GNSS News
Spring 2008
Persuasive Arts
Formation 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.
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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, Compass, 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 Columns
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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