November/December 2010

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eVOTZ founder Elliot Klein and his method for using geolocation and wireless technologies to remotely verify and authenticate a mobile voter’s ballot wins the first USA Challenge.

Mobilizy, an Austrian start-up company, took home the €20,000 grand prize in the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2010 (ESNC 2010) for its navigation system Wikitude Drive, which uses augmented reality (AR) to superimpose driving directions over live street video on smartphones.

In which a boy from Detroit gives up backyard Corvair re-assembly to study mechanical engineering and spends the next 26 years getting ever deeper into the GPS program.

GPS-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) have profoundly changed how the U.S. Defense Department carries out command and control in the electronic battlespace — from a reactive to a real-time mode of continuous situational awareness. Now military leaders are looking for the technologies that can fill the gaps in PNT that occur in GPS signal–challenged conditions.

When GNSS designers quantifiy the performance loss due to phase noise effects on the baseband signal, these performance bounds may then be used as the basis for local oscillator design. The authors develop bounds by identifying front-end local oscillator phase noise effects on the correlation loss, while tracking receiver performance. This is one of the first articles to characterize and document the effects. 

Ultimately, the really interesting aspects of Internet and GNSS innovations come in their combination, not their separation.

This issue's hotspots take us to Brazil and Belgium, Afghanistan and Oberfaffenhofen.

The Global Positioning Program continues progress in space and on the ground