u-blox has launched the UBX M8230 CT GNSS receiver chip, which offers a balance of performance and ultra-low power use.
Its new super-efficient (Super-E) mode cuts the power consumption by two-thirds to 20 mW at one position update every second with hardly any loss in accuracy. It delivers continued superb speed and position accuracy even when tested in applications such as wearables and portable electronics, where the antenna is small and movement prevents a constant view of the sky.
The UBX M8230 CT’s Super-E mode is designed for devices that require high levels of speed and position accuracy, but where power is limited. Along with smartwatches, sports wearables and fitness trackers, it can be used in trackers for assets, people, children and animals, to provide accurate and frequent location information with minimal impact on battery life.
“Constantly needing to know the user location in wearables has a strong strain on the battery, which has traditionally limited GNSS adoption,” said Florian Bousquet, market development manager, Product Center Positioning at u-blox. “UBX-M8230-CT’s low power consumption combined with its high positioning accuracy and the ultra small design footprint of < 30 mm2 makes it possible to add GNSS to virtually all wearables.”
He added, “The UBX-M8230-CT’s Super-E mode uses concurrent reception of GPS with either GLONASS or BeiDou. It allows batching location data temporarily on the chip, which helps to further reduce the system power consumption by avoiding the need to constantly run the main CPU.”
The size and power savings brought by UBX-M8230-CT will enable designers to add features desired by the market, such as heart rate monitoring, while still offering high position and speed accuracy.
To learn more about UBX-M8230-CT and see a live demonstration, visit u-blox in the meeting room 2C3MR at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, February 27 to March 2.
Samples will be available in March 2017 and volume production will start in summer 2017.
Djibouti, a country located in the Horn of Africa with a population of about 850,000 citizens, adopted what3words as the addressing standard for its postal service.
what3words is a global addressing system that provides a fixed address for every 3-by-3 meter square in the world.
According to what3words, Djibouti is the fifth country in the world to accept its addresses. The country only has a few named streets, so delivering mail is a struggle for La Poste Djibouti, the nation’s official postal system, what3words added.
In addition, until recently, home delivery was restricted to express mail in Djibouti City, the capital of the republic. Any other post would be delivered to P.O. Boxes, where the recipient was responsible for collecting it. what3words provides an easy reference for international mail and enables home delivery for the country.
“Thanks to our partnership with what3words, every place in the country now has a fixed, accurate and immediately assigned address,” said Bahnan Ali Maidal, CEO at La Poste Djibouti. “Each inhabitant living in Balbala or Arhiba, Ali Sabieh or Obock, Randa or Assa Geyla will be able to quickly determine any address, write it on an envelope or communicate it by telephone.”
Available in thirteen languages, including English, French and Spanish, what3words is used by individuals, delivery companies, navigation tools, governments, logistics firms, travel guides and NGOs.
LabSat has launched the LabSat 3 Wideband simulator, which can simultaneously record multiple signals from different constellations.
Small, battery powered and with a removable solid-state disk, LabSat 3 Wideband allows users to quickly gather detailed, real-world satellite data and replay those signals on the bench.
Photo: LabSat
With three channels, a bandwidth of up to 56 MHz and 6-bit sampling, LabSat 3 Wideband can handle almost any combination of constellation and signal that exists today, with plenty of spare capacity for future planned signals.
For example, users can now record GPS L1, L2 and L5 at the same time as GLONASS G1 and G2 and BeiDou B1 and B2.
An interactive bandwidth calculator allows users to see which combinations of constellation and signal can be recorded. Users can also change the bandwidth and bit depth to see how it affects the selection available.
Despite the huge capability of the unit, the LabSat 3 Wideband remains easy to use, retaining the one-touch recording and playback feature.
A removable battery pack gives two hours of use, and the 1-TB solid-state disk drive can be swapped in seconds.
Specifications
Recording bandwidth: 10MHz, 30MHz or 56MHz
Recording resolution: 2, 4 or 6 bits (depending on bandwidth)
Skydel SDX Release 17.1 adds a fine level of control on signal multipath to the software-defined GNSS simulator.
SDX 17.1 introduces a powerful multipath simulation option, enabling users to create less-than-ideal signal propagation conditions for GNSS testing. Multipath echoes can be added and fined-tuned for each satellite, per signal. Control is possible via four fundamental attributes: pseudorange offset, power loss, Doppler shift and carrier-phase offset.
It’s now convenient to create simplified test conditions otherwise impossible to achieve with the live sky. The new options are fully controllable through the SDX application program interface (API), and can be modified on the fly while the simulation is running.Release 17.1 also adds L2C navigation message modification. Besides the usual conditions such as start and stop time and PRN number, users can specify the message type, and the message content to match.
Because the CNAV message is 300 bits long and not subdivided in words like the NAV message, managing the modifications as a per-bit fashion would be tedious. The interface solves this by letting you add modifications for portions of the message — and lets users add as many as they need.
Software-defined radios (SDR) can take a few seconds to initialize when starting the simulation. To improve software synchronization performance, Skydel has added an armed state. Upon clicking the arm button (or issuing the command through the API), the armed state prepares all hardware. When the start command is later received, the delay to emit the GNSS signals is minimal.
Other updates have also been made. See the release notes for the full list. As always, existing licensees benefit from an immediate upgrade.
Among the next items on SDX’s development agenda is the release of advanced jamming capabilities through an innovative integration with the GNSS simulator.
Micro-Technology for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing towards PNT everywhere and always; slide from a 2014 DARPA presentation to the Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing National Advisory Board (Image: Robert Lutwak, DARPA Micro-Technology Office). Click to enlarge.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiatives underway with a dizzying number of technologies, all seeking to reduce reliance on GNSS in challenged environments. Using cold atom interferometry and other techniques to reduce the size, weight and power consumption (SWAP) as well as cost of inertial sensors, employing other signals of opportunity (SOI), chip-scale atomic clocks (CSAC), micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and more, the Micro-Technology Office (MTO) and the Adaptable Navigation Systems (ANS) projects press relentlessly forward to provide U.S. forces with PNT “everywhere and always.”
DARPA’s ANS initiative explores tools to enable use of the many sensors available to warfighters and first reponders. “Over the past two decades, the field of robotics has done a lot for extracting features out of imagery and tracking those features as the robot moves through a given environment,” said Lin Haas says, program manger at the Strategic Technology Office. “We’ve been building upon those capabilities and using the capabilities for the purposes of navigation.”
ANS seeks to provide GPS-quality PNT to military users regardless of the operational environment. It addresses three basic challenges through its Precision Inertial Navigation Systems (PINS) and All Source Positioning and Navigation (ASPN) efforts:
better inertial measurement units (IMUs) that require fewer external position fixes;
alternate sources to GPS for those external position fixes;
new algorithms and architectures for rapidly reconfiguring a navigation system with new and non-traditional sensors for a particular mission.
PINS is developing an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that uses cold atom interferometry for high-precision navigation without dependence on external fixes for long periods of time. Atom interferometry involves measuring the relative acceleration and rotation of a cloud of atoms within a sensor case, with potentially far greater accuracy than today’s state-of-the-art IMUs.
A company called AOSense has applied cold-atom interferometry to IMUs and demonstrated sensors that support system drifts of 5 meters per hour, by using quantum physical properties to measure the relative acceleration and rotation of a cloud of laser-cooled atoms. The next challenge is shrinking the lasers to microsystem size, because the concept requires three lasers generating five beams to cool and move the atoms through interferometers to determine movement and rotation of the device.
Because even long-duration IMUs require an eventual position fix, the ASPN effort is developing sensors that use signals of opportunity — non-navigation signals from sources like television, radio and cell towers, and satellites, as well as natural phenomena, such as lightning.
“Our navigation systems tend to be finely tuned, and as a result they are fairly brittle in terms of accepting new sensors without a lot of hands-on time to make it work,” said Haas.
Flexible Combinations. Integrating and tuning these diverse sensors, maps and other components into a navigation system is expensive and slow, producing platform and mission-specific solutions. The ASPN effort is also developing new fusion algorithms and plug-and-play processing architectures for rapid integration and near-real-time reconfiguration or upgrading of sensors, IMU devices, maps and databases on a navigation system. With flexible combinations of existing and new navigation sensors, ASPN can produce improvements in accuracy, robustness and cost of navigation systems across a range of platforms, environments and missions.
PINS is working towards a final subsystem demonstration in fiscal year 2017. ASPN has completed multiple field demonstrations on air, land and sea platforms, with final demonstrations scheduled in fiscal 2017.
Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks. Meanwhile, last year DARPA launched the Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability project under the direction of Robert Lutwak (recipient of GPS World’s Leadership Award for Products in 2012). “If ACES is successful, virtually every Defense Department system will benefit,” Lutwak said.
ACES seeks to create palm-sized, battery-powered atomic clocks that perform up to 1,000 times better than the current generation, employing experts and techniques from atomic physics, optics, photonics, microfabrication and vacuum technology. “All of our modern communications, navigation and electronic warfare systems as well as our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems depend on accurate time-keeping,” Lutwak added.
Pseudolites. In other, non-DARPA initiatives around the Department of Defense, the Command and Control Directorate of the Army’ Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) is “very concerned about what happens when we lose GPS,” according to Paul Olson. CERDEC is developing vehicle-based, dismounted and anti-jam antenna pseudolite systems.
The pseudolites have completed feasibility testing and entered acquisition for transmitters, receivers and command-and-control. Rockwell International and L-3 are developing the transmitters. The effort seeks to use current military GPS receivers with software modified to accept pseudolite signals.
This article draws on interview quotes that appeared in Signal magazine of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
Topcon Positioning Group has released a new modular GNSS receiver system, the MR-2. The system combines all current and planned constellation tracking with a comprehensive set of communication interfaces to service any precision application requiring high-performance real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning and heading determination.
Topcon MR-2 GNSS receiver. Photo: Topcon
The MR-2 can perform as a mobile RTK base station, marine navigation receiver, mobile mapping device and as a GNSS receiver for agricultural, industrial, military or construction applications.
“The MR-2 delivers navigation support for a wide-range of applications,” says Jason Hallett, vice president of Topcon global product management. “It is an ideal component for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) needing a custom, high-accuracy modular design for easy integration.”
“The MR-2 is also designed as a ‘future-proof’ system,” Hallett says, “meaning it tracks all current and planned constellations, making it a smart investment in the expanding GNSS environment.”
The unit housing is water and dust-proof and built to withstand harsh environments with superior vibration and shock tolerances, he adds.
Using Topcon HD2 heading determination technology, the MR-2’s dual antennas compute high-performance heading and inclination determination alongside the RTK positioning engine for precise navigation and guidance applications.
“The MR-2 also provides a variety of communication interfaces such as Ethernet, serial, and CAN, allowing for easy integration into any application,” Hallett says.
The system also offers best-in-class multipath rejection, and using Topcon Quartz Lock Loop technology can operate without disturbances in high-vibration environments.
Rohde & Schwarz safeguarded Austria’s AirPower 2016 air show against the security risk of commercial drones encroaching on the show’s airspace. This was accomplished using the R&S Ardronis radiomonitoring solution that enables users to identify drone control signals early on, to locate and even stop the drone.
Photo: Rohde & Schwarz
Remote-control drones are constantly invading the privacy of individuals and violating the boundaries of protected areas. These flying objects pose a safety risk at airports where they interfere with air traffic flow and a security risk at major events.
At an air show, both of these are a factor, as any disruption of the closely timed take-offs and landings can represent a danger to event participants and spectators alike. To counteract such a risk, the Austrian Armed Forces relied on the R&S Ardronis radiomonitoring system. Working in cooperation with Rohde & Schwarz, AirPower 2016 was the first event to operate a test setup tailored to these special requirements.
R&S Ardronis enables users to locate the operator of a remote controlled drone and intervene in a timely manner. Remote controls for drones usually operate in the 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz ISM band, but also in other frequency bands such as 433 MHz or 4.3 GHz.
AirPower 2016 was held in September 2017 in Zeltweg.
The R&S Ardronis solution monitors the signals in the relevant frequency bands. It maintains an extensive library of drone control signal profiles in order to detect and classify these types of signals. R&S Ardronis reliably and automatically detects the remote control of a commercial drone within a 1 km radius.
The R&S Ardronis system used at AirPower 2016 was additionally equipped with direction finding functionality. The direction information obtained can be used to find the person with the remote control. If the drone transmits a video downlink, this signal will also be located. The information is clearly shown on a map on the display.
Other options are available for R&S Ardronis. For example, it can disrupt specific drone control signals to prevent the drone from performing a maneuver that poses a safety threat. Only the signals for controlling the drones are disrupted. Other signals in the vicinity are not affected. In contrast to broadband interferers that affect the entire frequency band, the ISM band continues to be available for other services such as Bluetooth or WLAN, or to control private drones.
EndRun Technologies, a provider of precision time and frequency solutions, announced at the Precision Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications (PTTI) meeting the release of the RTM3205 precision timing module for portable time and frequency applications.
The PTTI meeting is being held Jan. 30-Feb. 2 in Monterey, California.
The RTM3205 precision timing module by EndRun Technologies. Photo: EndRun
The second-generation RTM3205 is optimized for size, weight, and power (SWaP), but can exceed the stability of a standard cesium atomic frequency reference.
The GPS-synchronized RTM3205 is based on EndRun’s Meridian II precision timebase instrument providing a subset of outputs with the same accuracy, stability and ultra-low phase noise. For ultimate performance, EndRun’s innovative real-time ionospheric corrections are available to directly measure and compensate for the ionospheric delay of received GPS signals in real time.
The network-centric RTM3205 provides a dual-gigabit Ethernet interface supporting a high-bandwidth Stratum 1 Network Time Protocol (NTP) server, optional IEEE 1588 — Precision Time Protocol (PTP) grandmaster, and secure management.
“The versatile RTM3205 precision timing module is a consolidation of EndRun’s state-of-the-art time and frequency technologies in a small, thermal efficient module.” said Michael Korreng, senior R&D engineer, EndRun Technologies. “Customers can now easily integrate this high-performance, time and frequency module into portable and tactical systems.”
Key RTM3205 performance specifications with Real-time Ionospheric Corrections and an Ultra-Stable OCXO are:
Time accuracy of <10 nanoseconds RMS to UTC (USNO)
Frequency accuracy better than 4×10-14 (1 day average)
Tallysman, a manufacturer of high-performance GNSS antennas and related products, has introduced a magnetic-mount triple-band (plus L-band) GNSS antenna, TW7972, and a dual-band antenna, TW7872.
They are designed for precision agriculture, autonomous vehicles, navigation, real-time kinematic (RTK), precise point positioning (PPP), and other applications where precision matters. The ability of the TW7972 to access L-Band correction services extends its utility to a wider range of applications.
The introduction of these antennas is a continuation of Tallysman’s expansion into broader band GNSS antennas. These antennas are the first releases in a line of new enclosures that will be used for additional broadband GNSS solutions.
Photo: Tallysman
The antennas employ Tallysman’s Accutenna technology.
The TW7972 is capable of receiving GPS L1/L2/L5, GLONASS G1/G2/G5, BeiDou B1/B2, Galileo E1/E5a+b and L-band correction services (1164 MHz to 1254 MHz + 1525 MHz to 1606 MHz).
The TW7872 is capable of receiving GPS L1/L2, GLONASS G1/G2, BeiDou B1 and Galileo E1.
The precisely tuned antennas have a tight pre-filter to protect against intermodulation and saturation caused by high-level cellular 700 MHz and other signals.
The antennas provide superior multi-path signal rejection, a linear phase response, and a tight phase-center variation (PCV) at a new economical price point, Tallysman said. The antennas provide comparable or superior performance to higher priced triple- and dual-band GNSS antennas on the market.
The TW7972 and TW7872 are housed in a magnetic-mount, IP67 weather-proof enclosure with pre-tapped screw holes. The antennas can also be ordered without the magnet.
The TW3967 (28-dB gain) and the TW3972E (35-dB gain) are the embedded versions of the TW7972. The TW3867 and TW3872E are the embedded versions of the TW7872. They are available with a wide selection of connectors and custom cable lengths, and can be custom tuned by Tallysman to ensure optimum performance within the customer’s enclosure.
uAvionix Corporation, an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) avionics provider, has developed and is testing a tiny ADS-B transceiver for UAVs.
Weighing less than 1 gram, a dime-sized ADS-B prototype module for drones with transmission power between 0.01-0.25 Watts could provide visibility to any aircraft equipped with ADS-B “IN” avionics from 1 to 10 miles away, and is small enough to integrate directly into professional and consumer-level drones.
uAvionix is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other partners under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to test the unit, along with other uAvionix products.
uAvionix Ping ADS-B transceiver. Photo: uAvionix
A recent study published in January 2017 by The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) imagined a future of high-traffic densities of drones operating with ADS-B onboard, and then sought to understand the implications of that.
The study suggests that there is a nominal transmission power output between 0.01 and 0.1 Watts that when coupled with limited drone traffic densities can result in a compatible operation with the system as a whole.
“We developed this product to show the world the art of the possible,” said Paul Beard, CEO of uAvionix. “We can’t yet sell this device because the standards that were developed for ADS-B did not take into account the value of air-to-air ADS-B communications between small drones or between small drones and manned aircraft. It’s literally not legal to transmit at these low power outputs. We aim to lead the discussion and development of those standards, and will work with any regulatory body to do so.”
Organizations selected to participate in Testbed 13 will develop prototype solutions based on the sponsors’ use cases, requirements and scenarios. These are described in detail in the CFP. Participants’ prototype solutions will implement existing OGC standards as well as new prototype interface and encoding specifications introduced or developed in Testbed 13. Prototype specifications may ultimately become official, member approved OGC standards, revisions to existing OGC standards, or best practices for using OGC standards.
OGC testbeds are part of OGC’s Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on and collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test, innovate and deliver proven candidate standards into OGC’s standards program where they are formalized for public release.
In OGC’s Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiative Sponsors. OGC Interoperability Initiatives include testbeds, pilot projects, interoperability experiments and interoperability support services — all designed to encourage rapid development and mobilization of OGC standards.
This leading-edge standards work has enormous potential and value for testbed stakeholders — both technology users and technology providers. Shared investment in spatial standard prototype solutions brings improved sharing and integration of spatial information, which has widespread and longstanding value for the testbed sponsors and for society at large.
Technology providers gain market exposure, market intelligence and a chance to quickly take advantage of the business opportunities that arise with the introduction of new standards and associated technical capabilities.
Anyone interested in learning more about this opportunity should contact Scott Serich, Director Interoperability Programs ([email protected]). See www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/programs/ip for more information about the Interoperability Program in which OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are organized, planned and managed.
