Javad GNSS announces that, after a short retirement, Tom Hunter has rejoined the company as chief sales officer. Hunter will draw on more than three decades of GNSS industry experience, most recently with Javad GNSS and previously with Ashtech/Magellan as vice president.
“Tom is key to our operations,” said Nedda Ashjaee, CEO. “I am looking forward to reigniting this group of companies and continuing our four-decade tradition of bold innovation. Who better to do this with than the person who helped my father build the original company in the first place?”
Hunter will oversee sales channel development in support of a new market-driven roadmap developed by the executive team at Javad GNSS, also known as J-CORE.
Hunter’s association with Javad began in 1987 as one of the original seven people at Ashtech, Ashjaee’s namesake firm created shortly after his departure from Trimble Navigation. The firm brought numerous surveying industry firsts and other legendary products to market.
Company founder Javad Ashjaee passed unexpectedly in May 2020, leaving behind 200 loyal employees in offices around the globe. A strategic thinker, Ashjaee was known for operating “several steps ahead,” said one employee, having groomed his executive office and other support staff for a swift takeover in the event he were unavailable. Javad’s daughter Nedda, familiar to all who had conducted business with the firm, has spent the last 12 months carefully restructuring the business plan.
On March 31, Nedda Ashjaee, Tom Hunter and the rest of the J-CORE team hosted a two-day virtual gathering of global Javad GNSS dealers, technicians and other personnel, taking time to unveil the firm’s new strategic vision. The information and overall strategy was met with an overwhelmingly positive response.
Javad GNSS retains significant patent holdings relating to survey and mapping and offers what many of its customers believe to be one-of-a-kind system(s).
Hunter explained, “If you’re a surveyor or other positioning professional working with GNSS, you owe a debt of gratitude to Javad — the man dedicated his life to developing GNSS for the high-precision marketplace. You can see his hand in nearly every major GNSS survey system on the market today.”
“As we continue to develop and introduce new products in support of the surveying and reference station markets, we will use our exceptional technology and our U.S.-based world-class manufacturing facility to focus on new OEM applications and opportunities including strategic partnerships and private labeling,” Hunter said.
Dr. Javad Ashjaee, Founder and CEO of Javad GNSS, 1949–2020. (Photo: Javad GNSS)
The GNSS community was deeply saddened by the loss of Dr. Javad Ashjaee — Javad, as he liked to be called — on May 30. Following are excerpts of comments by GPS World Editorial Advisory Board members and others, all of whom also expressed their heartfelt sorrow.
Message from The Ashjaee Family
“Once in a while an individual comes along with a spirit seemingly superhuman, a resolve and constitution seemingly indestructible. Dr. Javad Ashjaee was one such individual. His talent, intellect, commitment and sheer guts were head and shoulders above the rest, much to the chagrin and frustration of his competitors and naysayers. But those closest to him know that he was also simply, beautifully, erringly human. He brought out in the rest of us the strength and wisdom we could not always see in ourselves. Yes, he was a force of nature, as many describe, but Javad never did anything alone. Throughout the years, he has had a sizable family and team, by blood as well as by love, behind each of his many achievements and contributions to his field. He once told us his name, Javad, means ‘generous.’ And that he was. All that he has given to, and all that he has inspired in, his family, team, and professional industry, forms a legacy that will continue for years to come. We, his family, his team, his protégés and protectors, are here to stay and stronger than ever. If he were here, he would surely wonder how his competition would proceed without that fire only he could ‘light up their asses.’”
Jules McNeff VP of Strategy and Programs Overlook Systems Technologies
“Javad was a brilliant innovator, although he could be a bit infuriating at times. He loved to place ads in GPS World in part to poke fun at the DoD for our Selective Availability policies, for which I was the principal defender at the time. Javad was a unique and talented person of tremendous fortitude and intellectual confidence who was never afraid of controversy. The GNSS community will miss his energy.”
Mitch Narins CISSP/FRIN Strategic Synergies
“When I think of Javad, the words that come to mind are ‘brilliant, dedicated, driven, and committed.’ The last time I saw Javad at an ION GNSS+ conference, he knew he was on the side of an argument opposing many other experts in our GNSS community. That did not bother Javad. He was never one to go along to get along — which was one of the reasons he was able to develop such innovative and capable systems. Our GNSS community has lost a leader, innovator and contributor to the science and engineering behind position, navigation and time.”
Paul McBurney Ph.D., CTO and co-founder OneNav
“Javad was a one-man army who was not afraid to fight. From his days at Trimble, where he developed major advancements in receiver software, and through all of his endeavors, Javad produced an impressive amount of truly innovative solutions. He used the LightSquared crisis as an opportunity to add novel front-end filtering to his products, and cleverly marketed it. His writing was unmistakable, featuring the wordsmithing of both an engineer and a salesman. He was a role model to many aspiring GPS entrepreneurs.”
Tim Burch Director of Surveying SPACECO
“Javad’s contributions to the surveying profession helped turn every practitioner into a geospatial information provider. From his early days at Trimble pioneering the commercial-grade receiver to creating his company at Ashtech and embracing GLONASS with GPS, he continued to expand the capability of the GNSS receiver. Many surveyors today, however, only know his name through his latest company, Javad GNSS, and its unique line of receivers and measuring devices, with their distinct green color. Javad was a big part of the GNSS revolution, so the next time someone starts up his/her receiver to collect survey data, take a moment to thank him. His departure leaves a giant hole in the geospatial world.”
Michael Swiek Managing Director, Executive Branch and International GPS Innovation Alliance
“The ‘Original Cast’ of GPS innovators is dwindling. Javad was a complicated, self-made, innovative, and entertaining man. In the many years we knew each other, we worked on shared visions, many challenges, laughed a lot, and disagreed and argued more than a bit. We always remained friends, honest to each other. Javad was a true GNSS pioneer.”
Ellen Hall President and CEO Spirent Federal Systems
“What a loss for everyone. Such a talented person who truly made his mark on the world.”
Greg Turetzky consultant
Dr. Ashjaee leD the signals team of the “Satellites vs. Signals” after-dinner debate at the GPS World Leadership Dinner held during ION GNSS 2008. (Photo: GPS World)
“I have very fond memories of Javad from the many years we attended
ION GNSS+ and other industry conferences. I will always remember a spirited ‘Satellites vs. Signals’ debate we had at a GPS World Leadership Awards Dinner. We were equally passionate about the debate — despite not having chosen the opposite sides to which we were attached. These are the memories of Javad I treasure. He was passionate, informed, innovative and really good at playing the game. His spirit of innovation will be missed, but I am confident it will be carried on by other members of the GNSS community of which he was such an important part.”
Alison Brown President and CEO NAVSYS
“I am so sorry to hear about Javad’s passing. He was an innovator and an originalist. We worked together after he left Trimble and was in the process of starting Ashtech. I particularly remember his championing the cause, with me, against Selective Availability. He ran an ad with the iconic image of the Mona Lisa as part of this cause, with the slogan “Why ruin a work of art?” It is tragic that Javad fell victim to COVID-19. He will be sorely missed.”
Javad Ashjaee, founder of Javad GNSS, has died in Moscow, Russia. He died on May 30 after a three-week fight with COVID-19.
The news was first reported by a family member on social media. Ashjaee was born in 1949.
“It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of the passing of our founder Javad Ashjaee, a GPS/GNSS pioneer and visionary, on the morning of May 30, 2020, due to COVID-19 in Moscow, Russia,” reports a statement on the JAVAD GNSS website.
The website continues, “Over the course of 37 years, Javad made an incredible and far-reaching impact in the GNSS community. He pioneered the world’s most advanced GNSS technology through a multi-national effort that combined GPS and GLONASS and established more than a quarter century of partnership between Silicon Valley and Moscow. He was always proud of this ‘success story of cooperation.’ Javad was a true industry disrupter long before the term and concept became popular. His whole way of doing business was challenging and disrupting to the status quo.”
Read more about Ashjaee in his own words on the Javad GNSS website, where he describes the founding of his company:
“In 1998 I founded Javad Positioning Systems (JPS) and introduced Legacy, Odyssey and Regency products, followed by HiPer. It was a 76-channel geodetic receiver. Other companies later copied HiPer. Today, many of GNSS receivers look like it. I sold JPS to Topcon, who changed its name to Topcon Positioning System and is a very successful company.
“In 2007, after my obligations to Topcon ended and according to the provisions of our agreement, I founded Javad GNSS and introduced Triumph products. These were 216-channel receivers, integrated with several communication channels. We also introduced their Alpha, Delta, and Sigma versions. We were again the first to offer European Galileo and Japanese QZSS tracking in mass production. Triumph technology has been shown to have the best signal quality and best multipath reduction capabilities against all others tested by the German Aerospace. We also introduced GLONASS inter-channel (group/carrier delay) calibration to 0.2 millimeter which made GLONASS FDMA as good as GPS CDMA. Javad GNSS is growing fast and gaining market share.”
Articles, insight provided by Ashjaee to GPS World
Ashjaee’s nephew Sol Adibnejad provided this biography on his uncle via social media:
Javad was born in 1949 in Qom, Iran. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in electronic physics from the University of Teheran in Iran, he left Iran in 1972 to continue his education at the University of Iowa and got his graduate degrees, a doctorate in 1976. He went back to his native country Iran to teach at the university. He became the chairman of the Department of Computer Engineering at the Aryamehr University of Technology where he founded and managed a UNIVAC-100 computer centre. There, he created the first Iranian microprocessor lab. In 1978 he created one of the earliest student online and interactive registration systems in the world. In a few years and after the 1978 revolution and the political turmoil, things happened and he had to flee the country in 1981.
He went straight back to the U.S. and started the next chapter of his journey in life which led to the pioneering of GPS. He spent the rest of his life designing and manufacturing of many generations of his GPS and JPS products at JAVAD GNSS, JAVAD ArWest and JAVAD EMS in the Silicon Valley. Javad Ashjaee is listed as the primary inventor in 102 granted patents, the last one in April 2020.
New developments in antenna technology empower the final positioning solution with better accuracy and reliability. Leading experts discuss the technology advances producing greater user benefits.
The increasing prevalence of both intentional and inadvertent jamming, new wider bandwidths, and the significance of antenna phase-center variation all bring changes to the dynamic and evolving antenna sector.
Javad Ashjaee (Photo: Javad GNSS)
Javad Ashjaee
President & CEO, JAVAD GNSS
Advanced filtering techniques enable our antennas to defend against jammers and spoofers and to inform users with the details of these intrusive actions when they are detected.
Near-Band Interference. The J-Shield is a robust filter in our antennas that blocks out-of-band interference, in particular such signals that are near the GNSS bands like the LightSquared/Ligado signals. The graph below shows the protection characteristics of the J-Shield filters. It has a sharp 10-dB/KHz skirt that provides up to 100 dB of protection. It makes the precious near-band spectrums available for other usages and protects GNSS bands now and in the future.
In-Band Interference. Our in-band protection digital filter protects against in-band interference like harmonics of TV and radio stations when you get close to them, or against illegitimate in-band transmissions. Our in-band interference protection is based on the 16 adaptive 80th-order filters. Advanced interference mitigation (AIM) filters can be combined in pairs for complex signal processing. This filter can simultaneously suppress several interference signals.
Graph: Javad GNSS
The 16 finite impulse response (FIR) AIM filters can be combined in any number in chain. Each filter is a 255-order FIR filter. It can be used to suppress the stationary interference signal in programmable area (compare with adaptive AIM-filter) or for spectrum shaping. To have more suppressing areas or more aggressive suppressing, one can combine FIR AIM serial.
Neil Gerein, Portfolio Manager, NovAtel. (Photo: NovAtel)
Neil Gerein
Director, Product Management, NovAtel
At NovAtel we often say, “accuracy is addictive,” and to meet increasingly demanding accuracy and reliability requirements it is vital to concentrate on the antenna. After all, the antenna is the first in a long chain of key technologies that the GNSS signals must pass through to create a position, navigation and timing solution.
All modern GNSS transmit on multiple frequencies, with wide bandwidth signals, requiring antenna elements and integrated low noise amplifiers (LNAs) that operate across these frequencies. The challenge is to design the antenna element and LNAs for symmetric radiation patterns across all frequencies while minimizing multipath, phase center offset (PCO) and phase center variation (PCV). The result is better carrier-phase measurements, and therefore more accurate solutions in real-time kinematic (RTK) and PPP applications.
Photo: NovAtel
Since 2016 the Radio Equipment Directive (RED) has been in effect, and all GNSS receiver systems sold into the European Union must be compliant to the standard, including adjacent-band compatibility and spurious emissions testing. RED compliance is an end-to-end system test, where the filtering within the antenna must be analyzed in concert with the filtering capabilities of the connected GNSS receiver to meet the requirements. The antenna performance therefore becomes critical to any GNSS receiver system that is intended to be sold within the EU.
Gyles Panther, president and CTO, Tallysman Wireless. (Photo: Tallysman)
Gyles Panther
President and Chief Technical Officer, Tallysman
A fact often not appreciated is that the performance of a GNSS antenna is commonly the limiting factor in system accuracy. Digital signal algorithms in the receiver are helpful, but if the signal delivered by an antenna is less than optimum, the receiver cannot compensate.
Precision GNSS systems typically rely upon resolved wavelength ambiguity measurements, combined with ephemeris and clock corrections to determine signal time of flight. In real-time kinematic (RTK) and precise point positioning (PPP) receivers, the basis for this measurement is phase locked tracking of received satellite signals. Thus an over-arching measure of antenna performance in the specific application conditions is the proportion of the time that phase lock is maintained by the receiver.
The VeraChoke GNSS antenna. (Photo: Tallysman)
All this provides for an unprecedented level of accuracy, with precision antennas now more akin to the ends of a tape measure than providing a simple GNSS “fix.” To this end, key parameters include a best possible G/T ratio, high multipath rejection, excellent axial ratio, high front-back ratio and minimal phase-center variation (PCV), all with high uniformity in the azimuth — altogether a very demanding design task.
Combining these parameters to provide exquisite accuracy, the Tallysman VC6100 choke ring antenna has less than 1 millimeter PCV when combined with absolute calibrated corrections data, whilst the lower cost VP6000, with its less complex installation, can be used without corrections data and still be within a millimeter or two of the truth compared to its more precise cousin.
Javad GNSS’ Javad Ashjaee gives GPS World an overview of the company’s J-Mate at Intergeo 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany. According to Javad GNSS, the J-Mate is a total solution that features a camera that can automatically identify targets, a laser module for accurate distance measurements, and two motors for control of precision encoders that measure vertical and horizontal angles to the targets.
Javad GNSS President & CEO Javad Ashjaee discusses the company’s new J-Mate total station, newest generation Triumph chip, Omega receiver and J-Shield filter. The interview took place at Intergeo 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany.
Contrary to the “Out in Front” editorial published in the April issue of GPS World magazine, there was an Izvestia story published on March 28 touting the possibility of a merger of the GLONASS and BeiDou systems, and there will be an International Conference on Advanced Technologies in Manufacturing and Materials Engineering in Harbin, China, at which such a possibility may hypothetically be discussed.
However, neither hard news nor any official statements have emerged to substantiate such a dubious claim, despite repeated queries to officials of both countries.
Javad Ashjaee (far left, above), CEO of JAVAD GNSS and based in Moscow, communicated that he spoke on a panel at an aerospace technology event organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, alongside representatives from NASA, Boeing, Honeywell and Roskosmos.
Ashjaee asked the Roskosmos official publicly about the prospect of a GLONASS merger with BeiDou, and “he knew nothing.”
Q: What is the biggest challenge facing designers of multi-constellation GNSS receivers today?
Javad Ashjaee, founder of Javad GNSS: The biggest challenge now is spoofing.
Some years ago the issue was jamming —the hot issue of LightSquared — that would hurt GNSS. To solve that problem we created the J-Shield and showed that J-Shield technology could protect against LightSquared and similar signals. We manufactured dozens of units that were successfully tested by several independent laboratories.
Now GNSS faces the spoofing issue. Reports of Black Sea spoofing and other examples show the urgency of paying attention to this problem. When a spoofer is successful, both position and time are spoofed.
A Nov. 3 CNN video report on this subject gives an example of how little people know about spoofing and about the work that has been done on this subject. The report claims that GNSS technology companies have not done much or spent money on this subject. Obviously the reporter doesn’t know what we have done, as I will report here.
I’ll review the spoofing methods and how we counter them.
Source: Javad GNSS
Spoofers use three methods: One simple way is to broadcast GNSS-like signals that provide the wrong ranging information which, when used, creates wrong position and time solutions. Most probably this is the method that Prof. Todd Humphreys used to spoof the GNSS receiver on the $80 million yacht [“GNSS Lies, GNSS Truth,” November 2014 GPS World.] This method fools the GNSS receiver into ignoring the correlation peak of the real satellite signal and using the correlation peak of the spoofer signal. To deal with this type of spoofer we take advantage of the 864 tracking channels and over 130,000 fast acquisition channels of our TRIUMPH chip. We assign more than one channel to each satellite signal and we track all their peaks: The real peak and the spoofer’s peaks. Then in Step 1, below, we exclude all signals with more than one correlation peak.
Method Two is broadcasting spoofed signals for satellites that are below the horizon in the spoofed area or for satellites that do not exist. In this case only one correlation peak exists. Our equipment and OEM boards can download valid and certified almanac data from our website to know the status of satellites and their visibility ahead of their mission. Almanac data can be used for several weeks.
Method Three is to cover the signal of a visible satellite with noise and on top of the noise add the spoofer signal with more power. We recognize such spoofers by their unreasonable signal power and the background noise.
In the first counter-spoofing step we ignore these signals:
Those with more than one peak;
Those that according to our almanac should not be visible;
Those with unreasonably high or inconsistent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR);
Systems whose satellites all have similar SNR.
Satellites that do not generate complete multi-frequency signals (spoofers usually generate only C/A code).
After removing all questionable signals, we use the remaining signals to compute our approximate position. We need at least 4 signals from the many available signals of GPS L1, L2P, L2C, L5, GLONASS L1, L2, L3, and the many signals of BeiDou, QZSS and IRNSS.
In the second step we validate all questionable signals against the approximate position that we have calculated and keep only those that pass our validation. We then re-compute the more precise position using all good signals. We consistently throw away the spoofer correlation peak and use the real satellite signal.
If all signals of all satellites are spoofed, then we warn the user to ignore the GNSS signals and use some other sensors (like compass and gyro) to get out of the spoofed area. A spoofer that can spoof all signals of all satellites will be very expensive to build and deploy.
In a very difficult situation, the user can enter their approximate position to quickly understand if spoofers exist, and then identify them.
All the counter-spoofing methods that I have discussed here are the subject of patents for which we have applied.
Since currently most of spoofers spoof the L1 C/A code, we can simply initially ignore the C/A signals to compute the initial approximate position and use it to identify the spoofed signals.
It is vital that in areas that spoofing danger exists, users employ OEM boards that provide more satellite systems and more signals, rather than using a simple GPS C/A code, for example.
Finally I would like to challenge Prof. Todd Humphreys [professor and director, Radionavigation Laboratory, University of Texas-Austin] to spoof any of our receivers that have this anti-spoofing option. We offer this as an option on all of our OEM boards.
Javad GNSS’ Javad Ashjaee offers a rundown on the company’s Triumph-F1 unmanned aerial vehicle at Intergeo 2017, which took place Sept. 26-28 in Berlin, Germany. According to the company, the Triumph-F1 is a field-tested high-precision geodetic GNSS receiver that includes four battery compartments, four angled documentation cameras and more.
Javad Ashjaee of JAVAD GNSS introduces at INTERGEO 2015 a video by Shawn Billings of Billings Surveying & Mapping who discusses the features and advantages of the JAVAD TRIUMPH-LS. INTERGEO was held Sept. 15–17 in Stuttgart, Germany.
Javad Ashjaee of JAVAD GNSS introduces at INTERGEO 2015 a video by Shawn Billings of Billings Surveying & Mapping who explores the JAVAD TRIUMPH-LS camera offset survey function in depth. INTERGEO was held Sept. 15–17 in Stuttgart, Germany.
