January/February 2007

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Inertial sensors can help keep us on track indoors when we’re out of reach of GNSS. But if we can model how people walk, it makes it all much more worthwhile . . . and accurate. Here’s how one group is doing it in Switzerland.

GNSS has lead Allison Kealy from a small island, her birthplace in Trinidad, to the world’s largest: Australia. In the former, she was a nascent surveyor; in the latter, the first female academic appointee in the University of Melbourne’s Geomatics department.

Transforming policy into programs and progress challenges the leadership of any organization. But when the effort involves a global infrastructure, international relations, national interagency cooperation, and multiple civil/commercial/military users—as GNSS systems do–the task becomes even more complex. The director of the U.S. agency charged with implementing a new presidential directive affecting GPS describes how that's being done.

A micro aerial vehicle—a tiny, unmanned aircraft—needs a similarly sized navigation system. this one, designed and built by an engineering team from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, could be the world's smallest.

It's not too early to begin thinking about what a multisystem GNSS might look like and mean for users, receiver manufacturers, and service providers.

The scale of a nation’s endeavors tells us a lot about the scope of its ambitions. If Compass/Beidou remains a national or regional system, its significance and the intentions behind it are similarly limited. If Compass becomes a global navigation satellite system, we can assume that its sponsor’s ambitions have a similar scope. If I were a betting man, I’d bet on the latter outcome.