GPS World

Tag: editorial

  • Out in Front: One and One

    Two figures for your holiday mulling here. I keep putting one and one together, and coming up with three.

    The first one points to a value of $1,000 billion. Or, as we like to say, one trillion dollars. That has a nice ring to it.

    The second one hovers at a lower level, around $230 billion, not nearly as melodic as the first. But if the second one creates the first one, how much magic is there in that — do you see what I’m saying?

    Let me elucidate the second one first. It emerged at the European Navigation Conference, when a spokesperson for Galileo Services put forth the assertion that, currently, European industry holds a market share of around 20 percent of global GNSS hardware, software, and services, a market size he estimated at 180 billion euros, or $230 billion. Thus the first figure.

    The speaker’s point was that in other high-tech sectors, European industry held a market share of 33 percent, so really, they could be doing better. But that’s beside my point, which takes, as a rough estimate — and much subject to debate, granted — that the current global market of GNSS hardware, software, and services lies in the neighborhood of $230 billion.

    Returning to the first figure, it comes from a conversation with Paul Verhoef of the European Commission; a lengthy interview treats other issues, but I don’t want to let this snippet get away. He stated, based on some market research the EC has done but not yet released (you bet I’m trying), that “at the moment, 6 to 7 percent of the European Union gross domestic product (GDP) is directly dependent on the availability of GPS. This is a GDP value of around 800 billion euros; this is more than $1,000 billion.”

    A cool trillion dollars of European economy directly dependent on GPS availability.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew the similar figure for the U.S. economy?

    Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that it roughly equals the European number. So United States and Europe combined, two trillion dollars of GDP directly dependent on GPS availability. Throw in the rest of the world and I’ll bet you’re at three trillion dollars.

    Boy, I wish I had an investment portfolio that I could throw $230 billion at, and wind up with $3 trillion at the end of the day.

    What, what, what are world governments doing, pinching pennies and cutting back programs and replenishing on need and sliding to the right — when they could be feeding a roaring economic engine, a behemoth that would support and stimulate so many other industries, and their GDPs as a whole?

    Come to think of it, Russia and China are pushing forward with this capitalist plan. It’s Western countries that appear ignorant of, and thus unable to learn from, their own economic history.

  • Out in Front: An Open or Shut Case

    Engineers are an eager lot, by and large. They like talking about their work, openly showing information and results, testing their work against data and alternate hypotheses, getting feedback and even critique from colleagues near and far. They value an iterative, elaborative, collaborative process.

    Politicians and business managers, on the other hand, tend to the dour. They would rather not show their hand, nor do they care to hear what you think of their organization’s work, citing intellectual property or national security reasons.

    This is not just about last month’s abrupt withdrawal of a session’s worth of Galileo papers from the showcase rank of the European Navigation Conference (see story, page 14). It extends across governance of all GNSS, and ultimately affects the frontiers of knowledge everywhere. GLONASS has never been particularly forthcoming with technical details, while Compass has taken reticence to new heights. Or depths.

    The socialist countries have not taken much heat for this practice, perhaps because it is assumed to be part of their political culture. Europe, on the other hand, surprises us a bit. It may be a sign of the changing of the times, the tightening of the GNSS space race. Once Galileo held unquestioned second place as the GNSS of choice to combine with GPS. No longer. GLONASS revives itself on practically a daily basis, and Compass goes about launching satellites with quiet regularity — 
although without much useful information on signal structure.

    The GPS Wing of the U.S. Air Force deserves commendation for the frankness with which it has discussed recent problems. Even the Europeans admitted, “ION was a little better this year. The Americans talked about the failures they had, the problems with their ground stations and satellites.” At least one prominent U.S. government  contractor, however, has moved in the opposite direction.

    European system managers have grown cautious, and stress the importance of protecting intellectual property. “We were too open before.” The case of the behavior of atomic clocks, for example, comes up in discussion. “You take sx months to find a solution, and then give it away in one session. Knowledge, what you find out by trial and error, or even by accident, this is the most critical thing.”

    From another quarter came this opinion: “Detailed information on tests is a clear transfer of technology. It’s not a matter of security, it’s business.”

    Ironically, the Europeans have run into a stone wall of their own, after granting the level playing field that U.S. industry agitated for, in terms of access by foreign companies to Galileo contracts. A European satellite builder visited a U.S. company, on U.S. soil, prepared to solicit a bid. But the U.S. company’s compliance officer — charged with keeping all operations in line with government rules and regulations — repeatedly stood up in the meetings and told colleagues, “Stop talking about how you are doing it and just talk about what it does.”

    Unable to obtain sufficient technical context to prepare a request for proposal, the European company walked away, thinking “They don’t want our business.”

    Opportunity lost.

  • Out in Front: Welcome to Accuracy Anonymous

    The following was delivered as an invited presentation at the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee plenary session, held September 20 in Portland, Oregon.

    Hi, my name is Alan, and I’m an accuracy addict.

    I got my first taste of accuracy back in 2000 when I started at GPS World, and discovered the vast range of very advanced things that people were doing with the signals of the Global Positioning System.

    This filled me with a great feeling of elation, expansiveness, and effectiveness. I can position anything. I can track anything. I can go anywhere, and know where I am. I can direct something else to go somewhere, and have it hit exactly on target. I can examine the minute movements of the earth, the swaying of skyscrapers, the moisture content of the atmosphere, and I can know all.

    I began to feel the illusion of omnipotence — of power over all.

    The more I found out about accuracy, the more I used it, the more addicted I became.

    Very early, I learned that advanced practitioners, such as some of the people in this room, had developed ways of taking two GPS signals, not just one, but two signals, including one that they weren’t even entitled to use, and combining them, distilling them, refining them to produce an even more potent product: high precision.

    High. I was getting pretty high. Almost as high as some of you.

    Because we’re all in this together. In this room, we are all addicts. And when our supply of accuracy gets cut off, or restricted, or we learn that it might soon be diminished in some way, or even that its projected future rate of increase might not be as rapid as expected, or that it might not increase at all, it might just simply stay the same­ — well then, we get upset.

    We want to get high precision, we want to stay high precision, and we want to get higher precision.

    We may have a problem with our accuracy habit.

    It’s not just us, the highly educated, highly equipped, highly advanced users, with near-lifelong histories of accuracy use. Outside this room, outside this convention center and all who gather here this week, outside our offices and labs, the great unwashed masses are getting their first taste of low-grade accuracy. With their cell phones or smart phones, maybe 50-meter, maybe 15-meter, maybe even 5-meter accuracy.

    They’re liking it, that first taste. Once they learn how to exploit it, and learn that higher accuracy is possible, they’re going to demand it.

    And some enterprising young engineers are going to build a high-powered LBS app that needs high accuracy, just like other new apps need broadband or WiFi or 3G or 4G. If the capability exists, someone wants to make money off it.

    We may be raising a generation of monsters, who will absorb our habit into their bloodstreams and into their lifestyles.

    Things might get ugly. We know they’re going to change, altering the landscape in ways we may not recognize.

    I’m not talking about just the social landscape, the way accuracy users behave. Not just the user segment. I’m talking about the way accuracy is produced and administered. I’m talking about

    the supply of accuracy, the supply of a substance that is in high demand and to which an increasing number of people are becoming addicted.
    I’m talking about the ground control segment and the space segment.

    Ultimately, I’m talking about who makes the decisions, who funds the decisions, who enacts the decisions, and who enforces the decisions about how much accuracy can and will be produced.

    Today, we know, or think we know who those people are: the GPS Wing, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Administration of the U.S. government. We may think we know that those same people will be in charge tomorrow.

    I’m not so sure. Revolutions have happened before.

    I don’t mean to be U.S.-centric. The same developments are taking place, perhaps a bit lagged, in Europe and Russia and China. When the great mass of the Chinese market gets into using accuracy, gets the habit, you’re going to see some effects.

    Returning to the United States, simply because it has the most known and most established of these systems, it is not inconceivable that some Tea Party-like movement, a groundswell should roll right up to Washington, into Congress, and say:

    “Higher accuracy is possible. We are paying for GPS with our taxes, and we want you to spend that money producing and supplying us with a higher grade of accuracy. Don’t give us this talk of responsible stewards. We are calling the shots now. Just do it. Revise the ICD. Up the ante.
    “Give me accuracy or give me death.”

    Ladies and gentlemen, I have expanded, exaggerated only slightly, and perhaps exploded the old dictum that I’ve heard attributed to Charlie Trimble, I don’t know who first said it, but it bears repeating and repeating often: accuracy is addictive.

    Indeed it is. I’m here to tell you.

    I was asked to give you a user perspective. I’ve chosen what is today a relatively small user segment, but a very real one, and a growing one. And most important, one that augurs for the future.

    Perhaps the scenario I just imagined for you exaggerates a bit. Perhaps. I am consciously trying to push further out the boundaries of our thinking.

    We’ve been waiting, some of us, for a long time for the mass market to get involved in GPS. This is now happening, bit by bit. But it has not yet fully happened. When it does, great changes will come. When LBS figures out the key to making money out of location, you’ll see changes you can’t imagine today.

    I started to become aware of how pervasive and how strong accuracy addiction has grown when we experienced a succession of anomalies in the GPS constellation over the last year or so: SVN-49, the last IIR-M satellite; carrier-phase anomalies detected on SVN-48; and now SVN-62, a small variance in the L5 signal on the first IIF. “The signal variation results in no more than a 5-centimeter error with a predictable periodicity of about six hours.”

    In each case, GPS performed within spec, and some therefore viewed these issues as non-issues. “What seems to be lacking is context: what relevance their findings on unspecified and unrequired signal characteristics really have to do with the real-world GPS IIF mission and requirements.”

    I’ve repeated here two printed quotes in the magazine; offline, the point-counterpoint discussion grew a good deal more inflamed. Passions run high when the supply and quality of accuracy appears in question.

    This might seem a minor flare-up today, off in a corner of the field: specialized scientific research spatting with industry giants and their military-industrial complex benefactors.

    But today’s developing applications in aviation, ground transportation, structural monitoring, machine control, infrastructure, and more use techniques such as carrier phase that are not governed, are not even mentioned in the GPS ICD.

    When LBS gets figured out, and high-accuracy LBS and vehicle navigation and crash avoidance become regularly supplied commercial services, when the dependence of financial and communications infrastructure on high precision becomes fully understood and appreciated, then you’ll see some large corporate money that has become accuracy-addicted. Imagine this room in another few years, with GM, Ford, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon attending and very interested, very much so, in aspects of user accuracy that are not currently addressed in the ICD.

    This community will change. Its needs will change. Balances of power and funding will shift. Are we prepared for that? Are we prepared to be surp
    rised? Or are we prepared only to be left behind by tides of change, to become obsolete?

  • Out in Front: Beyond Cute

    Michibiki has more Twitter followers than you and me put together. All of you, and all of me with my 17 followers. Michibiki hit 16,284 when I signed on just now, and she (he?) has not yet even emerged upon the global stage. Perhaps by the time you read this, if the September 11 launch date holds true, s/he will be an orbiting, broadcasting entity.

    Michibiki-Alan
    Michibiki

    Why follow a satellite? One might well ask why follow anything or anyone these days. For utterings momentous or vacuous, leavened in lucky moments by a bit of gossip, or an even rarer bit of news. It’s a good bet that Michibiki’s scriptwriters will display more intelligence than the mass of online mouths. Right now it’s hard to tell; they communicate in Japanese, which comes through my browser as so many question marks.

    For intelligence is what the Michibiki anthropomorphizing — from the creation of a friendly, pettable caricature to the establishment of a Twitter voice — is all about. Savvy marketing by purposeful people to an audience that they have studied and know well. This goes beyond the cute that large segments of Japan have a fondness for. It has the goal of buliding a solid, sustained client core for location-based services, powered by QZSS signals.

    Other places where LBS have failed to take hold — and this means everywhere — despite their vast potential utility, would do well to watch and learn.

    As cell-phone text-message readers and e-mail users (could there be a broader market segment, other than people who eat and breathe?) become accustomed to receiving messages from Michibiki, they will subtly but increasingly think of this 4,000-kilogram, 40,000-kilometer high hunk of orbiting metal and circuitry as a personality, and even, a friend. They will be open to suggestions, impressionable and cute-prone teens and twenty-somethings, especially so. This is the next generation of satnav users. Or I should say, this is the Now Generation of satnav users.

    Young men and women with places to go and friends to see will remember Michibiki, and call upon her/him often. “My guide will tell me how to get there. With added services, my guide will also track my friends right now, and tell me where they are. My guide can do many more wonderful things for me: here is a list of them.”

    By no means  do I suggest that the U.S. GPS Industry Council or the Galileo Supervisory Authority or Roscosmos rush out and commission a cartoon character based on their respective space vehicles. Different markets require different approaches, and careful study.

    The Now Generation of satnav users is coming through, to supplant current users, and uses. They’ll soon rattle your windows and shake down your walls. If your time to you is worth saving, I do suggest that you pick up on social media. That is the message my own marketing staff keeps drumming into this obdurate old head.

  • Out in Front: EGNOS Up

    We now definitively declare “curtain up!” on the second act of the human and technological drama, Interoperable Global Navigation Satellite Systems, by many authors, directors, and actors, upon the global stage. It happened on August 2 with removal of the message 0 (“Do Not Use in aviation”), by the European Satellite Services Provider, from the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) signal. It enables EGNOS use for en-route and lateral guidance approaches.

    The first act of our drama, of course, saw the U.S. GPS achieve operational capability, not to mention enthusiastic worldwide reception and application. We might have declared the second act open upon GLONASS operability, intermittent though that has been — but GLONASS is not (yet) interoperable with GPS. We might have marked its beginning in 2003, when the European Council of Transport Ministers approved the Galileo program, or in 2006, when Galileo launched its first satellite and broadcast its first signal in space. But no useable navigation message has yet emanated.

    The EGNOS signal is essentially a corrected GPS signal. Still, its certification for use in aviation embodies an international, interoperable navigation signal from space.

    (Legalistic note: “After an operational period of three months [following August 2], the EC will declare the Safety of life (SoL) service available to the aviation community, enabling the publication of precision approach procedures with vertical and lateral navigation guidance (APV) based on EGNOS. At that time, European air navigation service providers will be in position to implement satellite-based precision approaches . . . .)

    Chairman Mao said “The march of 10,000 li begins with a single step.” We have taken more than a few steps, though still at the beginning of our journey. Curtain’s up, vistas are wide. Let’s keep moving.

  • Out in Front: Welling Up

    oilcover
    September 1992.

    One of the first industrial uses of GPS came in survey and seismic exploration for offshore oil, as evidenced by the cover story of this magazine’s September 1992 issue. A salient passage from that 18-year-old “Quality Control For Differential GPS in Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration” article:

    “Users are in danger of being mesmerized by the apparent simplicty of the technology and abandoning quality-control principles . . . . The key to routine operations is rigorous real-time quality control.” Eerily, among the companies acknowledged for support of that article was BP Exploration.

    Oil companies early-adopted GPS and private satellite differential correction services, and remain enthusiastic users today, for monitoring of and navigation around deep-sea rigs. The March 2010 cover story shows how this field continues to forge ahead, now as early adopters of multi-GNSS technology.

    Positioning, navigation, and timing had nothing to do with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but some important lessons float there for our learning. They concern engineering principles — principally in not forsaking them.

    The full Deepwater Horizon story has yet to emerge, but it seems abundantly clear that corner-cutting and downright elimination of basic practices led to the disaster. When a natural aberration occurred, it blew right through several weakened backup systems and safety guards, ones that were withdrawn or restricted only days earlier, to shave costs and time.

    Beancounting and other modern business practices have undermined vital enginering principles — rigorous mathematical analysis, based firmly in the laws of physics, situational and historical experience, and what may seem to be overcautious safety margins — not just in the Gulf, but everywhere we look, including our own GNSS backyard. Control of technical programs in both private and public sectors now rests in the hands of non-technical people who owe highest allegiance to the almighty dollar. CPAs trump engineering Ph.D.s. If a disaster hasn’t happened (yet), there’s no need to guard against it, they believe.

    Has anybody here seen my old friend Loran-C?
    Can you tell me where he’s gone?
    He guided ships and airplanes,
    But it seems the budget’s slashing-prone.
    You know, I just looked around, and he’s gone.

  • Out in Front: Brussels Calling

    The European Commission rang up the other day, concerned that a recent column contained misperceptions about the Galileo Open Service Signal-in-Space Interface Control Document (ICD). I replied that if misperception exists, it is shared by at least some in industry. Though the EC has abandoned a plan to charge for licenses, its requirement for a free license and continued talk of patents on the Galileo signal dampen industry enthusiasm for making Galileo receivers, at least in North America.

    Herewith, some Brussels counterpoint. “In the previous [ICD] there were some patents characterizing the signal, that could not be commercially exploited. The new publication completely removes these. We now propose a licensing agreement that aims to eliminate any barrier in the wide exploitation of the asset. Both licenses [research and manufacture] are based on non-discrimination. There is no exclusive basis, and they are absolutely free of charge. Furthermore, there is no geographical limitation.

    “Regarding the duration of the license, we are assuming 10 years. We believe this is a proper timeframe, considering the lifecycle investment of this sector. A patent can be enforced for 20 years. The patents that we own are already about five or six years old. If you add 10 years, you almost get to the end.

    “We ask companies to provide us with information on the use of these patents: whether they are used for high-precision receivers, for testing purposes, and so on. We ask for an update on a yearly basis, for information on the intended use. The only purpose is to have a good grip on the marketing, to guarantee a traceability of market needs, to interpret its evolution in a fast-changing context, and therefore enable the Commission to closely follow and support customer needs. In case a manufacturer will develop some patent on top of our patents, they have to notify us. That is, I believe, standard practice.

    “It is not our intention to create barriers to access of this signal. Manufacturers have nothing to fear from providing basic information in these licenses. We want to foster innovation and promote competition.

    “It might seem we are a team of lawyers creating problems where there should not be any. I am an aerospace engineer, not a lawyer.

    “[Complaints] could be more a point of perception. In concrete terms, we are not much different [than GPS]. We want to keep track of what we are giving away for free. We want the widest possible access to the signals. If there are any doubts, we invite manufacturers to contact us directly to work out any misunderstandings.”

    The EC was sincerely surprised to learn of discontent with the process and the patents, and hopes to have further dialog with all manufacturers.

    I was puzzled by the patents: why were they taken in the first place? It’s as if you had drawn a line in the sand, from which you now feel unable to back away, even though you might like to, and it’s clearly the best idea. The EC maintains these date from the public-private partnership effort, where intelllectual property rights were (IPR) were for the private sector a non-negligible form of revenue. Since funding has shifted to public money, “the situation has changed, and we have modified our approach.”

  • Out in Front: What’s in a Number?

    Computers killed a trusty companion of my teenage years. That is, after those proto-computers known as pocket calculators knocked him out and left him unconscious on the cooling floor.

    But I come to praise my slide rule, not to bury him.

    I marveled at the way he worked. You had a tactile relationship with numbers on a slide rule. You could see — and feel — how a small adjustment here effected a big change over there. With computers, it’s just numbers in, numbers out.

    Maybe that high-tech approach led both the GPS Wing and the Government Accountability Office into trouble with constellation gaps. GPS satellites have proven themselves very hardy in space, outlasting their predicted lifetimes. The GPS Wing has grown to lean on those longer lives a bit, and what with Congress and the Administration booting budgets a year or two to the right with addictive regularity, the Air Force has saved money by replenishing upon need. And need has been not all that great, so replenishment, and the contract awards and manufacturing that feed the replenishing line, have been allowed to relax.

    But not the mathematical models that someone has held to more conservative standards. Those models use the shorter predicted satellite lifetimes. When those models were projected against the real-world timelines for IIF and Block III — whoa GAO! Some black gaps suddenly yawned.

    Now we learn that GAO and the Wing will re-undertake this exercise, factoring instead the longer lifetimes that the satellites have proved capable of. Tinker a small adjustment here, see a big change out there.

    Speaking of numbers, I’ve grown fond of 20, and lately enamored of 200. The former being the number of years we have published this magazine, the latter the new world record for GNSS technical articles, attained by one Richard B. Langley.

    With characteristic Canadian unbravura, Langley fidgets and frets that we have made too much of him on this magazine’s cover and page 42. It looks too braggy for him and he feels uncomfortable with it. But I have prevailed upon him to swallow his humility, to take one for the team. We bask in his reflected glory.

    Quick, what’s the difference between 160 and 144.5? Not in absolute terms, but in tactical advantage. If I add a metric, east longitude, geosynchronous orbit, does that help? I’m puzzling out why Compass would move its G1 satellite from one location to another after only ten days in space. Better ground control might be the answer. But more mystifying, why China’s spokespersons at the Munich Summit would proffer the first location, when they must know very well — in fact, they so admitted when I confronted them with it — that the second is actually the case.

    Numbers don’t obfuscate. People do.

  • Out in Front: Apply the Seat of the Pants

    Alan Cameron
    Alan Cameron

    Not “fly by,” but “apply.” As in W. Somerset Maugham’s advice to aspiring young writers: Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

    Get grounded. Confront the blank page, the typewriter, or the less preferable modern equipments (because instant electronics short-circuit orderly brain function) for a period of silence and contemplation. Above all, think. Then, and only then, communicate.

    Some serious word-eating now ensues. In last month’s editorial, I faulted the Architecture Evolution Plan (AEP) GPS ground control software update 5.5C for wreaking havoc with fielded receivers, both military and civil. Website news stories that I subsequently posted bore headlines driving this misconception home.

    I was wrong. Subsequent analysis by more knowledgeable and expert people has established that, yes, havoc was wreaked, but not by the software update. The deficiency resided in the factory-installed software of the respective receivers. See The System story on page 12 for details.

    In my only defense, I state that I was groping in the dark. Very incomplete word, secondhand no less, arrived just as we were preparing the issue for press. No official announcement came from the Air Force during the days that followed. We understand that internal brouhaha was brewed, stern words were uttered and written, but ultimately it was determined that the fault lay in the user segment, not with ground control or vendors thereto.

    We have it on good authority that the GPS Wing maintains, and will presumably continue to maintain, that the AEP update was absolutely perfect with no software glitches. But the Wing also realizes that none of the receiver manufacturers had any idea how the update was going to be implemented, as in what pages would be affected, and if there would be new data in places where it had not been loaded before.

    A grudging admission emerges that there may be some ambiguity in the receiver interface control documents (ICDs), and that those may need some tightening up sometime soon.

    We return to the theme of communications, in this case clear ones between the GPS Wing and the various user communities: civil, commercial, and military. For GPS to maintain its place as the world’s gold standard, there must be clear — and timely — communication between the Wing and its customers. All customers. Dual-use.

    So far, there’s no No. 2 system trying harder in this regard. But why leave the door open?

    A controversial suggestion: beta versions of future AEP updates could be released to a predefined subset of receiver maufacturers, who would test and report back concerning any glitches that occurred when their receivers saw the new software and simulated nav message for the first time.

    Work with the customers.

    I’m off to take my own medicine now.

  • Out in Front: Rocky Road to Robustness

    The news arrived after this issue had gone to press, so I pulled back this column to write about it. By early February, it will be oldish news, and further details will have appeared on our website.

    The crux: another pitfall for the GPS constellation.

    The system’s command and control operational software update uploaded in late 2009 has started wreaking some havoc with installed military receivers across many fielded platforms, as well as with some civil receivers. Whether major or minor havoc, I don’t pretend to know yet. The concept of selective availability anti-spoofing module (SAASM) figures in it, though now I’m toeing classified turf.

    Whatever the control features may be, they are designed to work with authorized military receivers that have successfully passed security tests prior to fielding. But actual live introduction of the new software has produced different results than those seen in testing: some receivers in question are intermittently not tracking Y-code.

    Corrective action could encompass either the Air Force rolling back the update or revising its software, or manufacturers modifying software within the receivers — thousands or perhaps tens, hundreds of thousands already in the field.

    The conscientious, hardworking engineers at the GPS Wing had barely recovered from the SVN49 debacle, or perhaps not even, as a work-around has yet to surface. Now this.

    In the category of small comfort, they are not alone. Recently manufactured GLONASS satellites have significant signal-generation problems. A new Compass satellite on orbit may no longer be controllable. And while Galileo inches forward, European political and industrial bickering perseveres. Ah, the bickering . . . .

    Despite these distractions in the sky and elsewhere, we should all keep our heads down, noses to the grindstone, fingers to the keyboard — and eyes on the prize. A radio-frequency signal in space, like Heinlein’s moon, is a harsh mistress. Very exacting, very demanding. Occasionally punishing. Ultimately rewarding.

    This Just In. By the time you read these words, the Loran signal may be dead and gone from U.S. territories. Thanks to the Coast Guard Commandant, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and those in the administration — perhaps the president himself — who know or care nothing about secure PNT, and who braggadaciously proclaim, “Back-up? We don’t need no steenkeen back-up!”

    Meanwhile the Air Force Chief of Staff has started saying it is critical for the military to “reduce its dependence on GPS-aided precision navigation and timing” because of its vulnerability, and supporting officers confirm that GPS has been jammed or interfered with recently.

    Do these people talk to one another? Surely they must.

    The PNT Key. More robustness will always be a good thing. Once I have two coded signals on widely spread frequencies, I’m well on my way there. This is not just within the narrow band allocated to GNSS, but across many radio frequencies, many technologies.

  • Out in Front: GPS World, 20 Years Young

    GPSW_20th_LogoThis magazine, the very one you hold in your hand or peruse digitally, hereby celebrates its 20th birthday. Hooray!

    Since its inception in 1989 and first appearance in the public eye in 1990, GPS World has provided — and continues to provide — technical and business information on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to engineers, product designers, manufacturers, researchers, system developers, executives, and high-level managers around the world who incorporate global positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) technologies into their corporate strategies, operations, and product offerings to maximize profit and performance.

    Many things have changed since our birth: changes in the world, changes in GPS itself and now in GNSS, and changes in this magazine.

    The book has repositioned itself over the years from its early focus on applications to the present comprehensive yet detailed grasp of design concepts at both the space system and integrated circuit level.

    We can still say, as Glen Gibbons wrote in the inaugural issue, “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about GPS today is the enthusiasm that we find

    everywhere among people involved with the field. We want to share that enthusiasm with our readers. GPS — our world and welcome to it.”

    Double-Decade Insights

    Langley_new-mug_REV_lmRichard Langley: in the fall of 1989, GPS World’s founding editor, Glen Gibbons, approached Dave Wells, Alfred Kleusberg, and me — faculty members in the then Department of Surveying Engineering at the University of New Brunswick — about editing a “technology/product development column” in a new magazine. Since readers would have marked differences in their knowledge and expertise in the GPS area, “the column should deal with issues that have broad application and interest and are presented in terms that are accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible,” he wrote. The column was to be called simply Innovation.

    We decided that Alfred Kleusberg and I would manage the column, with Dave Wells serving as one of the inaugural members of the magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. I took over sole responsibility for the column in 1997.

    Many Innovation columns have been tutorials including the one in the very first issue of the magazine. Written by Dave Wells and Alfred Kleusberg and titled “GPS: A Multipurpose System,” it used three different positioning scenarios to explain how GPS could provide positioning accuracies all the way from a Selective Availability-constrained 100 meters down to the sub-centimeter level. It also outlined GPS’s ability to determine platform attitude with multiple antennas and its use for accurate time transfer.

    The Innovation column has run continuously in every issue of the magazine except for August and December, when it gives way to the Almanac GNSS information pages. Next April’s column will be the 200th!

    Ed Aster, Founding Publisher: 20 Years Ago, GPS World almost didn’t happen. The idea of a magazine focussed on an unknown technology shrouded in military guise was turned down by 10 publishers before the idea was thrown at me while developing our international offices in Chester, England. It immediately made sense, as long as you had long eyes. A technology that has changed the world almost as much as the invention of the telephone. Who woulda thought. GPS leads the world and allows all countries to benefit from its quite simple premise, “Where am I?”

    GPS World: That Was Then

    During the last decade of the 20th century, the U.S. Global Positioning System achieved full operational capability. Prior to and after that key 1995 event, the technology saw active use and growth, primarily in the fields of surveying, mapping, and high-precision positioning. The technology most often took the form of a GPS receiver, frequently a stand-alone box, although active research and development into smaller form factors and integration with other technologies began.

    A 1996 Presidential Decision Directive reiterated GPS’ global availability for peaceful use. Russia’s GLONASS became irregularly active.

    Marking the practical — that is, the true — start of the GNSS era, the first integrated GPS+GLONASS RTK surveying system appeared in 1997: the GG-24 from Ashtech. The first GPS IIR (for replenishment) satellite rose that year, proving that satnav was not only here to stay, but to improve.

    Europe’s Galileo became a topic of earnest discussion.

    Double-Decade Insights

    McNeff_Jules_boxJules McNeff: Twenty Years ago, GPS was just a promise. The first Block II satellite was not yet a year old. GPS was known to only a few. It had not contributed to victory on the battlefield; it had not revolutionized earth science nor changed the way businesses and people conduct their daily activities. Now it has done all of that. It has awakened a global awareness of precise and ubiquitous position and time and of their value as essential elements of every human endeavor.

    I look forward to its next 20 years with the same anticipation and excitement I felt then.

    GerardLachapelleGerard Lachapelle: The Launch of the Block II satellites, starting in February 1989 after a hiatus of more than three years, was the most remarkable, exciting news of the time. By January 1990, six satellites had been launched with four more to come throughout 1990, an impressive accelerated schedule that had a major impact on equipment manufacturers, technology, performance, and users. It accelerated investments in research and development, and in long-term planning of major users and suppliers of positioning services.

    GPS would be a reality! The world has never been the same since!

    First Advertisers

    These companies advertised in the inaugural January 1990 issue — and we thank them!

    Three Full Pages

    • Ashtech

    Two Full Pages

    • Trimble

    Full Page

    • McDonnell Douglas
    • Magellan
    • Geodimeter
    • Wild Leitz
    • Interstate Electronics Corp.
    • Ball Aerospace
    • Oscilloquartz
    • Navstar
    • Stanford Telecom
    • Plessey/ITT
    • GE Astro Space
    • Odetics
    • CAST
    • ITT Defense

    Fractional Ads: Holden GPS, Sensor Systems, Racal, Alcatel, FTS/Austron, Allen Osborne Associates, Datum, McIntosh & McIntosh, Intermetrics, Piezo Crystal, Van Martin Systems, Navtech Seminars, GEOSurv.

    Map these companies onto their present names/ownership and enter to win the editor’s Happy Anniversary to Us Prize! Send your answers to [email protected].

    GPS World: This is Now

    During the first decade of the 21st century, the GPS industry entered early maturity and saw action in an ever-increasing number of fields: avionics, transportation, wireless communication, burgeoning consumer devices, and location-based services. Emphasis in product design shifted to the board and chip level, and GPS chips began “disappearing inside the application,” going inside other boxes fo
    r integration with other technologies.

    GLONASS declined, then rose again; Galileo got underway in fits and starts; international regional augmentations began.

    GPS World held its first Summit for 1001 GNSS VIPs with a top-level panel during the 2002 ION-GNSS conference, and a second Summit in 2004. It became the Leadership Dinner in 2006, with a Great Debate in 2007, a GNSS Election in 2008, and Brad Parkinson’s “True History of the Origins of GPS” in 2009. In each case, proceedings were subsequently shared with all our readers.

    The magazine became more than a magazine, redesigning its website to track developments in ever-diverging industry sectors, and launching e-mail newsletters focused on these specialized interests, followed by discussion forums, webinars, video interviews, job listings, and more.

    Double-Decade Insights

    ashkenazi_vidal_boxVidal Ashkenazi: As a geodesist, I consider GPS as the natural follow-on to satellite triangulation-trilateration and Transit Doppler (in the 1960s), when navigation and timing were added to straight positioning, and geodetic concepts of accuracy and reliability (renamed integrity) were adopted. We still had some difficulties in convincing the navigation community of the need to adopt a precise geodetic coordinate system (like WGS84), instead of just latitudes and longitudes.

    The imposition of Selective Availability led civilian ingenuity to come up with differential GPS, carrier-phase, and RTK. Who could have predicted in the 1990s that countless GPS applications would develop, benefiting business, governments and citizens everywhere?

    StephenC_BOXStephen Colwell: I started GPS World back in 1989. With a $1,200 investment and business plan in hand, I struggled through 43 investor presentations until finally receiving an approval nod for funds to launch the magazine. What I remember most during these times was invariably a potential investor would say “Now explain this to me again — what is GPS, and why does it need a magazine?”

     

    LONG HAULERS
    These memoirs come from founding members of our Editorial Advisory Board who still serve in that capacity! Jules McNeff is now vice president, strategy and programs, Overlook Systems Technologies; Gérard Lachapelle is professor and CRC/iCORE chair in wireless location, Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary; Vidal Ashkenazi is CEO, Nottingham Scientific Ltd. Other advisors still on board from that first issue are Paul Cross, Larry Hothem, William Klepczynski, Keith McDonald, and Brad Parkinson.Richard Langley is, as ever, a professor of geodesy and geomatics at the University of New Brunswick; Ed Aster is a vineyard owner and entrepreneur in New Zealand; Stephen Colwell writes a monthly e-mail column on the Consumer OEM sector; Glen Gibbons is a publisher in his own write, familiar to many readers.

    GPS World: Behold the Future

    Alan-CameronIn this nascent decade, the GNSS industry will enter its full maturity as truly an indispensable utility for everyday life, at individual consumer, industrial enterprise, and government organization levels. Multi-technology circuitry, which now integrates positioning with other capabilities on a single chip, will only continue its astonishing march.

    Galileo and GLONASS will achieve their promise, and Compass will join the family, forming together with GPS a veritable system of systems with highly accessible and accurate coverage and availability even in challenging environments. GPS itself will modernize, strengthen, and expand its considerable capabilities.

    As ever, GPS World will be there, up close and personal with the technology and the business, providing eyewitness accounts by researchers, product designers, program managers, and end users.

    The magazine will continue serving its international readers and advertisers, accomplishing its mission through an integrated information system of print, e-mail newsletters, websites, webinars, and videos, all communicating critical intelligence to decision-makers and technical experts.

    GPS World’s media platform, designed for and dedicated to industry’s use, is a searchable, application-specific knowledge base of GPS/GNSS-related technologies that is mapped to the markets and needs of the community’s core purchasing audience.

    Despite its name — and names may change — the magazine has never limited itself to coverage of the U.S. Global Positioning System. We chronicle the development of all GNSS: Galileo, GLONASS, and Compass; of augmentations WAAS, EGNOS, MSAS, NDGPS, QZSS, GAGAN, and GRAS. We track the integration of GNSS with other PNT technologies, such as inertial, laser, Loran, and radio frequency fields such as wireless communications, RFID, Bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and others.

    While busy writing and talking, we are also busy listening. We encourage online comments to articles appearing at env-gpsworld-integration.kinsta.cloud. We’ve started one technical discussion forum, Tech Talk, and plan to have another, on chip and circuitry design, flying within months. We administer a LinkedIn network for GNSS professionals to communicate interests, leads, queries, referrals, and open positions; our Facebook page enables members to create unique user content to build meaningful and resource-full discussion.

    We have unparalleled personal reach in every industry sector. You’ll find one or more of GPS World’s dozen correspondents and business development consultants at every important technical and business conference. Come right up and give us a piece of your mind. Please.

    GNSS — your world. We feel privileged to play a key part in it. — Alan Cameron, Editor-in-Chief

     

     

  • Out in Front: From IAIN to 101

     

    This is one of those mind puzzles that challenge you to transform one word to another in as few moves as possible.

    No, it’s not. But it does constitute a journey of sorts. I made it in a few minutes, while listening to David Last give the keynote address at the 13th World Congress of the International Association of Institutes of Navigation.

    Departure point: ballroom of the Clarion Hotel, Stockholm, Sweden, late October. Destination: GPS 101, an online webinar for engineers from PNT-related (as in, kissin’ cousins) disciplines, sometime in the near future.

    Last described the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN), of which he is president, as “a failing business in a booming industry.” He added that many institutes of navigation struggle with falling membership and declining revenues, if not outright losses. Contrast this with huge satnav growth, and the exploding numbers of  “products that are more powerful, more user-friendly, more cost-effective, every time we have met.” Rising industry, falling professional associations.

    My concern here is not the well-being of institutes, but the global technical awareness possessed by engineers and designers from a range of industries whose products now seek to incorporate position, navigation, and/or timing. Phones, cameras, cars, binoculars, road tolling, parole anklets, and so on.

    This magazine reaches and educates those far-flung technical personnel, in addition to our readers already working in and supplying the surveying, aviation, military, marine, mapping, precision agriculture, and other more traditional positioning fields. I think we do so very successfully.

    But I was surprised by the low level of awareness evidenced by participants in July’s webinar, “The GPS Constellation and More,” with Colonel David Madden, GPS Wing Commander. Presumably attendees came from among our readers and web visitors, but some of their questions were beyond (or below) elementary. Editor Don Jewell, who moderated that webinar, saw the need for a GPS 101 course, and I fully agree.

    We don’t intend to compete with companies or institutes offering technical tutorials. Rather, to offer a stepping stone up to those tutorials, and to leverage our free and extensive global reach to engineers everywhere.

    Returning to the RIN president for Last words, “What was once a specialized set of professional techniques has expanded into an industry with hundreds of millions of users. Navigation is a unique place where bright engineers — hardware and software — work alongside systems analysts, geographers, surveyors, geodesists, mapmakers, and those who design, manufacture, market, and support navigation equipment, and those who use their products as practitioners. These people are today’s navigators.”