May 2010

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The German Aerospace Center at Oberpfaffenhofen is the national space agency’s Center of Excellence for Satellite Navigation — and a key player in Europe’s Galileo operations. Inside GNSS visited recently and discovered why: quadrotors, GBAS demonstrator, the Galileo Control Center, advanced GNSS receivers, and the world’s largest, slow-motion Tilt-a-Whirl.

For all its remarkable capability and accomplishments, the Global Positioning System —and, by extension, all GNSS systems — appear increasingly vulnerable to malicious jamming. A UK radionavigation expert outlines the hazards, field test results, and a possible remedy in enhanced Loran. Last is a PNT consulting engineer and former head of the Radio-Navigation Group at the University of Wales.

Imagine walking into a new place — a shopping mall or an office building — wandering around for 20 minutes or so, and coming out with a map of the facility that others could use to navigate through it — say, a fire rescue crew or someone looking for an office suite.  A team of researchers at the German Aersopace Center are working on a “walk-about” solution that uses GPS to initialize the beginning of the traverse and tie the position data to an absolute coordinate frame. Foot-mounted inertial sensors increase the map accuracy when a person revisits previous points in the building.

Achieving robust, reliable positioning in GNSS signal-challenged environments has long represented a kind of Holy Grail. One promising approach combines GNSS with terrestrial systems using existing wireless infrastructures. One company successfully used GPS and Wi-Fi and now Its technology is incorporated into a wide range of mobile “connected” platforms, including Apple’s iPhone and iPod.

Enter your original applications product or service in the USA Challenge, the newest regional contest in the 2010 European Satellite Navigation Competition. Win cash, an Inside GNSS cover story and free consultation with the University of Calgary PLAN group

Our series continues with easy16, an analysis of the information available from a single set of GPS satellite signal observables that can provide an insight into the nature of GPS error sources, the ones that matter most, and the ways that these can be modeled or eliminated.

Release of the Galileo OS SIS ICD marks the resolution of a complex political process, and does so by coming down on the side of transparency, non-exclusivity, and maximum public benefit.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Iqualuit, Nunavut; Western Europe; Afghanistan; Satish, Dhawan space center; Perth