All Over the World: 2013 GNSS conferences

2013 opens with a new event in Hawaii, a rescheduled Munich Summit, and other familiar technical meetings, workshops, exhibitions, and GNSS-oriented activities.

Receiver standards? January 22 webinar discusses why, what and how

Do we need performance specs for GNSS user equipment design? For a long time, the signal-in-space interface guidelines provided enough technical guidance. But times have changed.

Over the past two years, the effort by LightSquared to persuade the FCC to allow it to operate high-powered terrestrial transmitters in frequencies adjacent to GPS focused attention on potential vulnerabilities of GNSS user equipment.

Civil Galileo System Poses New Options for Secure Services

When European leaders first took up the idea of creating their own GNSS system nearly 20 years ago, they held up the concept of civilian control as a crucial differentiator from existing services operated by national military establishments.

As Galileo nears its operational phase, that principle may manifest itself in a surprising form: the opportunity to offer a range of security-oriented positioning and timing solutions in place of the all-or-nothing alternatives on encrypted services maintained by defense agencies.

Meet the New European GNSS Agency: Much the Same, Only Different

Coming nearly full circle and yet ending up in a new place with a new name describes the peculiar fortunes of the European GNSS Agency, an unlikely fate perhaps reflected most clearly in its continued use of its predecessor’s acronym, GSA.

Five years ago when Europe’s GNSS program abandoned its seemingly misconceived and now roundly condemned effort to forge a public-private partnership (PPP) to develop Galileo, the original GSA — the Galileo Supervisory Authority — appeared orphaned, bereft of purpose and patrons.

London Conference Beats Drum for Galileo Acceptance

The third Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellite, also known as Flight Model 3 (FM), began transmitting signals last week, and the FM4 spacecraft, like the FM3 launched on October 12, is expected to come on-line soon — providing the theoretical capability of 3D positioning using solely satellites of Europe’s GNSS system.

Longer Show Hours, Fewer Days for ION GNSS 2013 Exhibitors

Companies who exhibit at the Institute of Navigation GNSS conference next September will have longer exhibit hall hours to work the floor - but fewer days to do so - at the 2013 event in Nashville, Tennessee.

Based on feedback from exhibitors, ION will eliminate the Friday hours for the industry show and increase the Wednesday and Thursday hours next year.  

GNSS Hotspots

1. TRAFFICKING TOOL
Los Angeles, California
√ From Ukraine to Haiti to L.A., mobile devices and networks play “a central role” in finding, following and controlling the adolescent victims of sex trafficking, says the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center in a new report. It says those PPP technologies should be a “powerful new tool in identifying, tracking and prosecuting” the bad guys, and the wireless carriers should take the lead.

Retired GIOVE-A Satellite Helps Demonstrate High-Altitude GPS Navigation Fix

An experimental GPS receiver, built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), has successfully achieved a GPS position fix at a 23,300-kilometer altitude — the first position fix above the GPS constellation on a civilian satellite, according to the company.

SSTL’s SGR-GEO receiver is collecting data that could help the company to develop a receiver to navigate spacecraft in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) or even in deep space.