GPS World

Tag: U.S. Federal Communications Commission

  • FCC to vote on allowing US devices to use Galileo

    FCC to vote on allowing US devices to use Galileo

    The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote in November on whether to allow U.S. devices to access Galileo.

    The Galileo Order is tentatively on the agenda for the Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 15:

    Galileo Order – The Commission will consider an Order that addresses waivers of certain satellite licensing requirements for receive-only earth stations operating with the Galileo Radionavigation-Satellite Service. (IB Docket No. 17-16)

    “Enabling the Galileo system to work in concert with the U.S. GPS constellation should make GPS more precise, reliable and resilient for American consumers and businesses alike ,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

    In 2015, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) submitted to the FCC a request from the European Commission to waive certain of the commission’s earth station licensing rules to permit non-federal U.S. receive-only earth stations to operate with Galileo.

    The NTIA recommended grant of the requested waivers, and the International Bureau issued a Public Notice seeking comment on the potential public interest benefits and technical issues associated with the waiver request.

    The FCC is proposing to waive its licensing requirements for non-federal operations with Galileo signals known as E1 and E5, subject to certain technical constraints, officials said.

    The FCC includes conditions to ensure users of satellite-based positioning, navigation and timing services in the United States will benefit from Galileo signals. The systems are interoperable under a 2004 agreement.

    Below is a summary of the order; the full text can be downloaded here.

    • Grant in part the request of the European Commission for waivers of certain of the Commission’s earth station licensing rules to permit non-federal U.S. receive-only earth stations to operate with specific signals of the Galileo GNSS without obtaining a license or grant of market access.
    • Find that the Galileo GNSS is uniquely situated as a foreign GNSS system with respect to the U.S. GPS, since the two systems are interoperable and radiofrequency compatible pursuant to the 2004 European Union/United States Galileo-GPS Agreement.
    • Find that there are significant public interest benefits associated with operations of non-federal U.S. receive-only earth stations with the Galileo GNSS, including increased availability, reliability, and resiliency of position, navigation, and timing services in the United States.
    • Grant the request for operations with the Galileo E1 signal, which is transmitted over the 1559-1591 MHz frequency band.
    • Grant the request, and a waiver of the non-federal portion of the U.S. Table of Frequency Allocations, for operations with the Galileo E5 signal, which is transmitted over the 1164-1219 MHz frequency band.
    • Deny the request for operations with the Galileo E6 signal, which is transmitted over the 1260-1300 MHz frequency band, since there is no federal or non-federal allocation for RNSS in the U.S. Table of Frequency Allocations in that band and grant of waiver could constrain our future spectrum management for non-federal operations in the U.S. in spectrum above 1300 MHz, where potential changes in the non-federal allocation are under consideration.
  • Taking a look at the rest of the Ligado story

    Taking a look at the rest of the Ligado story

    Alan Cameron
    Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, GPS World

    “All the News that Fits” can sometimes be a hard motto to live up to, and it has turned out so this month. I want to get more material into our pages for your perusal, and it just could not be crammed into the System of System pages in this issue. Therefore, I cede my “Out in Front” editorial to the 27 gentlepeople, executives across the commercial, scientific and government agency spectrum, who wrote to U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai on July 18.

    The core quotes from the letter appear here. However, there’s more meat on the bones and I want to present it here.

    “The undersigned organizations, representing entities that provide and rely upon critical GPS, satellite communications (“SATCOM”) services, and essential weather and other environmental data, write to inform you that the threat of harmful interference from Ligado’s proposed ancillary terrestrial component (“ATC”) service continues to pose a significant risk of harmful interference despite Ligado’s May 31, 2018, amendments to its license modification applications in the above-referenced file numbers. The record, augmented by recent government reports, makes clear that the interference will be particularly impactful to the countless government and commercial entities that rely on GPS and SATCOM services for aviation safety and other critical services and the many groups that receive and depend upon real-time weather and related environmental information from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) satellites…

    “We recognize the importance of ensuring that there is sufficient spectrum for mobile broadband, and the Commission has recently taken many steps to address that challenge. However, at a time in which the Administration has placed so much emphasis on the critical importance of space-based communications — through the revival of the National Space Council and other policy initiatives — the FCC should not undermine the nation’s critical space leadership.2 Granting Ligado’s request would harm the nation’s satellite industry and the broad sectors of the country that benefit from American space leadership every day in at least three ways. First, it would threaten the reliability of critical position, navigation and timing (“PNT”) services, including GPS and also an emerging satellite time and location (“STL”) capability augmenting GPS.

    “Second, it would undermine the investment-backed expectations of those who operate commercial satellite systems by fundamentally altering the interference environment decades after licensing.

    “And third, it would convert 40 MHz of increasingly rare satellite spectrum away from satellite use, rewarding a company for underutilizing its satellite spectrum rather than investing in new satellite technologies.”

    In addition to several organizations, the letter is signed by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the American Geophysical Union, American Weather and Climate Industry Association and the National Emergency Number Association.

  • Research Online: Sensor-based collision warning systems

    By Gustavo Lee and Mathieu Joerger, Aerospace and Mechanical Department, The University of Arizona Presented at ION/IEEE/PLANS 2018

    This paper describes the design and implementation of a new safety risk evaluation method for a sensor-based automotive collision warning system using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. It provides an overview of the V2V basic safety message (BSM) format and of surrogate measures of safety (SMS) used to parameterize a vehicle encounter. BSM and SMS are then employed to quantify risk of collision and risk of false alerts. Preliminary simulations illustrate the methodology in an example multi-sensor intersection movement assist system.

    The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has allocated 75 MHz of licensed spectrum in the 5.9-GHz band for use by Intelligent Transportation Systems vehicle safety and mobility applications. In addition, in the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J2735 Standard, the DSRC committee specifies a set of messages and their formats to support vehicle-based applications. Of particular relevance to this work is the BSM, which conveys critical vehicle-state information that includes vehicle position, positional accuracy, speed, heading, braking status and size.

    V2V communications using DSRC have an operational range of about 300 meters. Within this range, V2V applications have the potential to significantly reduce occurrences of crashes through real-time advisories, alerting drivers to imminent hazards. GPS and GPS/INS-based relative positioning using V2V is subject to alteration and loss of GPS signal. But unlike vehicle-resident sensors (such as cameras and lidars), GPS/INS/V2V is not affected by weather, light or dust, and can sense out-of-sight vehicles occluded behind other vehicles or around building corners. This capability addresses scenarios where an oncoming vehicle emerges from behind a truck or from a blind alley. In those situations, GPS/INS /V2V can sense threats that a radar or camera cannot.

    Available online via www.ion.org/publications/browse.cfm.

    Image: Lee and Joerger