July/August 2006

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Two many good ideas? That may be what GNSS receiver manufacturers are facing as they consider competing versions for a common interoperable civil waveform at the L1 frequency. Inside GNSS asked signal experts at a cross-section of GNSS companies what they thought about the binary offset carrier (BOC) and multiplex BOC (MBOC) designs proposed for the GPS L1C and Galileo Open Service. In this two-part series, they told us.

A recent study conducted on behalf of the U.S. departments of commerce
and transportation concluded that the new L2 civil GPS signal will
substantially benefit dual-frequency applications and could be a
long-term boon for applications requiring three or more frequencies.

Restoring 59,000 acres of a former military camp nearly 60 years after its closure has a special challange for the crews from Parsons Corporation: uncovering and safely destroying the thousands of live mortars, artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, hand grenades, and land mines left behind.

GNSS Receiver designers may be facing an embarrassment of riches as new signals come on-line in three GNSSes. WHat can you do with more than one or two signals? Multipath analysis and multi-frequency ambiguity resolution, for a start.

The ability to replace some hardware components in a GNSS receiver with software-based signal-processing techniques has already produced benefits for prototyping new equipment and analyzing signal quality and performance. Now some developers are attempting to extend the flexibility and cost-benefits of software defined radios to commercial end-user products, including mobile devices incorporating GNSS functionality. This column takes a look at the history of GNSS software receivers, the opportunities and practical engineering challenges that they pose for manufacturers, and the state of the art and related applications of them.

As with al-Zarqawi, so-called smart bombs were also involved in the “right building, wrong target” incident in Belgrade. Which reminds me of an ironic comment I once heard about the limitations of intelligent transportation systems: “What are you going to do when you have ‘smart cars’ with dumb drivers?”