November/December 2009

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A new system of systems is arising out of GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Compass (Beidou-2), QZSS, GAGAN, IRNSS, EGNOS, WAAS, MSAS and undoubtedly other acronyms yet to be born.  As 2009 turns into 2010, we asked a select group of GNSS leaders to comment on the progress of the systems and their augmentations over the past year as well as the prospects for the year ahead.

Not all space-based PNT providers can count on supportive government policies, generous funding, abundant skilled technicians, or a strong national economy to advance their GNSS system. So who is in the top 10? Analysts from a noted market intelligence firm rank the current and projected capabilities of the world’s GNSS system operators.

Meet the Burredo — an inexpensive, lightweight sub-microsecond timing system for synchronizing the position and attitude of an unmanned aerial vehicle’s camera at the moment of exposure.

Will the coming year mark the beginning of the Golden Age of GNSS? At first glance, such a notion might seem not just optimistic, but noticeably ill timed. Read further, however, and you’ll see a broad-spectrum list of events likely to occur in 2010 that could prove the best is still to come.

Data bit transitions, oscillator jitter, and user dynamics prevent coherent integration time in a GNSS receiver for more than a few dozen milliseconds. But increasing this to several seconds would help solve three problems in a degraded signal environment: multipath, cross-correlation false locks, and the squaring loss. The authors introduce a highly-sensitive prototype that may solve these issues.

GNSS data points and factoids to amuse and inform.