March/April 2007

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Multi-tasking is a fact of life for military units and first responders in life-threatening situations. Whether it's the fog of war or the welter of data and movement in an emergency, anything that lessens the data and duty load of unit commanders improves the odds of success - especially if it also provides them with a coherent picture of where their personnel and assets are. A Canadian Defence research team describes one way it could be done.

A career in the great Canadian outdoors ended early for Pat Fenton when his pioneering work on computer-aided processing of field survey data landed him permanently in the office. Now he’s chief technology officer at NovAtel with a long list of engineering achievements in GNSS signal processing and receiver design.

Successful launch of three modernized GLONASS-M late last year continues the replenishment of Russia’s second-generation navigation satellite system. This article provides as overview of the satellite deployment procedures and plans to accelerate the completion of a modernized GLONASS system.

Micro-electromechanical systems - or MEMS - have gotten a lot of attention in recent years. But what can they do for navigation? Two researchers explain how development of low-cost inertial MEMs devices is opening up the possibility of seamless indoor/outdoor GNSS/INS navigation at an affordable price.

Robust, continuous positioning in adverse signal-tracking environments remains a formidable engineering and practical challenge. A European project, launched in the context of Galileo development, is investigating deep integration of complementary GNSS and inertial technologies targeting rail applications.

For reasons of political sovereignty, technological competition, policy differences, operational control, and perhaps just plain old national prestige, the planet Earth may have four complete global navigation satellite systems within five or six years. Let’s assume that happens. Are users and manufacturers destined to work through a labyrinth of competing technical specifications and management regimes in order to take advantage of the rich GNSS signal resource coming into existence? Or can we shape a better world of GNSS interoperability and cooperation?

For years many in Europe have started referring to PPP as meaning, “Public Pays Private,” referring to the practical necessity for public subsidy — overt or covert — of an infrastructure that will ultimately pay for itself in the tax revenues generated by user equipment, services, and applications and not solely from revenues derived directly from the system itself.