With nearly 60 GPS engineers and scientists, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is one of the biggest GPS R&D centers in the world today. It operates as a division of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which manages the lab for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

It appears the US Department of Transportation has bought the Nationwide Differential GPS system (NDGPS) another year. The FY09 Presidential Budget Request was released earlier this week, and it contains a line item in the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) budget for NDGPS in the amount of $4.6M for operations and maintenance of the current system until October 2009. There is no budget item for the planned build-out of NDGPS. The budget request is subject to approval by Congress, but most likely this will go through.

One of the hotter topics in the construction industry these days is GPS/GNSS. If any of you attend the World of Concrete exhibition in Las Vegas, you’ll see many examples of how GNSS is being implemented in construction environments. The exhibition is expected to attract more than 1,700 exhibitors and 90,000 attendees this month. I’m sorry I’ll miss it this year, but if you do attend, you’ll find the usual GNSS (and related) suspects exhibiting: Topcon, various Trimble divisions, Leica, Sokkia, Seco Mfg, CST/Berger, Berntsen, etc.

On the GPS front, I’m going to paraphrase, plagiarize, and otherwise copy from my fellow newsletter editor Don Jewell, who writes the Military & Government PNT newsletter. He spent decades on the inside looking out (think Lt. Col. Jewell) and offers interesting perspectives.

ION GNSS 2007 Report I hope some of you had a chance to read my ION GNSS conference blog, as well as those of my fellow editors who attended the conference. I think Editor-in-Chief Alan Cameron´s brainstorm about this was very good, and I expect we will repeat next year. If you missed it, you can still view it on the GPS World Web site. It´s worth a few minutes of reading to get the flavor of what the hot issues were.

I, along with John Flick, co-authored a fairly in-depth piece on GNSS in the April 2006 issue of Geospatial Solutions. The basics of that article are still applicable, but here´s an update on GNSS events that have transpired since then ? with a bit of speculation and guesstimation thrown in.

I thought this would be a timely subject, since I´m heading off for two days of CGSIC/NAVCEN presentations before the ION GNSS 2007 conference starts on September 25. I´ll also be staying for the conference, and reporting back to you on what I hear there.

The European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) is Europe´s version of the U.S. Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) with essentially the same mission. It offers GPS users in Europe more accurate and reliably GPS positioning. Like WAAS, EGNOS focuses on improving the integrity and accuracy of autonomous GPS positioning primarily by modeling refraction caused by the ionosphere. Also, EGNOS was designed to be compatible with WAAS so your WAAS-enabled receiver will work with EGNOS just fine.