The ESNC is once again inviting entrepreneurs from research and industry to present value-added business applications for the emerging satellite navigation market. The current market for satellite services – such as for mobility, health, or safety – is already worth more than EUR 100 billion, and is expected to rise to EUR 240 billion by 2020. The ESNC supports participating innovators in realising their applications and business cases through an extensive partner network that covers the technical, economical, and legal aspects involved.

The International GNSS Service (IGS), a worldwide federation of agencies involved in high-precision GNSS) applications, has launched Real-Time Service (RTS). The RTS is a global scale GNSS orbit and clock correction service that enables realtime precise point positioning (PPP) and related applications requiring access to IGS low latency products. The RTS is offered in beta as a GPS-only service for the development and testing of applications.

Trimble has introduced the Ashtech ADU800 for GNSS attitude determination and www.Ashtech-OEM.comreal-time positioning. The ADU800 is a 6D positioning solution providing position plus orientation for system integrators. It provides precise heading, pitch and roll with 3D positioning up to centimeter-level accuracy and velocities at a rate of up to 20 Hz

PCI Geomatics now supports SPOT-6 imagery within its software suite. SPOT- 6, a new satellite built and operated by Astrium was launched on September 9th, 2012 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India. SPOT-6 is an optical imaging satellite capable of imaging the Earth with a resolution of 1.5 m Panchromatic and 6 m Multispectral (Blue, Green, Red, Near-IR). The support for SPOT-6 will be available in the Geomatica 2013 SP2 product release. www.pcigeomatics.com

Tokyo-headquartered Kaga Electronics has integrated u-blox’ high-speed UMTS modem technology into their U130-KG wireless 3G air-interface card. The card is designed for machines, PoS terminals, meters, signage and security systems used throughout Japan. It integrates u-blox’ LISA-U130 UMTS/HSPA module to deliver lightning-fast wireless performance: 7.2 Mb/s download and 5.76 Mb/s upload speeds. www.u-blox.com

A ground system aimed at enhancing the navigation precision of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) was approved in central China’s Hubei Province. The BeiDou Ground Base Enhancement System (BGBES), a network consisting of 30 ground base stations, an operating system and a precision positioning system

PetroVietnam University (PVU) has joined the Intergraph® Education Grant Program, selecting SmartMarine® Enterprise solutions for its curriculum to support Vietnam’s offshore oil and gas industry. PVU is located in the offshore oil and gas hub of southern Vietnam, and was established to focus on the development of the country’s oil and gas industry. www.pvu.edu.vn

Septentrio has announced that they have obtained, based on live ICD compliant Galileo messages from the four Galileo IOV satellites, a fi rst autonomous realtime Galileo PVT calculation. The standalone position was calculated from in-orbit navigation messages using a standard PolaRx4 GNSS receiver equipped with commercially released fi rmware. www.septentrio.com.

NovAtel Inc., has added a new commercially exportable MEMS IMU (micro electromechanical inertial measurement unit) to its line of SPAN GNSS/INS products. It is supplied by Analog Devices (Norwood, Massachusetts) and is exclusive to NovAtel. It can be paired with an OEM6 receiver card to provide continuously available position, velocity, and attitude (roll, pitch, yaw) in a small, single-unit form factor.

Philipp Ronnenberg, a masters student in design interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, recently showed off the first prototype sensors for his alternate “Open Positioning System,” which are designed to pick up regular seismic waves given off by large machinery in nearby power plants and factories. Once a sensor detects at least three different nearby seismic wave sources, Ronnenberg theorizes it should be able to determine its location. So far, he’s built a prototype sensor using the Arduino open source hardware microcontroller, which he says “can detect and collect different frequencies.