Paul McBurney, Ph.D., joins GPS World’s Editorial Advisory Board

We are pleased to announce that Paul McBurney, Ph.D., has agreed to join GPS World’s Editorial Advisory Board. He is currently CTO and co-founder of OneNav. Prior to that, McBurney was a GNSS architect at Apple. He was co-founder and CTO of eRide, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in high sensitivity GPS and sensor fusion that Furuno acquired in 2009. He also worked for nearly 10 years at Trimble Navigation, as well as Stanford Telecommunications. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1988 with a focus on GPS integrity monitoring. He has more than 50 patents in the areas of GPS, AGPS and sensor fusion.

Could new clocks protect planes from spoofing of GNSS signals?

GNSS receiver builders would certainly take advantage of better oscillators. Poor clocks hurt performance, while stable clocks improve performance and provide a source of reliable information. A better oscillator by itself cannot prevent getting spoofed, but it can be an important component of an anti-spoofing regime not only for detection but also for mitigation. At OneNav, we started testing SiTime MEMs oscillators. We are using some SiTime devices that have nearly perfect reference frequency, with less than 100 ppb and amazing shock and temperature stability. They are not cheap, but they are improving the manufacturability for lower cost.

TV broadcasters have petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for permission to provide PNT signals.

In the 1990s, Rosum Corp. of Redwood City, California, first tried to do positioning using TV signals. They were famous for a while and most of their engineers are in GNSS now. The inherent advantages of the multipath mitigation in the signal structure are still unexploited, mainly because TV tower navigation suffers from poor positional dilution of precision as many towers are on the same hilltop. It’s hard to imagine what changed in the manufacturing or business model to put this in the news again. It seems like a tough problem to adopt the silicon in a cell phone to receive this signal. It won’t be an answer for resilience except domestically.

Some claim that quantum systems could transform navigation.

Even navigation-grade IMUs have relatively short viability with meter-level accuracy without GNSS. We are preparing some jamming and spoofing tests with the U.S. Navy’s Stiletto program. The IMU is the limit of the project, and quantum IMUs would make a huge impact.

The Federal Aviation Administration is moving toward approving the use of controlled reception pattern antennas (CRPAs) on aircraft.

This is great news for everyone. It will herald a new movement toward more production, with lower cost and improved performance. We need this technology in everything that moves the public.

On February 24, the sun unleashed an X-class flare, triggering a radio blackout across the Pacific Ocean.

Once again, it’s centered on the equator, where most of the heavy stuff with the ionosphere happens. Research on geomagnetic equatorial ionosphere is on the frontier of ionospheric research. Events like this are wild points that don’t make it into the 3 sigma events. Single frequency receivers that rely on total electron content models for accuracy usually see some impact from these solar storms. The ionosphere has a subtle impact on people all over the world. Did anyone notice their navigation system acting any stranger than usual? Did anyone lose any money on the stock market because the timing accuracy degraded from 5 ns to 20 ns? Did a self-driving car have a blackout? I doubt it. But it’s an important part of a data sheet. Companies such as Novatel and Trimble should comment on how they did.