ION's Big Year! GNSS 2012 Plus a New Pacific Rim Conference

It's a big year for the Institute of Navigation, with the venerable ION GNSS 2012 happening this September in Nashville and the new and highly anticipated Pacific PNT conference opening for the first time next April in Honolulu.

ION GNSS 2012, the granddaddy of all GNSS events, begins shortly in Music City, USA: Nashville, Tennessee.

It's scheduled during the third week of September at the downtown Nashville Convention Center, a five minute walk to the Country Music Hall of Fame and other attractions.

Applanix Launches New Airborne Photogrammetric Mapping System

Applanix introduced a new position and orientation system and flight management system (FMS) for airborne mapping today (August 27, 2012) at the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) 2012 Conference in Melbourne, Australia.

GNSS Hotspots

1. PAPER CUTS
Washington, Oklahoma, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania
√ State transportation departments in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Ohio are printing fewer state highway maps, says the Associated Press. Washington did away with them entirely. Blame it on the double whammy of public sector budget cuts and smartphone, handheld, and in-car GPS. But there are lots of holdouts. As one Indiana man said, without a paper map, “You’re beholden to the GPS lady, you know?”

Interference & Jamming

The threats just keep growing to a resource that hundreds of millions of people around the world have come to rely on for a myriad purposes.

GNSS is, after all, an RF technology, vulnerable in its own way to the kind of disruptive effects that turn an AM radio into a static-ridden howl as you drive under a powerline. And the radiated energy of signals arriving with from satellite sources tens of thousands of miles away are orders of magnitude weaker than those carrying the top 40 tunes broadcast by a local station.

Single- versus Dual-Frequency Precise Point Positioning

Q: What are the tradeoffs between using L1-only and L1+L2 for PPP?

A: Precise point positioning (PPP) is a technique that can compute positions with a high accuracy anywhere on the globe using a single GNSS receiver. It relies on highly accurate satellite position and clock data that can be downloaded from the International GNSS Service (IGS) or obtained in real-time from a number of service providers, using either the Internet or satellite links.

INS Face Off

The automobile versus the horse and buggy. Cloud computing opposite desktop software. The trend is predictable, yet it is always surprising when one technology takes over the market space of another. After all, television did kill off the radio star.

Addition of Leap Second Highlights Campaign for Its Elimination

[Updated July 4] The world’s dominant mode of timekeeping, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), took on another leap second on Saturday, June 30 at 23:59:60 UTC.

And then the fun began: the addition caused software handling Internet services such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Mozilla, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare and Gawker to behave unpredictably or even crash over the weekend.