L2C and Next-Generation Smart PNT Receivers

Are you using a legacy-model PNT (position, navigation and timing) receiver or a smart PNT receiver, and why does it matter? Don’t have a clue? Read on! Hint — L2C and CNAV (civilian navigation message format) are the major reason it matters. Yes, it’s all because of L2C, the controversial GPS civilian signal that seems to always be in the news and just keeps getting better the more we learn about it.

It was just 30 months ago that I penned a column titled 2C or not 2C: An Important Signal Question.

A couple of weeks ago, Alan Cameron, our esteemed editor in chief — penned a follow-on editorial comprised of excerpts from techies, subject-matter experts and editors, including yours truly, exchanging opinions about the flexibility, sustainability and capability of the GPS L2C signal and all that signal enables.

I won’t bother to go into the details or history of the L2C signal here, as I did that in excruciating detail 30 months ago. However, let’s consider L2C 30 months on and determine if the landscape has changed.

What is L2C?

According to the official U.S. government PNT website, “L2C is the second civilian GPS signal, designed specifically to meet commercial needs.” As it turns out, the military needs L2C as much as the civilian world, but that is a story for another time. When combined with L1 C/A (coarse acquisition signal) in a dual-frequency GNSS receiver, L2C enables ionospheric corrections, a technique that boosts accuracy. Civilians with dual-frequency GPS receivers typically enjoy the same or better accuracy as the military.

For professional and high-precision users with existing dual-frequency receivers, L2C delivers faster signal acquisition, enhanced reliability and greater operating range. L2C broadcasts at a higher effective power than the legacy L1 C/A signal, making it more jam and interference resistant, plus it’s easier to receive signals under trees and indoors. The U.S. Commerce Department estimates L2C will generate about $6 billion in economic productivity benefits through the year 2030. Considering there are more than four billion GPS users around the world today, the DOC economic benefits number seems rather low.

L2C Status

The first GPS IIR-M (R= Replenishment, M= Modernized with M-code and L2C) satellite featuring L2C launched on Sept. 26, 2005, and is still operational today. Every GPS satellite fielded since then (18 SVs, including SVN 49) has included an L2C transmitter. This equates to 16 operational L2C satellites on orbit and transmitting, with GPS IIF-10 being number 17 when it is fully commissioned. With 17 SVs (GPS satellite vehicles) on orbit, the L2C system is officially near Initial Operating Capability (IOC). With the requisite ground system upgrades, which are in the works, this means that on any given day most users will have at least one or more L2C signals in view. You can be sure manufacturers will be quick to take advantage of the geometry.

LMCO GPS IIRM Satellite Vehicle On Orbit. (Artist’s rendering courtesy of Lockheed Martin)

Legal Caveats

“In April 2014, the U.S. Air Force began broadcasting civil navigation (CNAV) messages on the L2C and L5C signals. Prior to that time, L2C and L5C provided a default message or Message Type Zero, containing no data. Adding additional CNAV message types required upgrades to the GPS control segment. On Dec. 31, 2014, the Air Force began transmitting CNAV uploads on a daily basis. L2C should continue to be considered pre-operational and should be employed at the user’s own risk.”

Now the lawyers are happy.

So What?

What does this mean for the average user? You might be surprised at the answer. Depending on how technical you are and exactly how you use GPS, it could mean that all your “legacy” GPS receivers are about to become obsolete. Or, depending on the company that builds your receivers and the amount of foresight they built in, it could just mean a few firmware upgrades and new applications.

Regardless, with the full implementation of L2C GPS signals and navigation messages, GPS will never be the same again. This is not to say your legacy receiver will not work just as efficiently as it does today, and in fact you will probably be able to use it quite effectively for years. But it will not be able to take full advantage of all the capabilities L2C enables without an upgrade, if indeed it is upgradeable.

Legacy versus Smart

No matter how much or how little you paid for your GPS/GNSS/PNT receiver, it is essentially — except for a few notable exceptions — a legacy receiver. For example Trimble is ahead of the game as they began producing L2C capable receivers as early as 2003 and are just waiting for the additional L2C messages to be defined. Again, those receivers that are not L2C-ready or capable are what I will classify as a legacy receiver, simply because of all the future capabilities that are missing. Your current PNT receiver may have the potential to be a smart receiver — it may have the technical capability to process far more than it does today. But, unfortunately, essentially almost every receiver, again with a few exceptions, on the market today falls into the “legacy ” category.

Is My Legacy Device Considered Obsolete?

Now that I have your attention and have probably riled more than a few GPS device manufacturers, please allow me to explain. In the past, your GNSS/PNT device (for brevity’s sake, I will default to PNT for the rest of the column) has basically performed a simple function. It displayed your position, and perhaps maps and other ancillary data (targets or destinations) after it received, decoded, verified and applied timing signals and a very small number of navigation messages.

It accomplished this feat typically from a cold start in under 120 seconds. Maybe much less. Recently, I was privileged to view a demonstration of a receiver from a major manufacturer that performed a warm restart in less-than-ideal conditions and displayed a useful position in 1/20th of a second. As amazing as that may be, it is still today classified as a legacy receiver. It accomplished its task; it supplied a useful position both in human and machine language that could be utilized by both. In the past, this was the task your receiver accomplished routinely. With the full implementation of L2C, all that changes and changes drastically. I call it a revolution for PNT, but alas I am frequently given to hyperbole. However, give me a moment and see if you don’t agree.

I was attracted to a Wall Street Journal headline recently by a company that I know well, since they have an abundance of well-known and multi-talented former military leaders. That company, Accenture, puts it this way: “Change is good. Transformation is even better.” That is exactly where I believe we stand today with L2C. It is a game changer.

For example, just this week in the WSJ, which I read cover to cover six days a week, I saw stories about Audi vehicles driving autonomously from coast to coast, over 3,000 miles without driver intervention. Contrary to many manufacturers, Audi is quick to credit GPS with a large portion of the proprietary Audi (VW) technology and the capability it enables. There was a story about commercial vehicles, over-the-road diesel trucks that may have even more capabilities than the Audi. Again, with GPS as the prime contributor. The same WSJ story mentioned that, “Some of the features being added to trucks are similar to those in cars, but generally the move to autonomy in commercial and industrial vehicles is far ahead of the autonomous systems offered on most passenger vehicles. Already, mining vehicles and military forklifts are operated without drivers.”

Amazingly, these capabilities depend greatly on GPS, but exist without the full implementation of the revolution that L2C, CNAV and multiple nav messages will bring.

L2C CNAV Message Structure.

L2C Ready

I have over the past year seen advertisements for PNT devices that proclaim they are L2C ready. I beg to differ, but only because my definition of L2C ready probably varies greatly from that of the devices’ marketing department. Beyond its signal structure, L2C has a new messaging capability.

As stated earlier, the L2C signal is heads and shoulders above most other GNSS signals in strength, code structure and security. L2C delivers faster signal acquisition, enhanced reliability, and greater operating range. L2C broadcasts at a higher effective power than the legacy L1 C/A signal, making it interference and jam resistant and easier to receive under trees and indoors. These attributes make it a great signal and when you consider the carrier-phase and RTK (real time kinematic) capabilities, which really are real-time today. It is a very appealing signal indeed.

For precision and timing users, the carrier phase of the L2C signal, non-coded carrier, is 1,000 times more stable than the fully coded L2C signal. The L2C carrier-phase stability will remain unchanged until the semi-codeless transition date of Dec. 31, 2024, per the FRP or Federal Radio Navigation Plan of 2014. Then officially all bets are off, but who knows? That date could be extended.

However, the real and future strength of the L2C signal structure is hiding in one or more (accurately 255 more, for a total of 256) messages that can be utilized in a myriad of ways and applications. These are messages, nav-messages if you will, that your new or updated PNT device will be able to utilize for who knows how many functions. Just use your imagination. Here are some ideas I have for using the additional L2C messaging capability.

• Send 250+ other navigation messages, to be defined.
• Send continuous atmospheric corrections (such as ionospheric) for each two degrees of longitude around the globe or in one degree increments if you consider land mass applications only.
• John Deere and Trimble as the leading commercial and civil providers of navigation data could appropriate a small fragment of the messages for their global navigation and timing corrections to their agricultural and precision users/customers around the globe.
• Companies or governments could send nominal navigation or even text-based navigation-related messages to users anywhere an L2C signal can be received.
• Companies could shut down and render useless receivers from users that have not paid their bills or were abusing the system.
• Companies could send small firmware updates or notices of larger updates directly to users. Data could include active hyperlinks.
• Precision, scientific and premium users might have the capability to receive constant correction updates that make their PNT receiver a centimeter or potentially a millimeter level device.
• Receivers with communications — four billion plus smartphones and other devices with PNT capabilities and built-in communications — could become sensors capable of being sampled at will. These devices have the potential to be considered remote monitoring stations both for PNT and communications purposes. They could report both communications and PNT jamming or interference. They could also help track intentional jammers.

If you think about it hard enough, you will see that this modest list of capabilities with the proper security either make spoofing an impossibility or without proper security a malicious nightmare.

I hope by now you catch my drift and have come up with some ideas of your own concerning how the additional 250+ L2C messages could be utilized. We’re unsure how many messages will actually be available or how the messages will be used. The government will, out of operational necessity, require a small number, so right now your guess is as good as mine.

Keep in mind that L5C and M-code will have the same capabilities on differing frequencies, and different governing bodies will decide how the signals and 750-plus multiple-messaging capabilities are allocated and utilized. That is all hopefully in the near future. How that process unfolds, technically and operationally, will have a great deal to do with how successful and ubiquitous L2C becomes. The process alone will undoubtedly spawn thousands of articles; however, right now we are primarily discussing the necessity for smart receivers to fully utilize the additional L2C messages. For along with all the potential capabilities comes a processing and communications tail that does not exist today, except in a few instances that we can’t go into in this venue.

Relative

This is probably a good time to further qualify what I mean by legacy versus smart receivers. Were the appellation “legacy” not already in our vernacular concerning today’s highly functioning devices, it would not be one I would have chosen. However, it is and we are stuck with it. Consider that there are static high-end (read premium quality) single GNSS receivers that “see” more than 50-60 separate GNSS satellite vehicles and processes more than 150 GNSS signals. This does not take into consideration all the augmented and companion signals some of these devices are capable of processing. Many of these devices are very difficult to jam and literally cannot be spoofed, and still today they are legacy receivers in relationship to L2C capabilities.

However, I am told such high-end receivers are absolutely L2C ready, which may mean the additional L2C messages are ready to be processed and applied, received or rejected, whenever they are properly and officially defined. This brings us to the future definition or next generation smart L2C receiver.

Smart L2C PNT Receiver

For the first time a smart PNT L2C capable receiver will have the ability to:

• Select between GPS only, GPS + GLONASS, or full GNSS mode with ancillary corrections such as WAAS and EGNOS, and work with, process or reject messages, making a decision about some or all the signals it has in view. While there are receivers that accomplish some of these functions today, they do not typically have the option of accepting or rejecting a GPS navigation message if it is properly formatted and verified. L2C smart receivers will — indeed must — at a minimum possess and correctly utilize that capability.
• Alert users concerning new navigation message(s) and determine automatically or with user input whether the navigation message should be applied immediately, in the near future, put on hold or totally rejected.
• Alert users to the effect that applying new or multiple navigation messages will have on the current PNT display and possibly the current mission or operation. For example, if you are a precision user, think millimeters for level of accuracy, utilizing PNT to measure tectonic plate movement — you are very interested in relative displacement over time and you may have no desire to apply a multiple nanosecond correction that could move your current measured position several inches or feet. If you are a geocacher, you do not want the coordinates of your latest buried treasure to dynamically change.
• Determine if the latest valid navigation message(s) apply to your geographic area or, for mobile receivers, your destination, and what effect incorporating the messages will have on your displayed position or ETA.
• Display a text-based navigation message if it is addressed to your device.
• Require password(s) for certain actions — be they sensitive, proprietary, classified or of a “cannot undo” nature. Passwords could also be required in the message format before it could be unlocked and applied.
• Determine and alert users if multiple navigation or device-control messages conflict with organizational or user-defined parameters.
• Alert users to malicious messages or spoofing attempts.
• Alert users to GNSS assets that are no longer available or go offline, such as during the two total GLONASS constellation shutdowns when GLONASS signals were not available for several hours. In the case of Apple iPhones, the GLONASS constellation-wide shutdown meant these devices went from multiple GNSS devices to “GPS plus PNT augmentation (WAAS) and other onboard sensors” devices. This is something many users may not care about, but is definitely worth a user-defined parameter for a warning message.
• The ability to permanently reject a certain type of message by type, source, timeframe, etc.

By now, I hope you see the trend. You can probably think of many more possibilities for future GNSS or PNT receivers and the necessity for them to be loaded with computing and communications capabilities, especially where L2C is concerned — indeed, where all the CNAV signals and messages are concerned.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is L2C is a potentially revolutionary signal for GPS/PNT; it opens incredible opportunities for entrepreneurs, manufacturers and users at a minimum. We now all have some hard and important questions to consider before we purchase our next-generation PNT device or upgrade our legacy device.

Until next time, happy navigating, and I hope to see everyone at ION GNSS+ in September in Tampa, Fla. Remember, GPS is brought to you courtesy of the United States Air Force.