NovAtel to Develop WAAS G-III—Galileo Reference Receiver for FAA

October 27, 2015  - By
NovAtel's WAAS G-III—Galileo Reference Receiver.

NovAtel’s WAAS G-III—Galileo Reference Receiver.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and NovAtel have exercised a bilateral option to produce a Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) G-III—Galileo prototype receiver. Maintaining core NovAtel WAAS G-III functionality for GPS and SBAS signal processing, the new receiver will operate in the WAAS reference station test environment to facilitate research on multiple GNSS constellation utilization.

The prototype receiver will also add functionality to support tracking and demodulating associated navigation data for Galileo satellites including:

  • Galileo E1 and E5a tracking
  • Ephemeris and almanac reporting/processing from E1 or E5a
  • Automatic channel assignments
  • Time solution computed from Galileo
  • Correlator information for signal deformation on Galileo signals

The WAAS G-III—Galileo prototype receiver will be developed on NovAtel’s existing WAAS G-III receiver hardware and application software, and delivered as a field-loadable firmware package. The WAAS G-III—Galileo receiver will not be qualified to DO-178B Level D as part of this contract.

NovAtel’s WAAS G-III reference receiver platform was designed with expandability and multi-GNSS SBAS evolution in mind, and can be customized to meet the needs of individual satellite networks. NovAtel has already delivered G-III based reference receivers to several programs worldwide, including the WAAS G-III receiver (US WAAS, FAA), IRIMS G-III receiver (India IRNSS, ISRO),  and QZSS G-III receiver (Japan QZSS, NEC) variants.

The company’s reference receivers and uplink station equipment have been a central element of the U.S. WAAS since its inception. The WAAS third-generation reference receiver (G-III) uses fully updated hardware, and tracks all GPS signals including the legacy GPS L1 C/A, L2P(Y) (semi-codeless), and the modernized L2C, L5, L1C signals as well as the WAAS L1 C/A and L5 signals.

The WAAS G-III reference receiver provides a rich set of range measurement data, signal integrity metrics, and logs for processing by the system’s data communication processor, NovAtel said. The WAAS G-III – Galileo prototype receiver is the first G-III platform evolution for the FAA, an important step towards possible GPS + Galileo dual-GNSS SBAS operations in the future.

This article is tagged with , , , , and posted in Featured Stories, Latest News, Transportation

1 Comment on "NovAtel to Develop WAAS G-III—Galileo Reference Receiver for FAA"

Trackback | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Lance says:
    October 27, 2015 at 10:19 pm

    Glad to see we are possibly extending WAAS to provide more than GPS corrections… but this is so typical of government, lets not also support GLONASS & BDS, even-though this would double the operational use of the system and provide a higher level of security for GNSS users as the system could provide an independent health assessment of systems controlled by foreign governments but used widely by GNSS users in the USA.