing works. For indoor maps, it’s the Wild West. Currently there are no standards for vetting indoor mapping. Maps are being created of greatly varying quality, sometimes by way of rough diagrams found on the Internet that are then shoe-horned into the outlines of buildings.
TomTom to the Rescue? Shares in TomTom, maker of personal navigation devices (PNDs) and mapping, jumped to a three-week high on speculation that it may be taken private by its founders with the help of Apple. In turn, Apple could buy TomTom’s maps database to correct its mapping problems. TomTom’s founders own 47 percent of the company, but may be held back by the uptick in share value.
Paying for Location. Reportedly, Google has location-based AdWords in beta. Advertising rates go up the closer the targeted user is to the venue being promoted. A restaurant ad is more relevant, and more likely to draw a person who is one mile away than 20 miles. Some travelers will park near a string of hotels and use a site like hotels.com to find the most competitively priced room for that evening. An ad for a hotel on the other side of town is of lesser value and would be cheaper.
Comments Heard at the Location Business Summit by MforMobile this Month:
“We need to build ambient intelligence into devices. Nobody needs more information, more apps, ads, logins or devices. It isn’t sustainable.”
“Location data on the consumer side is often junky because phones are trying to conserve battery, and won’t invoke GPS.”
“You can get better locations from the carrier network, but it is too expensive a proposition for advertisers.”
“We find that hyper-local ad targeting leaves us with too few people to address.”
Can I Turn Back the Clock? In an interview for Forbes in 2003, Min Kao, CEO of Garmin, puts a stake in the ground. He says he does not seek to compete in navigation with the mobile phone, the likes of Nokia and Motorola, as that is the kind of commodity business Garmin would like to avoid. The PND vendors continue to be squeezed between the OEM embedded equipment and the smartphone. It is hard to be optimistic about the PND market, commented John Canali of Strategy Analytics at the Location Business Summit. Heavy discounting has led to plummeting revenues. “The PND companies are hardware focused in a market whose foundation is software. It will be very difficult to transform PND companies,” says Canali. “They will struggle.” In 2009, Google announced that all Android phones built on OS 1.6 or higher would have free turn-by-turn directions. Nokia followed shortly after. So it began.
A Little Slow. CTIA drew more than 5,000 people to attend MobileCon, its fall show with a new brand name. You may remember it as CTIA Enterprise and Applications. This was a significant decline from last year when 10,000 to 15,000 conference-goers attended. Activity was slow and the exhibit floor was smaller. Conference sessions were held on the exhibit floor.
Still Can’t Close the Loop. The industry continues to be unable to provide advertisers with metrics of how many pizzas a mobile ad sold. Papa John’s Pizza will know if someone has clicked to call or clicked to map, but Papa John’s won’t know if those actions resulted in a purchase. Without this fundamental metric, advertisers complain that it is hard to build a business case for mobile advertising. The click rates that they can track aren’t always representative because of user errors that include fat fingers, fraudulent clicks and pocket dialing.
There were a lot of the familiar faces at the Institute of Navigation GNSS 2012 convention in Nashville September 18-21. The show activity level was around the same as last year with a few more companies exhibiting. The format of workshops/panel discussions has really helped make program updates more comprehensible and accessible, but there weren’t a large number of technical/product papers by manufacturers.
The global panel discussions/workshops were popular, providing constellation status overviews on GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Compass/Beidou, as were the SBAS updates on the European EGNOS, US WAAS, and Russian SDCM. We also heard of key EGNOS and WAAS L5 implementation plans.
The exhibit hall was somewhat busy, with several new companies attending, and there were new products around if you looked for them, even if some had already been announced prior to ION. Manufacturers now have a number of market-segment product showcase shows where they can pitch new applications and products, so they don’t always save these for ION. ION still presents the opportunity for international industry/agencies/academics to get together and meet face-to-face, and this is still a key ingredient that pulls people in. Nashville this year was as ever a great venue — you could almost hear the music on Broadway from the exhibit hall.
Some snippets of news I collected during the show included:
Russia is still moving forward with next-generation GLONASS capability plans, and build-out of the System for Differential Corrections and Monitoring (SDCM) — the Russian SBAS. With one Luch GEO already on orbit, recovery is well underway to replace an apparent recent launch failure of the second Luch GEO, and the ground network continues to grow with 19 reference sites inside Russia and five outside. The Russian space industry is apparently undergoing a phase of consolidation, with fewer stronger organizations emerging. Plans for a new generation of SDCM multi-constellation reference receivers — including use of GPS, Galileo and other SBAS signals — are apparently being considered.
EGNOS in Europe is also moving right along, rolling out GNSS aircraft approaches, mostly in Germany and France, with LPV precision approach development well advanced in France, Germany and UK. Thirty-seven ground reference sites are up and running with step-by-step improvements in accuracy, integrity and coverage planned out to at around 2014/2016.
U.S. WAAS now has virtually 10 years of operational experience, with 38 ground reference stations and three operational GEOs. The FAA said that WAAS is achieving 99 percent availability over the continental U.S., and good service coverage extends well into South America and up into Alaska and Canada. Phase IV WAAS during 2014-2028 will see the change-over from use of L2 to L5 for measuring and generating ionospheric corrections, and a new GEO is planned for procurement around 2015-2018. Almost 2,000 LPV precision approaches have been commissioned at 1,900 U.S. airports — +60,000 aviation users appear to be largely general aviation and to some extent scheduled airlines. The FAA is targeting expansion of the number of approaches by 2016 to more than 5,000.
Beidou has aspirations to provide “sole-means” navigation capability in Western China where nothing else currently exists, and with 17 ground reference sites hopes that CAT I approaches could be supported.
Todd Walter of Stanford University is working with the FAA, preparing for definition of the service to be provided by the coming L1/L5 dual-frequency GEOs — a long and winding road through pending RTCA committee discussions — but Todd had some good proposals to eliminate redundant data and achieve high-integrity aviation navigation when L5 SBAS service comes on line. The FAA needs industry to look at these proposals and provide feedback so that L5 WAAS signal definition is available for when they want to get their L1/L5 GEOs procured, developed and online.
Photo: Boeing
The third GPS IIF satellite with L5 was launched October 4 and is undergoing on-orbit check-out.
That’s where we have a problem right now, as on-orbit GPS L5 initial operational capability (IOC) was being projected at the show to have slipped all the way out to 2020. So manufacturers are not ready to put resources and money into this effort until some hint of commercial return might be possible. But with GPS dual-frequency L1/L5 being a cornerstone of the FAA’s NextGen, we have to expect that there will be continued pressure to keep launching satellites, that RTCA L5 definition activities will have to move forward, and heck, we should even expect to see people making use of those L5 signals that are available in novel and unexpected ways. Manufacturers who have already taken the plunge and started up L1/L5 receiver development also need specs to be firmed up so they can field these receivers when there is service, so the FAA, Todd, and others need RTCA to move along and industry to support the activity. It would also help to see a firmed-up L5 constellation launch schedule, too.
It had to happen sometime. I just thought or hoped it might take a few more years.
But I guess I should not be surprised since I experienced a wonderful 30-year U.S. Air Force (USAF) career and that has been over for more than a decade. I have been working GPS issues since 1978. So I guess it should not have come as a surprise when just a couple of weeks ago a wet-behind-the-ears USAF 2nd Lieutenant actually inquired of me, in a public GPS-related forum no less, “So, what did you do in the war, granddad?”
Several irreverent and potentially satisfying responses immediately came to mind:
I am not your granddad.
Where do you get off asking me a question in that tone of voice?
Frankly, it is none of your business.
Instead, I simply inquired, “Which one?” This obviously unexpected response necessitated a long pause while the offender, a now obviously-easily-confused 2nd Lieutenant, ruminated about which war(s) to inquire. For my part I was ready to hit him over the head with my cane if he responded with WWII. Of course I would probably have been accused of child abuse, so he saved the day and a possible court date when he replied in a questioning falsetto, “Vietnam?”
I won’t bore you with my response. However, since that unfortunate “age discrimination” incident (from both parties), it has occurred to me that many of us who were privileged to experience GPS in its infancy are certainly not spring chickens. Indeed, many (Dr. Ivan Getting for one) have passed on to their great reward. Remember, Professor (Colonel) USAF Ret. Bradford Parkinson, who created and ran the NAVSTAR GPS Joint Program Office from 1972 to 1978, was a full colonel in 1972. However, that says nothing about commitment or expertise. Most of us, Brad included, are still as engaged and passionate about the future of GPS as we ever were. Consider that the first satellite in the system, Navstar 1, was launched February 22, 1978. In just a few months the GPS operational constellation will be 35 years old, and Air Force Space Command is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. My point being that few operational space systems, if any, engender this type of lifelong loyalty, passion and dedication. Plus, those of us who count ourselves among the original sojourners on this amazing journey, especially those who are graying and threatening to beat impertinent whippersnappers with canes, are actually very proud of the fact that we are still engaged, and even more amazed and heartened that there’s a generation of young USAF and other military personnel, engineers, scientists, inventors, and everyday believers to follow in our footsteps. I highlight the USAF personnel because they are the official stewards of GPS.
Indeed, at the recent ION GNSS Conference held it Nashville, Tennessee, it was apparent that many of the youngsters (many of whom are Ph.D.s) are just as engaged as we are. They see a future for GPS and PNT (position, navigation and timing) systems that we may never have imagined. As prescient as many of us “seniors” claim to be, I have no doubt, indeed I fervently hope, that the young men and women following in our footsteps will achieve feats with GPS and PNT systems of which we never dared dream.
ION GNSS 2012 – Nashville
I state here without equivocation or worry of being challenged that the plenary at this year’s event, which was titled “GNSS Revolution, the Catalyst of the New Information Age,” was the best I have ever encountered at any ION event in the past twenty years. Dr. Jade Morton from Miami University was an excellent moderator and kept the program moving along, but it was the presenters, their evident, extensible passion for their subjects and their excellent presentations (see list below) that made the night unforgettable:
1.
High Precision Agriculture: Tony Thelen, Director of Intelligent Solutions Group, John Deere
2.
Crime, Punishment, and the Global Positioning System: Professor David Last, Crime Consultant Engineer and Professor Emeritus, University of Bangor, UK
3.
Precision Navigation Sensors Based on Atom Interferometry: Professor Mark Kasevich, Applied Physics, Stanford Universit
GPS and Agriculture
Tony Thelen, the first presenter from John Deere — yes, the people who make green farm and lawn tractors among other things — actually made GPS and agriculture sound interesting. His presentation was top notch. It certainly kept my interest, and he left me wanting to know more about GPS and agriculture! Of course, I am being a bit disingenuous, since one of my most requested columns, titled “The Farmer in Finland,” concerns the unparalleled John Deere StarFire system, which probably deserves another column soon. Conversations with plenary attendees after his excellent presentation indicate that Tony managed to ignite that spark and interest again for many in the audience. The effect that GPS and companies like John Deere have had on agriculture is simply amazing, and the quantifiable benefits almost beyond belief. Plus, according to Tony Thelen, there is good reason to believe we will continue to be astounded at what the future holds for GPS and agriculture. I encourage you to visit the ION website and review not only Tony’s excellent presentation, but all the ION GNSS 2012 Plenary presentations.
GPS Forensics
When you have three excellent and inspiring speakers lined up for an evening of edification, you always face the conundrum of order. Should the featured or most entertaining speaker be in the middle, or should you risk losing some of your audience early and build toward a climax? With this audience Dr. Jade Morton made the wise decision, and put the most anticipated speaker in the middle of the lineup. There is always great expectation on my part, and I expect from most of the audience, when Professor David Last is scheduled to speak. At Nashville, he certainly did not disappoint. Only the infamous tonal chimes from “Law and Order” could have made his presentation any more dramatic.
For my part, I kept expecting to hear those infamous tones whenever David transitioned to a new slide. David’s presentation was a perfect combination of “Law and Order” combined with “The World of Stupid Criminals.” With material like that, how could it have not been a roaring success? Add the dulcet British Public School accent and perfect comic timing and delivery and you can’t fail. Indeed, anyone listening outside the auditorium that night would have thought they had stumbled upon a standup comic convention instead of a bunch of staid scientists and engineers listening to a presentation on GPS forensics.
David is always interesting, but that night he was competing for and in my book won the ION GNSS Emmy. If you ever have the chance to hear Professor David Last speak publicly, don’t miss it. And criminals in the UK should just surrender — they don’t stand a chance in court against a consulting engineer and expert witness like Professor Last. I dare say even Sherlock Holmes, the famous consulting detective, would be proud of Professor Last.
Cold Atom Interferometry
None of this lessens the impact or obvious passion for his subject displayed by Professor Mark Kasevich from Stanford University. It is not that I don’t have a passion for cold atom interferometry, it’s just that two weeks later I am still trying to figure out what he said and how it applies. I have no doubt that you can, excuse me, that Professor Mark Kasevich can, construct a cold atom interferometer that can be used to determine a position or a fix; I am just trying to figure out how that 10-cubic-foot rack is going to fit into anything remotely mobile. But, of course, even the optimistic Professor Kasevich admitted that mobile or handheld atom interferometers of this caliber are probably 10 years in the future.
So, at this years’ ION GNSS Plenary event, the audience was treated to a down-to-earth and yet exciting look at the future of GPS and agriculture: the comedic and yet brilliant GPS forensic expertise of a passionate John Cleese wannabee, a caped crusader who is feared by criminals everywhere, and the futuristic “Star Trek” look at cold atoms and interferometry. What more could you ask for? This was an evening that for me elucidates the best ION GNSS Plenary ever. My hat is off to ION Executive Director Lisa Beaty and Plenary Program Director Dr. Jade Morton for an excellent program, but mostly I applaud all three speakers for a wonderfully educational and entertaining evening. How often do you get to combine those adjectives?
GPS World Leadership Dinner and Annual Awards Ceremony
However, for myself and many others the highlight of the ION GNSS event for the past several years has been the annual GPS World Gala and Dinner, now known as the annual GPS World Leadership Dinner and Awards Ceremony. This wonderful and prestigious event is the brainchild of Alan Cameron, our beloved editor-in-chief and now publisher of GPS World. Every year the event just gets better and better. The venues are always palatial, and this year was no exception as we held the event at the beautiful Nashville Hermitage Hotel. The stained-glass ceiling in the lobby was astounding.
I won’t say much more since Alan wrote a complete review of the evenings events, except to caution you that invitations to this wonderful event are extremely hard to come by, and if you are nice to me, who knows? You might receive an invitation next year. It reminds me of the admonition from my daughter, a PsyD in Psychology and a practicing clinical psychologist, when she says: “You should always be nice to me Dad. Remember, I get to pick your nursing home!”
Kudos and Final Thoughts on ION GNSS 2012
I can’t complete my comments on ION GNSS this year without pointing out that the venue, Nashville or Music City, and the Renaissance Hotel by Marriott were both outstanding. The ambience of the entire event was professional yet also warm and friendly, and the ION staff as well as the staff at the Renaissance could not do enough to make my stay more memorable. The Renaissance staff was extremely professional and attentive, working hard to make the event a success. I am already looking forward to next year’s conference, which will be held at the same location September 16-20, 2013. Book early and arrive early for reasons I elucidate next.
Lest we forget, while the ION GNSS is the main performance, the center ring if you will, it is historically preceded by the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee (CGSIC) meeting, which is co-chaired by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) NAVCEN/CC. The CGSIC has been around for 52 years, and was outstanding this year. Yes, the title sounds incredibly dry and boring, but CGSIC meetings are actually very informative, down to earth, informal and even occasionally entertaining. The new USCG NAVCEN commander, Captain William Burns, and his NAVCEN team did an excellent job putting the event together. So, again, I highly recommend arriving a couple of days early for next year’s ION GNSS in Nashville, so you too can attend the CGSIC. You will find it worthwhile.
LightSquared
As much as I hate to close my column on a downer I must unfortunately inform you that the amnesiacs at LightSquared (LSQ) are at it again. Not exactly the same amnesiacs, of course, as their CEO resigned in February, and Philip Falcone from Harbinger, whose solipsistic behavior resulted in a federal security SEC indictment for fraud, joined the LightSquared board recently. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently filed securities fraud charges against Falcone and Harbinger Capital Partners. However, this has not slowed LSQ as it subsequently on Septembert 28 submitted two proposed spectrum sharing filings with the FCC, proposing to utilize the lower 5 MHz of LSQ’s non-existent broadband network in a form that was not initially sanctioned or envisioned and, according to the filings, will not interfere with GPS signals. LSQ did not submit any evidence or test data to prove the lack of interference, just conjecture. These filings, of course, are in addition to LSQ’s recent filing for Chapter 11, better known as a bankruptcy filing. Plus, Philip Falcone has publicly alerted the FCC that LightSquared will not go away!
Where have you heard this song and dance before? I have read both filings very carefully, and they are filled with the same flawed technology and total refusal to adhere to the laws of physics as their previous filings. LSQ fails to understand that you cannot abrogate the laws of physics merely because they are inconvenient and interfere with your grand scheme. Previous test results have determined that transmitters as powerful as the ones proposed by LSQ will interfere with GPS signals no matter what portion of the immediately adjacent spectrum bands are proposed.
The latest filings clearly seem to be a last-gasp effort of a dying company that is attempting to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. LSQ must think the U.S. government has an incredibly short attention span. In my humble opinion, if the FCC were to approve either of the proposed filings, pilots, airlines and passengers at Ronald Reagan National Airport and other major airports on the East Coast would be unable to use GPS to fly out of or navigate to the airports. LSQ continues to think it is more important to be able to tweet, “I just saw Elvis” than it is to navigate safely to your destination. However, as improbable as the acceptance of these LSQ filings may be, in a recent memo I warned my GPS/PNT colleagues, via notable quotes you may recognize, “…unfortunately this is not over, ‘prepare for boarders’ and remember ‘we have not yet begun to fight’.”
GPS II-F 3
Fortunately, I won’t end on a down note after all. As I write this, the third GPS IIF satellite, designated SVN-65, is on orbit being checked out by the 19th SOPS (Space Operations Squadron) with LADO (Launch, Anomaly, and Disposal Operations) software developed by Braxton Technologies. My hat is off to AFSPC (Air Force Space Command), SMC (Space & Missile Systems Center), Boeing, ULA (United Launch Alliance), the 50th Space Wing, and Braxton Technologies for a successful launch and hopefully a quick and flawless checkout. It has been a long 15 months since the last IIF launch, and this is the only launch in calendar and FY12. Plus, technically the satellite on orbit is actually satellite vehicle (SV) four, as SV three is undergoing some necessary changes. Most experts expect a minimum 30-day checkout. However, my sources tell me it could be as long as 90 days. Wouldn’t it be great if it were sooner? We will just have to wait and see. Stay tuned to GPS World for the latest news on GPS IIF-3. The good news is we have another GPS IIF on orbit.
Until next time, happy navigating, and remember all of us at GPS World now have new email addresses in the following format. If you wish to email me please do so at [email protected]. I look forward to your comments.
The uproar caused by glitches in turn-by-turn and other features from Apple’s new Maps feature has forced CEO Tim Cook to make a public apology. It also has made some in the industry wonder why Apple decided to drop Google Maps in the first place — though many say it was the smart thing to do in the long run. In the meantime, indoor positioning technology and markets seem to be shaping, if not slowly, for serious commercial success in the near future. Some still have concerns about indoor positioning’s technical limitations, privacy concerns and consumer acceptance.
Apple recently told its customers to try competing map services while it improves its new mapping program. A recent uproar by iPhone users, who found that Apple’s new mobile maps gave them wrong directions right after the release of iPhone 5, has been dubbed “mapplegate” by some bloggers.
In a letter to customers, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, said that iPhone customers try mapping services from Bing, MapQuest, Google and Waze through its apps store.
Cook, in his letter, apologized for the frustration caused by its mapping platform. He said that more than 100 million iOS devices use the new Apple Maps.
“We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps, including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up,” Cook said. “Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.”
TomTom, which provides the map data for the new application, has been tight-lipped about the fiasco. In addition, the move to TomTom has some questioning Apple’s move away from Google Maps.
One thing is for sure in this whole mess: the importance of location and mapping to consumers, something pundits have downplayed in recent years. A recent New York Times article said the Maps outcry “shows how map services, which Apple treated as an afterthought when it built the first iPhone, have become critical tools for millions of people.”
The Times article goes as far as saying that Apple executives were surprised by the popularity of the map function, but began to concern the brass there about how much iPhone behavior data was flowing back to Google.
Between this recent glitch and its decision not to join standards consortiums for indoor positioning, one wonders if Apple, or Google for that matter, really believes in the power and promise of location technology.
Aisle411 Says It Has 10,000 Indoor Maps
The mainstream media is touting indoor location as the next big thing for consumers. One company, aisle411, now with 10,000 indoor maps, says the future is now. The “so what” for consumers is the ability to easily search for products, says Kris Kolodziej, new aisle411 vice president of location services.
“Consumers want less stress when shopping; they want to be informed, and also have fun [and] be engaged,” said Kolodziej, who most recently was associate director at Verizon Wireless.
Aisle411’s product enables product search, indoor/store map, indoor location (around 5 meter/aisle level) and product recommendation through an ad engine. “Users can search for products. We then display the products on a store map, down to the aisle level,” Kolodziej said. “We also recommend products based on search and indoor location by displaying coupons and offers.”
Kolodziej says, as part of its 10,000 indoor maps, all 8,000 Walgreens stores are mapped. “You can find these maps inside the Walgreens app and inside the aisle411 app. Even Google does not have this,” he said.
Like all new technology, including GPS, standardization of maps and technology help to grow new markets. Some believe it is the Wild West for indoor positioning, which Kolodziej contends may be overblown. “Aisle411 figured out the technical issues related to scaling indoor maps and indoor location. Aisle411 generates the indoor maps and offers them in an XML format via our SDK and APIs,” he said. “Developers can access the product data and store maps via our SDK and APIs.
Big box retailers and other chains are showing big interest in indoor positioning, but the concern is will privacy and other issues slow it? “This Walgreens deployment is helping to educate the market, and other retailers, that this technology is what consumers want. Specific to indoor location, consumers are more open to sharing their location with their store/retailer vs. Google or anyone else,” Kolodziej said. “Since the store already knows you are there to shop, users are not afraid to share their location inside the store.”
Aisle411 recently purchased WiLocate’s technology assets — and a few patents pending as part of the deal. WiLocate’s positioning product, which allows access to mobile devices, leverages existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and sensor information, along with gyroscope and compass.
Google continues to be a dominant player in indoor mapping. It recently said that Galeries Lafeyette and supermarket chain Carrefour in Paris are now mapped. This includes information about ATMs, escalators, restrooms, what products are in different aisles, and walking directions.
Google has been mapping airports, museums and malls for some time. In addition to France, the company brought indoor maps to the United Kingdom and Switzerland last summer. In the United States, Google has mapped such places as Atlanta Hartsfield — Jackson International Airport; San Francisco International Airport; Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota; Caesars Entertainment, Bally’s Las Vegas; MGM Resorts, Monte Carlo Resort & Casino, Las Vegas; and Vallco Shopping Mall in Cupertino, California.
Google has also mapped such big-box stores as Home Depot, IKEA, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s — though it remains to be seen when a Wal-Mart or Target will be included.
Analysts contend that the big indoor positioning players are Google, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Nokia and Qualcomm.
