Innovation: A look back at 35 Years of ‘Innovation’

Innovation Insights with Richard Langley

Click to read the full Innovation Insights column, “Innovation Insights: It starts with the physics”

This is my 300th and last “Innovation” column in GPS World. I have mixed feelings about stopping the column. I’ve really enjoyed doing it for the past 35 years, but editorial deadlines can be difficult to meet sometimes, especially when I’ve got other things to get done or if they come in the middle of a vacation.

To rephrase the old adage, editorial deadlines wait for no one. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to initially produce six and then 10 columns each year, along with all my other duties as a university professor. Mind you, as I’ll soon discuss, most of the articles in the columns were authored by others. My job mostly was to edit the articles to help the authors tell their stories in a particular GPS World style and sometimes to improve their submitted figures. Additionally, in 2006, I started to write a sidebar called “Insights” to provide some basic background material about each column’s topic. A few years ago, I became editor-in-chief of the Institute of Navigation’s journal NAVIGATION, which takes up a bit of my time, along with lecturing and managing a research team. So, at 75, I thought it might be a good time to lessen the load a little bit.

In this last column, I’m going to tell the story of how “Innovation” came to be and review some of the column’s developments over the years.

How it all began

In the fall of 1989, GPS World’s founding editor, Glen Gibbons, approached Dave Wells, Ph.D., a fellow faculty member in the then Department of Surveying Engineering at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) – about assisting with a “technology/product development column” in the magazine he was about to start. Glen wanted it to provide “an analysis and commentary on the research, development, product issues and needs of the GPS community.” And, since GPS World readers would have marked differences in their knowledge and expertise in the GPS area, “the column should deal with issues that have broad application and interest and are presented in terms that are accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible,” Glen said in a letter to Dave.

Glen had heard about Dave’s (and UNB’s) early involvement with GPS. When I came to UNB in 1981, UNB was already carrying out some of the first theoretical studies on how GPS could be used by surveyors and geodesists for precise positioning. Shortly afterwards, UNB participated in some of the first surveys using the Macrometer V-1000 and Texas Instruments TI 4100 receivers and developed software to process the resulting data. In 1983, Dr. Gerhard Beutler from the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern came to UNB on a sabbatical and began developing his own GPS data processing software that would eventually become the Bernese GNSS Software or just “Bernese” to those in the know. Somehow, in between our GPS algorithm and software development, teaching, mentoring graduate students and other duties, we managed to self-publish the first textbook on GPS, Guide to GPS Positioning. With a publication date of December 31, 1986, it went on to sell more than 12,000 copies in the English version alone. It was also translated into Chinese, Spanish and Vietnamese. So, perhaps it is not surprising that Glen came to knock on UNB’s door when he was starting up his magazine.

Getting back to Glen’s letter, he went on to say, “It would be possible to handle the preparation or presentation of the column in one of several ways: We could identify a single person who would have primary responsibility for writing all the columns and whose byline would appear on them; we could have a person act as the coordinating editor responsible for obtaining suitable contributions from various authors; or we could establish a collective or institutional editorship with column responsibilities shared among a pool of contributors.”

The letter arrived in early November 1989, and Dave, I and Alfred Kleusberg, Ph.D., who was a research fellow in the department (and subsequently a professor), began to discuss whether we wanted to take on the responsibility for the column and, if so, how we would manage it. I shortly departed to the University of Bern, where I would spend the better part of two months during my first sabbatical. Communication had to take place using e-mail, although phone, telefax and telex were also possible. Universities had e-mail before most other organizations thanks to BITNET (known initially in Europe as the European Academic and Research Network or EARN), a computer network that predated the Internet. My BITNET e-mail address was lang@unb or lang@unb.bitnet. As I recall, the personal part of the address was limited to at most four characters. So, when UNB joined the Internet, I basically kept the same e-mail address: lang@unb.ca. I talked about GPS and the Internet in the November 1995 edition of the column. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

FIGURE 1: First page of Dave Wells’ notes from December 31, 1989 on how UNB would manage the “Innovation” column. (Photo: GPS World archives)

That December, the three of us more or less agreed that we would handle the column in some form. From Switzerland, I sent Dave a list of 12 possible topics for the column, but I added the rider: “Note that I am not necessarily volunteering to write any of the articles.” As we know, things turned out a little differently. During the university’s Christmas break, after I returned to Fredericton, we met at Dave’s house to discuss how we would manage the column in more detail. We met on New Year’s Eve — a Sunday afternoon — and decided that Alfred Kleusberg and I would manage the column as co-editors, with Dave serving as one of the inaugural members of the magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. The column editorship was to be a blend of the second and third of Glen’s suggestions. The task wasn’t supposed to be too onerous. After all, the magazine was to be published bimonthly. Lots of time to get someone to write an article and for Alfred and I to edit it. Or so we thought. And the column was to be called, simply, “Innovation.” I don’t recall who came up with the name — whether it was one of the three of us or Glen, but the notes from that Sunday afternoon meeting have “Innovation” written at the top of the first page (see FIGURE 1). Ideally, as per Glen’s suggested guidelines, column articles were to be tutorial in style or written in a way that they could be understood, for the most part, by non-experts in the field.

At that Sunday afternoon meeting, we decided that Dave and Alfred would write the article for the first column. It was an introduction to GPS and some possible applications titled “GPS: A Multipurpose System.” With a couple of iterations of the article back and forth with Glen via fax (GPS World didn’t have e-mail until a few years later) and a figure delivery by FedEx, the column debuted in GPS World, Volume 1, Issue 1, January/February 1990.

It used three different positioning scenarios to explain how GPS could provide positioning accuracies from a Selective Availability-constrained 100 meters down to the sub-centimeter level. It also outlined GPS’s ability to determine platform attitude with multiple antennas and its use for accurate time transfer.
There was a brief introductory couple of paragraphs, which would be a column standard (later extended to a sidebar). That first introduction went as follows:

“‘Innovation’ will be a regular column in GPS World and will comment on GPS technology, product development, and other issues and needs of the GPS community. Coordinating editors are Alfred Kleusberg, Ph.D. and Richard Langley, Ph.D. both of the Department of Surveying Engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, as is David Wells, Ph.D., co-author of this initial column.

“The first few columns will introduce GPS World readers to GPS technology. This first column focuses on the many capabilities of GPS. The next column will look at the flip side — what are the limitations of GPS? ‘Innovation’ will discuss some intriguing questions in future columns: Why is the GPS signal so complicated? How have surveyors been able to use it to get such accurate results? How serious is selective availability? We will also devote columns to exploring in depth some of the issues raised in this column: GPS and electronic charts, GPS and geographical information systems and prospects for using GPS and GLONASS together. We welcome readers’ comments and topic suggestions for future columns.”

That introduction listed the topics for the first year of “Innovation.” They were written by Alfred, me, both of us, or other researchers at UNB and, in one case, by colleagues at the Canadian Hydrographic Service. We had a very positive response to our first few column articles, so Glen kept us on, but at some point in 1990, he told us the magazine was going to 10 issues a year. There were just too many GPS-related developments to be covered in just six issues. So now there would be a monthly column except for the July/August and November/December issues.

In the second year, Alfred and I continued to write some tutorial articles for the column, but we started to invite others to submit articles, which we would then edit for style and space, and that became the tradition. Over the years, we have had hundreds of leaders in GNSS technology development and applications pen articles. In the second and third years of the column, for example, we featured articles by Stephen DeLoach on precise real-time dredge positioning, Jack Klobuchar on ionospheric effects on GPS, Edward Krakiwsky on GPS vehicle location and navigation, Yehuda Bock on continuous monitoring of crustal deformation, Keith D. McDonald on GPS in civil aviation, David Coco on GPS as satellites of opportunity for ionospheric monitoring, Derrick Peyton on using GPS and remotely-operated vehicles to map the ocean, Oscar Colombo and Mary Peters on precision long-range DGPS for airborne surveys, Adam Freedman on measuring the Earth’s rotation and orientation with GPS, Christian Rocken and Thomas Kelecy on high-accuracy GPS marine positioning for scientific applications, Marvin May on measuring velocity using GPS, Thomas Yunck describing a new chapter in precise orbit determination, and Gregory Leger on using GPS-equipped drift buoys for search and rescue operations. And the list goes on and on.

As I mentioned, in the second year of GPS World, there were 10 issues. That changed in 1993, when the magazine went to 12 issues a year, but the September and December issues were “Showcase” issues featuring more industrial news and announcements of new products. It was also to include “The Almanac” — an update on the GNSS constellations, which I also looked after. Eventually, the “Showcase” issues became regular issues but with “Innovation” replaced by “The Almanac” at the “back of the book.”

Figure 2A Different eras of “Innovation” throughout the years; the January 1993 edition (left) and the January 2000 edition (right). (Photo: GPS World archives)

The column look changed a few times over the years, typically coinciding with magazine makeovers, with the logo changing from the original 3D terrain graphic to a logo of people with stuff in their hands starting in January 1999, to a “bits” logo from January 2001, to a somewhat plain format from September 2003, with the “Insights” sidebar and my photo from April 2006, to a circle photo from November 2015, and with a new photo from January 2016. FIGURES 2A, 2B and 2C show representative column snapshots for each era.

Figure 2B Different eras of “Innovation” throughout the years; the January 2003 edition (left) and the September 2003 edition (right). (Photo: GPS World archives)

FIGURE 2c Different eras of “Innovation” throughout the years; the April 2006 edition (left) and the February 2016 edition (right). (Photo: GPS World archives)

The tutorials

As I mentioned earlier, right from the beginning of “Innovation,” we decided to have essentially two types of articles in the column: discussions of recent advances in GPS (and later GNSS) applications and related technology written by guest authors and tutorials explaining the fundamentals of GNSS including how the three main components of GNSS work: the satellites, the control segment and the user equipment. Here is a list of some of the tutorials written by the UNB team (mostly me) that were featured in “Innovation”:

• GPS: A Multipurpose System (January/February 1990)
• The Limitations of GPS (March/April 1990)
• Why is the GPS Signal So Complex? (May/June 1990)
• The Issue of Selective Availability (Sept./Oct. 1990)
• Comparing GPS and GLONASS (Nov./Dec. 1990)
• The GPS Receiver: An Introduction (Jan. 1991)
• The Orbits of GPS Satellites (March 1991)
• The Mathematics of GPS (July/August 1991)
• Time, Clocks, and GPS (Nov./Dec. 1991)
• Basic Geodesy for GPS (February 1992)
• The Federal Radionavigation Plan (March 1992)
• Precise Differential Positioning and Surveying (July 1992)
• The GPS Observables (April 1993)
• Communication Links for GPS (May 1993)
• GPS and the Measurement of gravity (Oct. 1993)
• RTCM SC-104 DGPS Standards (May 1994)
• NMEA 0183: A GPS Receiver Interface Standard (July 1995)
• Mathematics of Attitude Determination with GPS (Sept. 1995)
• A GPS Glossary (Oct. 1995)
• GPS and the Internet (Nov. 1995)
• The GPS User’s Bookshelf (Jan. 1996)
• Coordinates and Datums and Maps! Oh My! (with Will Featherstone; Jan. 1997)
• The GPS Error Budget (March 1997)
• GPS Receiver System Noise (June 1997)
• GLONASS: Review and Update (July 1997)
• The UTM Grid System (Feb. 1998)
• A Primer on GPS Antennas (July 1998)
• RTK GPS (September 1998)
• The GPS End-of-Week Rollover (Nov. 1998)
• The Integrity of GPS (March 1999)
• Dilution of Precision (May 1999)
• GPS, the Ionosphere, and the Solar Maximum (July 2000)
• Navigation 101: Basic Navigation with a GPS Receiver (October 2000)
• Getting Your Bearings: The Magnetic Compass and GPS (Sept. 2003)
• GPS by the Numbers: A Sideways Look at How the Global Positioning System Works (April 2010); this was the 200th “Innovation” column.

As you can see, the tutorials became fewer as the years went by. As my research career expanded, I just didn’t have the additional time to write more tutorials. I had taken over sole responsibility for the column in 1997, shortly after Alfred Kleusberg left UNB to pursue a career opportunity in Germany.

However, the tutorial columns were (and still are) popular judging by the comments sent to GPS World and the number of citations for some reported by Google Scholar. For example, the one on dilution of precision has been cited in papers, theses, and reports 837 times to date. While not as many as a paper on an important medical breakthrough, it’s not a bad record for an article on a navigation topic.

Changes at the top

The column has seen four changes of editorial leadership at GPS World. Glen Gibbons, the founding editor, stepped down as editor-in-chief in July 2005 and shortly afterward started up his own publishing company to produce the magazine Inside GNSS. Alan Cameron took over the job in 2006, and subsequently became the magazine’s publisher and editor-at-large. Tracy Cozzens became the senior editor in 2019 with responsibility for “Innovation,” and then Matteo Luccio became editor-in-chief of the magazine in May 2021. I’m happy to say I got along well with all of these “bosses,” and they continued to put up with me even when I got the column in at the last moment. Additionally, the magazine’s various art directors over the years have always made the column look good.

However, after I took over sole responsibility for the column, there were no changes at the bottom. So, I’ve ended up being the longest serving GNSS rapporteur or editor, with Glen and Alan and Tracy having retired at different epochs during the past decade. In addition to the column, I have contributed a number of shorter articles to the magazine and the GPS World website over the years, sometimes joined by colleagues from different organizations, in particular the German Aerospace Center.

A bit of my own history

I wasn’t going to bother with an “Insights” sidebar for this last column. The column isn’t about a single topic that needs any background information. But you might be wondering how I got this gig as the “Innovation” editor (apart from what I’ve already told you) or got my job at UNB for that matter. So, I’m repurposing the “Insights” sidebar from the February 2016 issue of GPS World, in which I talk a bit about antenna arrays and my own radio tinkering. It doesn’t mention that after getting my Ph.D., I spent two years at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow working under the famous physicist Irwin Shapiro on analyzing lunar laser ranging data to uncover subtle changes in Earth’s rotation due to the fluctuating winds of its atmosphere. Even as a graduate student, I was involved with satellite navigation and helped to uncover a bias in the coordinate system used by the U.S. Navy Navigation Satellite System, commonly known as Transit, by comparing station coordinates with those I obtained in my very long baseline interferometry research. I’ve always been a radio nerd both in my day job and as an avid shortwave radio hobbyist. So, it is not too surprising that I got involved with GPS and then GNSS (including ionospheric studies) and established a GNSS research group at UNB with some stellar graduates over the years.

The archives

I would like to report that all 300 “Innovation” columns are available for download on the Internet. Unfortunately, that is not the case — yet. Perhaps that’s something that could be done when I actually do retire. However, the first two years of the column are available here: gauss.gge.unb.ca/gpsworld/innovation.html. Hopefully, we can continue to keep that URL alive for a few years. If it should disappear, just Google it or consult the “Wayback Machine” at archive.org. The columns since June 2008 (with a few more before that) are available here. Full digital versions of each issue of the magazine since January 2009, including the “Innovation” column, are available here.

The end

And there you have it. It only remains for me to thank all of the authors who have shared their research and understanding of the many facets of GNSS in the column over the past three-and-a-half decades, the staff at GPS World for getting the column into the print and later the electronic editions on the Web, the readers whose positive feedback encouraged me to keep the column going, and to my wife, Marg, who let me spend the long hours on the column when I should have been attending to things around the house. So, now, to paraphrase a much better journalist than I: Goodbye, and good luck.

The November 2024 issue of GPS World features Professor Richard Langley’s 300th and final “Innovation” column. His first one appeared in the January/February 1990 issue, the magazine’s very first. In celebration of Richard’s decades-long contribution to GPS / GNSS / PNT, we are publishing a selection of testimonials and photos from some of his colleagues and friends, gathered by his former students Sunil Bisnath and Attila Komjathy. Click here to read the testimonials.