Out in Front: Give the Makers What They Want
October 1, 2009 By: Alan Cameron GPS WorldWho has the best and most current information about what GNSS users in the field need or want? Who keeps close tabs on developing cutting-edge applications of GNSS technology? Who stays well informed on modernization plans (at least, those that are publicly released) for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Compass?
GNSS manufacturers, that’s who.
What tops these manufacturers’ wish lists for GNSS development? If they could take over direction of the four satellite programs, what would they do? Choices include but are certainly not limited to new signals, rapid (or at least on-time) delivery of operational capability of new signals, publication of signal ICDs, more satellites, different satellite geometries, aspects of interoperability between two or more systems, various forms of GNSS back-up by different technologies, augmentation systems whether satellite-based or ground-based . . . anything!
The editorial intent of our October webinar (see adjacent Upcoming Webinar box) is not only to provide a forum for manufacturers vis-à-vis satellite system operators, but to provide insight to all listeners as to where the market(s), applications, users, and research and development are moving, or looking into. And anything else that might develop from the speakers’ thoughts and online discussion. Plus your questions, taken at the conclusion of their 45-minute jam session.
By the time you read this, I will have finished my short presentation to the plenary session of the 49th Civil GPS Service Interface Committee meeting in Savannah. There, I talked about user concerns: valid, of course, highly so.
But I believe manufacturer concerns — absorbing as they do many or most user concerns, and projecting them forward into various scenarios, both economic and systematic, folding in a healthy measure of technical knowledge as to what may or may not be possible (in many cases, what they have already demonstrated to their own satisfaction but not yet told the world) — represent a higher order.
The CGSIC exists in part, of course, to serve as a forum for industry, among other users, to express its views to system operators. Yet in my (admittedly limited) experience of CGSIC, what I have heard is mostly system operators talking. And generally saying things that most people in the room already knew. Hmmm.
To their credit, CGSIC organizers have striven recently to increase outside voices — participation from the floor, so to speak -- in the meeting’s presentations and panel discussions: thus my own good fortune to address the body. But there remains a distance to travel to reach a true feedback loop. Keep on pushing.
Of course, the prime user driving system development (and this holds not merely for GPS, but for other GNSS as well) is the military. Thus, their needs get first weighing.
Recall, however, that just like that other military invention, the Internet, industry ideas, research, and development have exploded GNSS growth, concepts, and benefits far beyond what they might be today had only military considerations been taken into account.
For more of this good medicine, let’s all listen in. Closely.
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