GNSS NewsMarch/April 2013
Droning On about UAVs
The latest Orwellian theme: “The sky isn’t falling — it’s watching!”
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Inside GNSS
Thinking Aloud Until now, positioning has been a lot like the weather: everybody talked about it, but nobody did anything about it. They couldn’t. Not practically, not without affordable, accessible tools and the techno-cultural sensibilities to bring it about. But this first decade of the 21st century may prove to be the Axial Age of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) community. Four systems, developed by four political and economic powers, are in various states of maturity and robustness. The signals used by GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and several regional and augmentation systems are the lingua franca for satellite based positioning, navigation, and timing. This magazine is dedicated to speaking the new language of GNSS, in the hopes that we can create the community’s Rosetta Stone (and avoid the Tower of Babel.) Thinking Aloud is my chance, in each issue, to help that process along.
Glen Gibbons, Jr. E-mail: glen@insidegnss.com SPEECHES AND PRESENTATIONS: Columns
January/February 2013
The GNSS Merry Go RoundThe temptation to shape regulatory measures, market initiatives, or
technology development in ways that unfairly benefit one’s own program
battles the idea that we are all in this together, or should be.
November/December 2012
Our Harvest Being Gotten InWe give thanks for those new initiatives, yet unseen or unborn, stirring throughout the world of GNSS.
September/October 2012
Fractured GNSS Fairy TalesIt’s free, it’s worked great — without
failure, really — for nearly 20 years, and it has delivered to the
world’s citizens an affordable, accurate, and widely available
capability for precise location and timing unprecedented in human
history.
July/August 2012
Can Congress Rescue Itself?May/June 2012
IP Rights and Wrongs
Many
people have tried to reinvent the wheel, but no one has gotten into a patent
fight over it.
March/April 2012
LightSquared Lessons LearnedThe regulatory phase of the GPS/LightSquared controversy appears to be winding down, and the litigation phase warming up.
January/February 2012
GPS - The DoD's Profit CenterWhat began, in the words of the Defense Department, as a “force enhancer” has become an economy enhancer of enormous value.
November/December 2011
Oh No! Not LightSquared Again!Only the backing of a billion-dollar hedge fund operating in the plutocracy that America’s political system has become enables LightSquared to dominate this conversation.
September/October 2011
Worst GPS President Ever?Common sense and due diligence would seem to call for holding off on rolling out LightSquared’s system until further tests can be conducted.
July/August 2011
The Fire Next TimeThe GPS community needs a continuing, effective organization to prepare for the next attack on its hard-won equities.
May/June 2011
A Target — Possibly MovingThe FCC’s new report repudiates the principle that latecomers to an RF band must ensure their operations do not harm existing users.
March/April 2011
Can You Hear Us Now?Like questionable genealogies that trace one’s roots back to some royal family or other, the LightSquared arguments beg the question of what its initiative means in the near future.
January/February 2011
Your Signal Is My NoiseIn the absence of solid agreements on how to achieve compatible, interoperable services, the addition of signals becomes a bane, not a boon, to users of any and all GNSS systems.
November/December 2010
World Wide GNSSUltimately, the really interesting aspects of Internet and GNSS innovations come in their combination, not their separation.
October 2010
Launch FeverWe are enjoying the fruits of almost invisible labor - the efforts of
those who put satellites into the sky and signals on the air.
September 2010
The Missing ICDRelease of an ICD would be good for both the Compass program and the community of GNSS receiver designers and end users who are looking for the additional signal resources that the Chinese system can bring.
July/August 2010
Interesting. Too Interesting?
More systems, more satellites, more signals — A conservative
estimate totals 441 different modes that a receiver could operate in. Difficult as they
now appear, sorting out frequency-sharing issues among the various providers
may turn out to be the easy part.
June 2010
Deselecting Unavailability
In 2000 the United States turned off GPS selective availability. The consequences of that decision — probably immeasurable at that moment — are still rippling through the world today as the number of GPS receivers in use soars toward the billions.
May 2010
ICDs — Another Good ExampleRelease of the Galileo OS SIS ICD marks the resolution of a complex
political process, and does so by coming down on the side of
transparency, non-exclusivity, and maximum public benefit.
March/April 2010
Service and SecurityThe Volpe report came out on the day before 9/11/01. Now we’ve blown
through another nine years without really addressing the issue. And if
Volpe repeated its study today, only assessing the effects of the
vulnerability of the world’s timing infrastructure as well as
transportation . . . well, no one really wants to think about that. And
so nothing has really been done about it.
January/February 2010
More of the SameWith Loran-C’s demise follows the probable abandonment of
enhanced Loran (eLoran) as a multimodal backup to GPS. We have to hope
that it won’t take a disaster to correct the gaping security hole in
our critical national
infrastructure for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT).
November/December 2009
The Golden Age of GNSSWill 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.
September/October 2009
Growing Up with GNSSIt's hard to imagine that 20 years can embrace nearly the entirety of the
public presence of a phenomenon such as the Internet or GNSS.
July/August 2009
Satellite Numbers GameMay/June 2009
Inflection PointsDefining who we are by sketching the shadows of strangers is often easier than filling in the outline of our own qualities and aspirations on which to build the basis of mutual interests.
March/April 2009
Whither Galileo, and Why?The continuing question is whether management of Galileo has changed sufficiently and soon enough to make a difference.
January/February 2009
Critical Infrastructure: The United States and GPSSo, President Obama wants to spend some money on infrastructure, eh? Well, here’s an idea: send some of it GPS’s way.
November/December 2008
Waiting to Exhale: End of the Bush AdministrationThe parting regime was an administration of people — people who kept working away
through all the bad days and dark hours. Just folks
who got up each day and did the best they could with what they had and
where they were...
Fall 2008
The Six Percent Solution: More Science and Engineering Students NeededActually, six percent isn’t the solution, it’s the problem — fewer
than six percent of high school seniors in the United States plan to
pursue degrees and careers in science or engineering.
That’s the discouraging fact of American life discovered in a recent
study by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA).
September/October 2008
Interoperable World: the ICG Should Avoid a Cold War mentalityOnce again the world is becoming a cauldron of grievances involving its
most powerful nations, including the four primary members of the ICG
Providers Forum.
July/August 2008
Lost in the Noise: The Need for Longterm Infrastructure DevelopmentFrom time to time, the words in the column title have been a metaphor for the U.S. GPS program, and could end up as a permanent description of the state of our national public infrastructure - deferred maintenance.
May/June 2008
Limits of ImaginationThe use of GPS (or GNSS) is only limited by our imaginations. . . How many times have you heard that since someone–probably Charlie Trimble– first coined the phrase back at the dawn of space-based PNT civilization?
Spring 2008
Persuasive ArtsFormation of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Executive Committee (PNT ExCom) three years ago occurred under circumstances as awkward as its interminable name.
March/April 2008
The Easy PartAll four major GNSS programs seem to have reached the same passage —not
quite an impasse, but a definite narrowing of the political space.
January/February 2008
Seems Like Only YesterdayPerhaps we could turn an earlier generation’s aphorism on its head: don’t trust any GNSS under 30.
November/December 2007
GNSS Believer
Technology agnostic. Now there's an interesting term. . . it has
such a fine post-Enlightenment ring to it, connoting an analytical,
studied approach to things. But when it comes to space-based
positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), I'm not one.
I'm a GNSS believer. I'm for it. I'm a big fan.
Fall 2007
Time Against Time
We have an abiding trust, it seems, in the constancy of time. Amid this welter of transience, it's nice to think about those steady little increments of time, like the gentle susurrus of creation itself. . . Too bad it ain't so.
September/October 2007
GNSS: A System of Systems
The first time I heard the term “system of systems” applied to GNSS, I thought to myself, “Yeah, a catchy phrase, but that won’t really happen.”
After all, much of the last 15 years has been spent accentuating the differences, divisions, and mutually exclusive competition among the existing and proposed GNSS systems.
July/August 2007
About That CoverI opened the PDF with this month’s cover design from our art director, Tim Jordan, about five minutes after I picked up the morning newspaper. In the paper, a front-page article described our local school district’s plans for starting what would eventually become a 12-year immersion program in Mandarin (putonghua or guoyu).
To my way of thinking, the news about the school program was just one more confirmation of our decision not merely to highlight two articles on China’s Compass program on our cover, but to add it to the galaxy of GNSS systems on Inside GNSS’s masthead.
May/June 2007
Don't Look BackSo, anyway, about this likelihood of the European Union discarding the public-private partnership (PPP) concept for Galileo. People seem pretty nervous about it. Others are gleefully ready to say “I told you so.” Still others are looking for political cover.
But it’s really just business as usual. . .
Spring 2007
GNSS for the MassesFabrication technology delivers some amazing results — no question about it. But the distinctive value of GNSS is not to be discovered in the foundries of Taiwan or China. Rather, it arises from the imaginations and hard work of engineers and signal designers around the world.
March/April 2007
Public Private PerplexityFor 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.
January/February 2007
The China SyndromeThe 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.
November/December 2006
Land Before TimeThe 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.
October 2006
A System of Systems
Robustness, redundancy, availability, interoperability. Like FM radio, these are the qualities that make a GNSS system of systems such a desirable goal — for GNSS product manufacturers and location services providers, for end users, and for the nations building critical infrastructures and national security policies on space-based positioning, navigation, and time.
September 2006
The Future Is Now
If all goes well, Galileo will have a full constellation of satellites up in five or six years. But the GPS L1C signal that would use BOC or MBOC won’t even begin launching until 2013, and many years will have to before the old signals are replaced. Given those respective modernization timelines, the bilateral agreement left it up to Europe to decide — BOC or MBOC? — and the United States would follow.
July/August 2006
Why War, Precisely?
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?”
May/June 2006
GNSS Marketplace
In an industrious and cooperative surge of activity, we have seen three sets of draft specifications reach fruition in the last few weeks: publication of a joint recommendation for design of new civil signals on GPS and Galileo, the Galileo Interface Control Document, and the GPS L1C interface specification.
April 2006
Bring Out the Galileo ICD
Over the last couple of years, a series of papers coauthored by members of the European Commission (EC) Galileo Signal Task Force have laid out elements of the frequency plan and signal structure: RF bands, lengths and types of codes, data rates, and so forth. What had remained missing were the Galileo codes and the navigation message structure.
March 2006
Hardware Versus Software
But GNSS is not just physical science, but political science, too. The sound bite as much as the kilobyte. Economics as well as ergonomics. The nanometric microcosm, but also the macrocosm of nations and cultures. How else do we explain the multibillion-dollar infrastructures, programs, posturing, and policy directives?
January/February 2006
Turning Point
Slowly, steadily, but with an ever-growing momentum, GNSS-driven applications of accurate time and location are entering the popular imagination. Today, hundreds of millions of people are walking around with GPS receivers in their pockets — whether they know it or not. And literally billions are benefiting from the myriad uses to which the technology is being put.
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