November/December 2006

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Robbing banks is still a popular pastime in the United States. After all, that’s where the money is. But sometimes the crooks get away with a little more than they’d figured on.

Are location-based services and integration of GNSS technology into GSM mobile phones always going to be the killer application of the future, or will they actually happen some day soon? Two researchers heavily involved in this sector draw on recent market studies to support their answers to this question.

The long history of the Galileo program’s development has tended to focus on the design, construction, and launch of the system’s satellites. But an equally important activity is the development of Galileo-capable user equipment. Leaders of an engineering team that has developed a multi-frequency Galileo receiver describe their efforts and the results.

The Global Positioning System has gotten along without leap seconds for nearly 30 years, and if GPS system time — which drives the phones, the power grids, the Internet, and even more important, the banks — can get along without it, that’s fine by me.

Measuring variations in the Earth’s gravity field has practical implications for commercial exploration for natural resources as well as advancing geophysical knowledge. The value of gravimetric methodology relates directly to the precision of spatial resolution derived from the measurement instruments. For years, researchers have used the complementary technologies of GNSS positioning and inertial sensors to refine their methods. Today, new data-processing algorithms and the advent of Europe’s Galileo system promise new advances in these techniques.