There’s a whole lot of change coming for North America and European users, too, and much of that is being envisioned, enthusiastically promulgated, and occasionally even demonstrated at this global village of 60,000 modcom movers and shakers that congregate here every year.  Just a few examples:

• granting access to one’s location data for only a set period, from 15 minutes to 4 hours, via Glympse.
• location-based display advertising, not just coupons, but glossy little ads on your screen, called up by proximity to the advertiser, via Sofialys.
• centimeter-accurate indoor navigation, to the product on the shelf and not to its competitor product next to it on the same shelf, via Wi-Fi and near-field communication (NFC), Broadcom again but others including LocAid are talking about it too.
• An alarm clock function on your phone that will wake you (or let you sleep) at exactly the right time for that morning, based on real-time traffic and weather conditions on your commute route, from Airbiquity.

All this with either a few deft touches of the smartphone screen, or automatically enabled.

And this is just the location aspect of smartphones, which represents maybe 5 percent of what’s being talked about here.  Tons of other apps for health and entertainment and more.

Tomorrow: location as a blue-chip commodity.

Question One. The greatest challenge to realizing new technical capabilities is:

A.   staying ahead of the competition.  4.3% voted for this one.
B.   funding.  34%
C.   meeting expectations of the consumer (user).  34%
D.   establishing standards.  8.5%
E.   overcoming opposition (policy, privacy, regulations, etc..).   19.1%

Few surprises here. The biggest problems are always getting hands on the money to make a product, and then getting someone to buy the product.  The latter, of course, by making the product enough of a value proposition for the discerning prospect to buy.

Question Two. The predominate source of technical vision/innovation is:
A.     Governments.   1.7%
B.     Industry on its own.   53.3%
C.     Industry responding to government requirements.   28.3%
D.     Academia.   16.7%

Most of you out there believe you know what you are doing and are best left to yourselves to do it. Good on ya.

By the way, all the questions here were devised by Doug Taggart, president of Overlook Systems Technologies, Inc., and moderator of the plenary session at the Institute of Navigation’s (ION’s) International Technical Meeting. The ION ITM plenary took place three hours before our webinar, and audience members voted on these same questions. We then adjourned to a hotel room at the conference site and essentially re-presented a portion of the webinar content, interspersed with the polling questions.

The full 60-minute webinar, with presentations by Jules McNeff, VP Strategy and Programs, Overlook Systems Technologies, Inc., and Chuck Schue, president and CEO of UrsaNav, is available for download and replay at www.gpsworld.com/webinar (scroll down).

Question Three. Successful innovation is most dependent on:
A.     technology revolution.   11.5%
B.     technology evolution.   39.3%
C.     market demand.   34.4%
D.      project management.   6.6%
E.      funding.   8.2%

The free-market Keynesians out there are exceeded (in numbers) only by the techno visionaries, who believe that technology itself is a live organism, evolving and developing under its own impetus (perhaps aided or driven in part by market demand). Unless I’m putting words into someone’s mouth.

Question Four. Should innovative military capabilities be made available for civil/commercial exploitation?
A.      Yes, always.  The commercial spin-off value is far greater.  31.3%
B.      Sometimes.  When military capability is not compromised.   68.7%
C.      No.  Military capabilities are for military use only.  Every advantage must be protected.   0%

“Sometimes” is always a safe answer. But a coalition of free-marketers and techno visionaries made a surprisingly strong showing, garnering nearly one-third of the votes on an unequivocal up-down issue. This pushback should not be ignored by those in power.

Question Five. GPS will continue to be the world’s space-based PNT “Gold Standard”:
A.    for the next 20 years.   50%
B.    until Europe’s Galileo system is declared operational.   20.8%
C.    until China’s Compass system is declared operational.   14.6%
D.    until Glonass incorporates L1C.   8.3%
E.    it is not the Gold Standard today.   6.2%

At first glance, one might find few worries here for those who design new products with GPS uppermost or even solely in mind. On the other hand, if you combine the four non-GPS gold standard answers, you get a separate but equal body politic.

Mind you, the other 50% are not saying that any other system will surpass GPS and become a new gold standard. The question does not ask that. But it does leave the door open for anyone to conclude that there may not be a gold standard at all at some point in the future — that all or at least a plurality of systems will be equally capable, or that an interoperable, interchangeable GNSS will surpass any single system component.

Question Six. From a user perspective, what is the most concerning aspect of having access to PNT information derived from GNSS?
A.    It is susceptible to interference.   58%
B.    Without augmentation, it does not meet my needs.   26%
C.    It is overshadowing the need for complementary systems that do not have similar shortcomings.   8%
D.    No concerns.   8%

Interference is on nearly everyone’s mind. In fact, those who voted the B or C ticket can also be inferred to be driven by interference concerns, they are just taking their concern a step further by envisioning a solution. Chuck Shue’s webinar presentation (see above link) on e-Loran should be of interest to everyone here except the bottom 8.

Question Seven. Regarding GNSS systems, which is more important to design and field first?
A.      The Space segment (satellites).   21.4%
B.      The Ground Control Segment.   23.2%
C.      The User Equipment.   1.8%
D.      All are equally important, and should be fielded simultaneously.   53.6%

I feel this result is of little use to anyone except the U.S. Air Force, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos, and the China National Space Administration. And I’m pretty sure they all knew it already.

Question Eight. How does a country gain and maintain GNSS superiority?
A.      Create technological advantage (better mouse trap).   25%
B.      Create political/policy advantage (better playing field).   11.5%
C.      Create fiscal advantage (better funding).   36.5%
D.      Create public/private partnerships (better risk mitigation).   26.9%

A majority, but not a thumping one, opts for money.  Another safe vote in almost any circumstance.

David Last, another panel speaker at the morning’s plenary, made a cogent comment when this question was presented. He could understand, he said, how a country might want to gain and maintain military superiority. That’s a question of survival. But GNSS superiority? In this age of interoperability, surely that’s beside the point.

Well, we’ve tossed our chaff into the wind to see which way it blows. Now we must all put our heads down and our shoulders to the wheel, pushing on to Election ’12, coming up  November 4.

But there’s an earlier Election ’12 that takes place September 20: the return showdown between the Satellite Party and the Signal Party. The Reds and the Blues. They last contested, you may or may not remember, in the previous election year, 2008; Put to a Vote, GPS World’s Leadership Dinner — held during ION-GNSS 2008 in Savannah, Georgia — convoked a lively debate: Would the community gain more from new signals, or from more satellites? A made-up scenario that elicited important insights.

The Satellite Party has been in power since its ’08 victory. Are you better off now than you were four years ago? We will return to the hustings in Nashville during ION-GNSS, as again GPS World hosts GNSS Election ’12.

Given the current tenor of debates around the country and around the world, I have a feeling we’ll be hearing from the Occupy GPS movement as well as the two frontrunners.

“Despite a vast potential for industry growth and new jobs in Europe,” she continues, “European government bodies are not taking up the challenge. The budget dedicated to GNSS application research in European Commission FP7 was dramatically cut in 2007, and no specific budget line for GNSS application R&D is foreseen for the period post-2013. In times of much-needed jobs, decision-makers seem to plan to leave out the GNSS application R&D. This short-term strategy, depriving European citizens of the opportunity to take full advantage of a booming market, is going to cost European GNSS downstream industry and Europe dear.”

See the full Galileo Services press release.

Hear melodic accompaniment and see very flashy footwork for the following doggerel.

And now, with apologies to Mack Gordon, Harry Warren, and Glenn Miller,

Pardon me, boy
Is that the Galileo choo choo?
Track twenty-nine
Boy, you can give me a shine.
Can you afford
To miss that Galileo choo choo
And miss the ride
That R & D would provide?

There’s gonna be
A certain party at the station
But if EU won’t show support
Our downstream market will fall short
We’re all gonna cry
Without a Framework Programme loan
So Galileo choo choo
Won’t you choo-choo me home?
Galileo choo choo
Won’t you choo-choo me home?

Senator Joe McCarthy is not a good look for them.

A young attorney of my acquaintance, who also happens to be a contributing editor to this magazine, wrote me in this regard:

“Lawyers have an old saying — when you don’t have the law on your side, pound on the facts; when you don’t have the facts on your side,  pound on the law; and when you don’t have either, pound on the table.”

It appears that LightSquared has run out of technical solutions that it has variably proposed, without coming up with any to solve interference with the full range of GPS uses and users, and is now reduced to complaints about process. Engineering was never its strong suit, and there are many cautionary lessons to be learned from its near-run at GPS demolition. Financiers and lawyers can bring a whole heap of spectrum danger with just a little knowledge.

In coverage of this issue over the past year, I have tried to keep the magazine and its various newsletters away from the posturing and saber-rattling on both sides, the stock-market speculations and the wireless industry tea-leaves reading, and stick instead to the facts: test results, official statements by government agencies, and so on. You gentle readers have plenty of other outlets for hyperbole and flights of imagination that you can go to for that sort of thing, and it’s never in short supply. I hope we have served you well.

The Elephant Charge (“Dust, Sweat, and Gears”), an annual off-road motorsport charity event, brings together competitors, their families, and supporters for a wilderness weekend of GPS-driven fun and frenzy in the Zambian bush. I’m for fun, but I always wince when I see folks tearing up habitat in the name of saving it.

Elephant Charge 2010 seeks to raise funds and awareness for local conservation in Zambia, specifically for two hides, or wildlife observation posts, in Lusaka National Park along with funding for the South Luangwa, Lower Zambezi and Kafue National Parks private-sector conservation efforts. Organizers hope to attract more than 300 campers over the weekend of October 23–25 and as many day observers and participants, en route to a fundraising goal of $35,000.

Focus of the weekend is an event for car and motorbike teams that requires stamina, sweat, driving, and navigation skills through the Zambian bush. Maps showing the location and GPS coordinates of nine checkpoints are issued to teams on the evening before the race. To win, a team must complete the nine-checkpoint course in the shortest distance among competitors. Each team finds it own route between the checkpoints, in any order, through valleys, over ridges, and up (or down) escarpments. The goal of short distance explicitly encourages teams to go off-road in their vehicles. Bush roads are cut to each checkpoint and marked on the issued maps, however they never give the shortest distance.

The blog piece you are reading is armchair bushwhacking at best, and it’s hard for me to preach at a distance to Zambians on how to use, exploit, preserve, or tear up their own turf. Of course it’s heartening to see GPS enlisted in conservation and education efforts. I just wish they weren’t harming habitat — by cutting bush roads and further encouraging racers to rip off through the vegetation — in order to help preserve it.

Visit www.elephantcharge.org for more information.

Alternatively, for a terrific vicarious experience of the Africa savannahs and bush without leaving home, read either Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, set in Rhodesia, Zambia, and Malawi, or Sand Rivers by Peter Mathiessen, set in Tanzania. “The crack of the dry grass, the intense heat, the startling beauty of the birds, the fleeting glimpse of wary wildlife . . .”

In January, 12 brave individuals joined me in San Diego to see if this thing would work at all.  It did!  The exercise revealed many adjustments needed to the game, but overall, a successful role-playing, negotiation game grounded in the workings of GNSS.

The rules are briefly recounted in an earlier blog, and to large extent, they will remain unchanged for the full-on game, to be played by 12 teams of 9 people each in Portland. It’s mostly the metrics that need some tinkering, a few of the quantities that govern exchange, and renewal of each team’s resources at the end of each quarter.

Here are each team’s goals over three quarters of play, and the points that they actually racked up. User communities could purchase receivers for as many signals as were “on the air,” from any national satellite system.  Interoperability rules!

GPS System Operator     Goals: 40 satellites, 3 global signals     Achieved: 45 satellites, 3 global (civil) signals
U.S. GPS/GNSS Industry     Goals:$750 million     Achieved:$1.55 billion
U.S. User Community     Goals 100 million 3-frequency receivers, 100 million 4-frequency receivers      Achieved: 50 million 3-frequency receivers, 100 million 4-frequency receivers

Galileo System Operator     Goals:30 satellites, 2 global signals     Achieved:35 satellites, 2 global civil signals
European GNSS Industry    Goals: $750 million     Achieved: $1.25 billion
European User Community    Goals:100 million 3-frequency receivers, 100 million 4-frequency receivers     Achieved:100 million 3-frequency receivers, 200 million 4-frequency receivers

GLONASS System Operator     Goals:35 satellites, 2 global signals      Achieved: 25 satellites, 1 global sigal
Russian GLONASS/GNSS Industry      Goals: $500 million     Achieved: $1.325 billion
Russian User Community     Goals: 50 million 3-frequency receivers, 50 million 4-frequency receivers    Achieved: 300 million 3-frequency receivers

Compass System Operator      Goals: 30 satellites, 2 global signals     Achieved: 45 satellites, 3 global civil signals
Chinese GNSS Industry     Goals: $1 billion      Achieved: $1.3 billion
Chinese User Community     Goals: 50 million 4-frequency receivers, 200 million 3-frequency receivers      Achieved: 150 million 3-frequency receivers

As you can see, those performing strongest relative to their goals, or outperforming their goals (in other words, the gamemaster’s expectations) were all industries, across nations (making out like bandits), and the Compass system operator.

Auguries for the future?

Those performing less well, relative to goals, were the Russian system operator, and the Chinese user community.

Again, auguries anyone?

Those playing the respective parts above were: Frank van Diggelen, John Betz, Chris Hegarty, Dorotoa Grejner-Brzezinska with Kathleen Bosely, Sam Pullen, Ron Hatch, Matt Harris, Sasha Mitelman, Maarten Ujit de Haag, Tim Murphy, Thomas Pany, and Jade Morton.

Here is some of the feedback gathered at the scene:

have smaller-denomination bills in the mix;
at the same time, multiply all cost amounts by factor 5 to make them more realistic;
have a banker available on the side during play;
all deals/transactions must complete in the quarter when negotiated; no carryover;
increase the number of receivers;
create moment(s) of randomness with a wheel of fortune or change cards;
use a laptop to quickly compute each quarter’s new payouts for each team;
satellites that reach end-of-life should do so during a quarter, rather than once it ends.

All will be fine-tuned and trotted out again in Portland. Thanks to all players for participating.

Sleep was what I wanted, you know what I got.  Wide awake, staying up late, wishing I was not.

Two quotes — with Some Accompanying Thoughts

“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”
—Albert Einstein
Too often these days we seem driven to produce, forgetting the purpose and value of research and development.  R&D allows us to assess alternatives, identify and mitigate risks, and develop practicable plans to achieve results.  It promotes an iterative process that moves us steadily towards our goals.  It understands both of the 80/20 rules: First, that achieving 80% of the solution usually takes only  20% of allocated resources, and second, that for  any normal program, things will go wrong 20% of the time, so plan accordingly.

The fact is that we simply do not do enough real research and development.  We have forgotten that the development of products or systems or solutions does not proceed on a single path point-to-point.  It is a continuum that has many ideas going in, a reasonable number that survive intermediate vetting processes, and a manageable field of candidate solutions coming out, from which to pick “the best” alternative.

We are not comfortable planning for sufficient small failures to ensure that we will not end up with one big one.  We limit the potential value of our successes by not supporting  wild and crazy ideas — even though such ideas may hold the key to real and sustained improvements.  We are too risk adverse.  We are too “results – NOW!” oriented.  We are afraid of failures – even small ones.  We are scared to dream.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”
—John F. Kennedy

Sadly, we have lost what made us great in the past: our willingness to take risks, fight for ideals, vigorously debate technical and operational alternatives, and move forward as one — either towards a celebration of a successful conclusion or, if nothing else, a celebration of a significant learning experience from which we can dust ourselves off and do better next time.   We have abandoned our can-do attitude for lists of excuses of why we cannot.  We over-think and over analyze and over-control everything — at every level.  Most seriously of all, we have given up seeing ourselves as one team with one goal.  Everyone’s looking out for themselves — with more time spent looking back in fear than forging new pathways forward.

The question is not “Where have all the leaders gone?” but rather “As leaders, what can each of us do to re-build and re-energize our risk taking leadership structure, our can-do team culture, our engineering inquisitiveness, our research and development mentality?

As with all things, the solution starts with the true recognition of the problem.

Therapy, anyone?

Sleep was what I wanted, you know what I got.  Wide awake, staying up late, wishing I was not.

__________
Before telling you what I came here to say today, I should really attempt to answer the question posed by our moderator:Is the world ready for new GNSS applications and services?

If by that we mean system modernization and newly envisioned applications, the  cutting edge, I say: No. What the world has a crying need for are older GNSS applications and services, ones that we in this room may take for granted, perhaps even view as somewhat passé.  But the vast majority of the world knows nothing of them, and has yet to experience their benefits.

Giving a journalist’s perspective could be difficult because journalists aren’t supposed to have perspective. Our task is to report the news, just the facts.

In satellite navigation, governed by physics and radio frequency, one might expect facts to prevail.

Not always.

Of course in the technical articles at the core of the magazine, facts rule.

But in the news that I write, The System, in effect GNSS Quo Vadis — in the news, facts may be in short supply.

This news is filled with projections, timelines, trends, expectations, a triumph or two, some disappointments, budgets, negotiations, market readiness. Facts come in a distant second.

Because I cover new developments in constellations on orbit, in ground control and monitoring, in plans and policies and rivalries. All these are created by people.

By you, in fact. You and your colleagues.  The global navigation community — living and working within the global community.

These maps, courtesy of Todd Walter and his colleagues at Stanford, show aircraft landing capability and its development over time. You saw them twice yesterday, maybe three times, if you read the magazine in your bag.

But I use them here to illustrate availability and benefits of high-precision PNT of all kinds.

Global positioning is available globally, everywhere. Pull out a receiver in the middle of the Sahara, you’ll get a position. What good does that do you, you and your nomad band, if you live in the Sahara?  Not much good, if you don’t have a map, or a frame of reference of some kind.

If you are a small industry, a local government, a market economy, any manifestation of a society, you need a reference network to get an advantage from your position, no matter how precise.

And in this white expanse, by and large, no such networks exist. The people living in these white areas are beyond the pale, outside the realm of the marvelous benefits of global positioning.

Patricia Doherty writes in this magazine, “The leading problems that continue to cripple much of Africa include hunger, extreme poverty, erosion of natural resources, and natural disasters. GNSS can help address these problems.  GNSS applications can increase food security, manage natural resources, provide efficient emergency location services, improve surveying and mapping, and provide greater precision and safety in land, water, and air navigation.”

This holds true not just for Africa, but across the Southern Hemisphere and swathes of the northern: often known as the Second and Third Worlds – coincidentally, all the white space on this map.

Why should we, the GNSS community living happily in our First World, the color on the map, care about this? I put it to you that it is in our own best self-interest to do so.

We’re very busy using GNSS to solve our problems of dense air traffic, and road congestion, hazardous material transport, extracting more from agriculture, finding our way in urban canyons, finding our friends, finding coffee, rescuing people.

Yes, we have problems.  They may be a higher quality of problem than the rest of the world experiences.

The rest of the world has poverty, hunger, disease, disaster.  When I hear “Bridging the Gap,” the title of our session – this is the gap that jumps immediately to mind.

From these problems global conflict arises: terrorism and persistent war in troubling regions.  Violent ideologies are born and nurtured in impoverished circumstances. Our prosperous societies will not know lasting peace until all the world shares some kind of equity in terms of quality of life. There will always be differences. But as long as abject poverty and hunger and unaided disaster exist, as long as a wide, deep gap persists, there will never be peace, lasting peace, or tranquility.

GNSS can help solve these problems.  But it’s moving awfully slow. These charts don’t have dates, but they imply that by 2018 or 2025 or perhaps later, an aircraft can land with precision in central Africa. The charts don’t offer anything for the people living there at that time.

How can we ensure that the spread of this marvelous capability applies not only to pilots and passengers, but to all people?

One way, one suggestion, is to inform our governments and legislators, to insist that every foreign aid program, every school-building project, every hospital or roadbuilding project, shipment of foodstuffs and medical aid, must be accompanied by the hardware for a reference frame, for a regional or portable RTK network, and by the training to install it and maintain it.

We know that GNSS leverages other technologies. It is a multiplier.

These regions lack infrastructure. GNSS can provide the infra inside that infrastructure.  A road network, regional development plan, transportation plan to foster local markets and economic development, exploration and extraction of natural resources — these things go better with GNSS.

For more background on what I’ve discussed, see www.gpsworld.com/Africa, www.gpsworld.com/afref, and www.gpsworld.com/chile.

Put the power of GNSS where it can do the most good – for everyone.  Let’s remember — and honor — Ivan Getting, the visionary who launched the very first GNSS. His vision: “lighthouses in the sky, for the benefit of all mankind.”

I’m a journalist. That’s my perspective.
Thank you.

Sleep was what I wanted, you know what I got.  Wide awake, staying up late, wishing I was not.