Trimble’s R980 GNSS receiver enhances surveying applications

GPS World Editor-in-Chief Matteo Luccio sat down with Anthony McClaren, product marketing manager of geospatial technologies at Trimble, to discuss Trimble’s new R980 GNSS receiver and its implications for the geospatial surveying industry.

What’s your position?

I am on the Trimble Geospatial Go to Market team. Product marketing managers are more customer-facing, while product managers are more engineering-facing. I’m based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and I’ve worked at Trimble for almost two years, but I worked with Trimble equipment for 16 years before that for a dealership and for almost 20 years in the geospatial surveying industry. The rest of my team is based in our Westminster head office.

What’s new about Trimble’s R980? What markets does it target?

The Trimble R980 takes over from the R12i GNSS system as the flagship product in the Trimble GNSS receiver portfolio. New features include a communications update. The R12i had only a 450 MHz radio. The R980 also has a 900 MHz radio. That’s very beneficial for people who find themselves on large-scale construction sites where they use 900 MHz radios, particularly in North America. These radios are much easier to license than 450 MHz radios, which outweighs the disadvantage of having a shorter range.

The R980 can be used as either a base station or a rover, correct?

Yes. The R12i had a 3.5G modem. The R980 has a 4G LTE cellular modem. So, it’s a global cell modem and the 4G network across the globe is far more expansive than 3G or 5G. 4G LTE also offers enough data downloading for things like VRS and Trimble’s Internet Base Station Service (IBSS), a new feature in Trimble Access software that the R980 is also capable of using. IBSS is a user’s Network Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (NTRIP).

So, you have a base station with a SIM card in the receiver. You start your base station as normal, and data is streamed to a Trimble data center. Then, you take your Rover, as we do today with a VRS survey. It has a SIM card, either in the receiver or in the controller, and you can connect directly to your base station via the Internet and stream your own corrections.

It is particularly useful if you’re not in a VRS environment or if you want to get the range of using a cellular network instead of radio. It also means that you don’t have to consider where you’re going to put your repeater, such as on the top of a hill. You don’t have to worry about these sorts of things anymore, because we’re using the Internet to stream out corrections rather than a radio.

You’re also uploading data to the office in real time.

That’s handled separately, via Trimble Connect on your data collector. It’s transferring data directly to a project.

This is your top-of-the-line, survey-grade receiver, right?

Absolutely.

In terms of cost and other considerations, for what other applications is it practical?

We’re seeing a lot of our topline receivers being used in civil construction, transportation, infrastructure projects, and mining — because the Trimble receivers are tracking all the currently available satellite signals. It means that surveyors working in an open-cut mine can be at the bottom of the pit and still achieve survey-grade results because they’re tracking so many satellites. It is also used by the more traditional, everyday land surveyors who are out there walking the streets, because the R980 with Trimble ProPoint GNSS technology allows our users to measure in the most rugged GNSS environments, such as urban canyons.

Speaking of walking down the street, the R980 is for either static deployment or slow-moving platforms, not for vehicles, right?

Correct. The mobile mappers that we see on vehicles have very high-end inertial measurement units (IMUs) to provide heading, pitch and roll and use lidar or laser scanning to take the measurements. The R980 has an IMU to enable very accurate tilt compensation up to at least 30°.

Looking at the broader trends in the industry, how do you see requirements changing? Of course, it depends on the market…

One thing that doesn’t depend on the market — I have learned this since joining Trimble — is that globally a lot of the industry is facing the same issue, which is a massive shortage of surveyors to meet the demand for them. In Australia alone, I think we’re short about 2,400 surveyors for next year. So, it’s quite a significant number. Our customers on the ground are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less.

So, Trimble’s goal with our products — whether it’s our top-of-the-line GNSS, total stations or something more entry level — is giving our customers the most productive equipment that we can so that they can do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why we have such things as Trimble Connect.

So, it’s not just about single point measurement anymore. It’s about using the ecosystem to be as efficient as possible. Once I’ve taken a measurement, what am I going to do with it? Beyond that, it’s in my data collector, which is using Trimble Connect to sync to the office, where I have Trimble Business Center software. So, the surveyors and the draftspeople at the office can start work on that straightaway and keep the guy in the field working.

Concern keeps growing about spoofing and jamming, mostly for defense and life-critical applications. How do you see that affecting some of your civilian markets?

Currently, in civilian applications, most of the jamming that we’re seeing is ad hoc and unintentional, not nefarious. For example, a truck driver who uses a consumer-grade jammer plugged into his 12-volt outlet so that his boss can’t track him. It’s unpredictable. I’ve also seen banks transmitting their data back to the head office near an antenna for a CORS site and jamming it.

Trimble receivers have anti-spoofing and anti-jamming solutions. They deal with spoofing in a multi-layered way. Number one is rejection of spoof signals in the digital signal processing. Essentially, that means that a spoofed signal generally comes through with a higher correlation peak, because the transmitter is probably closer than a satellite 20,000 km away, so the receiver can isolate that signal and reject it from the positioning algorithm. Also, when it comes to spoofing and jamming, it tends to be a particular constellation and not a particular satellite. So, if you’re experiencing jamming or spoofing generally, it’s going to be all the GPS or Galileo constellation — not, say, satellite 32.

Our survey-grade receivers use the Maxwell 7 technology, which can also cross-check orbital data from multiple sources. So, it’s detecting the orbital parameters transmitted by each satellite, and it can then check if any of those have changed unexpectedly, or if they fall outside of reasonable bounds, and exclude them.

Are you utilizing any non-GNSS PNT sources, such as signals from LEO satellites?

Not today. Is there a place for them in the future? Absolutely. Is Trimble aware of such things as Xona low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites? Yes. Obviously, we would love to be using those, when they’re ready and when we have products ready.

What about AI?

AI is an interesting one. That’s obviously a hot topic, isn’t it? Today, we don’t necessarily use AI. When it comes to such products as the R980, we use mixed reality — where you have data overlaid by the camera in your controller and using your receiver and turning around, you can see your digital environment as well as your physical environment — but we are not using AI as such today. We overlay CAD data on what is physical, and it’s still three-dimensional. So, regardless of whether I turn this way or that, I can see my design in the real world.