An International Committee on GNSS (ICG) Interoperability Workshop April 25–27, in Honolulu, Hawaii, is seeking participation by designers and manufacturers of GNSS user equipment. The workshop, convened by ICG Working Group A (WG-A) on Compatibility and Interoperability, immediately follows the ION Pacific PNT conference at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa.
Tom Stansell, a well-known GNSS industry consultant, has been engaged by the U.S. Department of State to organize the Friday April 26 meeting, which seeks to encourage better interoperability of emerging modernized signals. According to Stansell, the objective of the meeting is to allow those who design and build GNSS receivers to offer their best advice to signal providers (BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, GPS, QZSS, IRNSS, etc.) about how to achieve optimum interoperability benefits for their customers.
Some of the issues to be addressed include:
increase of noise floor in GNSS receivers resulting from additional signals from more satellites in the same band
common or offset center frequencies
common signal spectra in each band
prospects for increase in elevation limits to reduce multipath error as well as ionospheric and tropospheric refraction error
international clock and geodesy references
ICAO acceptance of new signals for international aviation
transmitter bandwidth to enable better multipath
mitigation and code measurement accuracy
another common open signal for wide area, high-precision, phase-based navigation
potential to use existing or planned spare capacity in open service or SBAS messages to increase multi-GNSS interoperability.
Selected speakers will address four types of GNSS receivers: 1. High Precision Code, for products with sub-decimeter accuracy that use wide area correction signals such as from OmniSTAR or StarFire. 2. High Precision Phase, for products with sub-cm accuracy that use terrestrial correction signals to resolve carrier phase ambiguities. 3. Medium Precision, for products with sub-50-centimeter accuracy, which often are single-frequency receivers using local correction signals. 4. Consumer Applications, for chipsets that are embedded in consumer products.
