Obama: The Trifecta of Bad Timing on Technology Policies

Talk about your bad timing.

The outcome of the LightSquared/GPS controversy threatens to make President Obama a three-time loser in technology policy matters.

In March 2010, his administration proposed to open for drilling for oil and natural gas extensive expanses along the Atlantic coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and off the north coast of Alaska, many of those areas for the first time. Less than a month later the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion unleashed the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

Data Dump from the Summit

Once this week’s Munich Satellite Navigation Summit got rolling, the information began flowing — sometimes in bits and pieces, sometimes in a flood.

Russia’s GLONASS program raised the curtain a few inches more on its plans to add CDMA signals to its FDMA satellite, beginning with the GLONASS-K launched last week and continuing on to a full set in orbit by 2020.

Does the Caged Bird Still Sing? or, GPS and the Bluebird of Happiness

Listening to today’s panel discussion on GNSS spectrum issues — with the hopeful subtitle, “A Place Where Competitors Become Colleagues?” — brought to mind a metaphorical description of the GPS signal environment that I heard recently.

The Munich Satnav Summit discussion revolved around the growing pressure on GNSS from other RF users, such as LightSquared, desiring to set up in radionavigation satellite system (RNSS bands).

Somewhat embellished, the description was this:

Willkommen zum GNSS-Fest

Perhaps it was Bavaria’s famous, free-floating Gemütlichkeit or just the excellent jazz ensemble from a nearby town, but the opening plenary at the Munich Satellite Navigation Summit this evening (March 1) was awash in benign goodwill but little new insight into the condition of the world’s GNSS systems.

FCC Attacks GPS Jamming (They Don't Mean LightSquared)

Now there's irony for you.

Death of a Russian Engineer

Very sad news from Moscow. Earlier this month, Stanislav Sila-Novitsky — Stas to his friends and colleagues — died unexpectedly after a short illness.

A member of the executive staff of Javad GNSS, Sila-Novitsky had a long career in space electronics engineering. During the Soviet era, he was the department head with the Russian Space Agency’s Institute of Space Device Engineering, which was responsible for the development of the overall GLONASS system electronics.

Full-Stop Shopping for GPS Jammers on Google? Why Didn't We Think of That?

It sounded like an excellent idea: convince Google to thwart on-line searches for GPS jammers, and, according to Bob Brewin, editor at large for nextgov.com, it worked — at least for a while.

The Ghost Writer: GPS Thickens the Plot

Always good to see GNSS play a big part in the storyline of popular fiction, even when it exhibits qualities unmatched by performance in the real world.

Just because it's popular fiction doesn't mean it has to be science fiction.

The Weilheim Dish — Keeping an Eye on Galileo

Up close and personal, the curved aluminum antenna dish at Weilheim — painted white and aimed vaguely skyward, with a big Krupp corporate logo on the front — looked a lot bigger than 30 meters across. And when we climbed up the steel stairs to the platform half-way up the dish, the ground looked a lot further away than 20 meters.

And that was before Peter, overseeing the DLR facility this late winter afternoon, flipped the switch and set the antenna in motion  — 240 degrees each direction horizontally, 90 degrees in the vertical.

Why Walk Your Map When You Can Fly It?

It’s hard to decide which of Patrick Robertson’s new toys — ah, I mean, remarkable scientific research tools — is the coolest: the boot with the GNSS and inertial sensors inside it that the DLR researcher is using to develop self-locating self-aware (SLAM) indoor mapping techniques, or the quadrotor intended for the same purpose, only airborne.