Terry's honours recognise his services to satellite navigation.

To read more about Terry's outstanding work please see the press releases on gov.uk and nottingham.ac.uk 

The CGPM is the supreme authority of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). The BIPM is an international organisation established by the Metre Convention, through which Member States act together on matters related to measurement science and measurement standards.

Leap seconds are added to coordinated universal time (UTC) to keep it aligned with astronomical time (UT1), compensating for variations in the Earth’s rotation. Twenty seven leap seconds have been added in total since they were introduced in 1972.

Previous leap seconds have been added due to the slowing of the Earth’s rotation, however, there is now evidence that the rotation is actually speeding up which would result in the removal of a leap second. This would be the first instance of a negative leap second.

Due to the complexity of adding time across distributed systems, each leap second causes technical issues such as outages and data losses in the data centre sector.

Justifying the decision, BIPM said the "introduction of leap seconds creates discontinuities that risk causing serious malfunctions in critical digital infrastructure". This digital infrastructure includes satellite navigation systems, telecommunications and energy transmission. 

To handle future time gaps, the BIPM recommends that a policy be formed for the adjustment of clocks but has not specified at what time gap this adjustment might be implemented.

The change will come into effect by 2035, with the possibility of leap seconds being phased out sooner, and has been lobbied for heavily by tech giants such as Amazon and Google. Russia, however, voted against the change. This is due to the incorporation of leap seconds into its GLONASS satellite navigation system, unlike other satellite navigation systems such as GPS and Galileo.

The Sunday Telegraph reports that the ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets, with their digital 24-hour clocks, is threatening to make the art of telling the time from a traditional timepiece redundant.

This has reached the stage where a school in Scotland has found that pupils as old as 13 are unable to tell the time from the analogue clocks hanging in classrooms and corridors. Teachers had began to notice that more and more of its senior pupils had no concept of how to read a clock, or at best struggled to do so. The problem had become so acute that it had begun to threaten the pupils’ exam prospects.

Now the school has begun to teach pupils to read a clock the old fashioned way, without resorting to their mobile phones; indeed, mobiles and tablets have been banned during school hours to encourage pupils to look at clocks around the school.

One teacher commented ‘Having the ability to understand the movement of the minute hand and the hour hand around the face of a clock gives young people a tangible understanding of the passing of time, not just numbers changing on a digital screen. Additionally there are maths applications that need this skill. It’s a fundamental numeracy life skill. We are encouraging parents and guardians to buy wristwatches for pupils from the age of five.’

Details from The Sunday Telegraph

The ‘navigate on autopilot’ (NOA) feature is highly dependent on GNSS reliability - and spoofing resulted in multiple high-risk scenarios for the driver.

The spoofing during navigating on autopilot is reported to have led to extreme deceleration and acceleration, rapid lane-changing prompting, unnecessary signalling, multiple attempts to exit the road at incorrect locations and extreme driving instability.

Regulus, who conducted the trial, concludes that the test proves beyond doubt the crucial dependence on GNSS for any level 2+ autonomous navigation system, and the high threat that spoofing poses to drivers and passengers utilising these features.

Details from Regulus

The call is out for aspiring entrepreneurs across the UK to enter into an international space competition, with the opportunity to win thousands of pounds in cash and business support for their innovative idea.

The Galileo Masters competition is open to anyone who has an idea that uses satellite navigation technology - be it for position, time, navigation or any other use, including iPhone, iPad and Android apps, as well as applications in any professional field.

GRACE (the Geospatial Research and Applications Centre of Excellence) at the University of Nottingham is hosting the UK rounds of the Galileo Masters competition, where the region’s champions will win £1 000 in cash and £4 000 worth of business support including an incubation programme. The UK winners will then go on to compete at international level for a €10 000 cash prize, as well as further support such as an accelerator programme.

“The UK challenges of the competition are a fantastic opportunity for those with an innovative idea for a satellite-based product or service that just need some help getting off the ground. The attractive support package, which includes business incubation, consultancy and patent advice, will help advance an idea all the way through to commercial success.” Paul Bhatia, general manager of GRACE at the University of Nottingham

From healthcare, military and leisure, to traffic management and transport logistics, satellite navigation is used around the globe. The Galileo Masters sets out to find the innovators of tomorrow with ideas that improve everyday life, which will advance Europe’s satellite technology capabilities.

The competition provides support for innovative ideas at any development stage, with the ultimate aim to turn them into reality. In previous years the Galileo Masters has helped launch a number of successful business ventures.

Those entering with links to a university should enter the University Challenge and start-ups, businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs should apply to the UK Challenge.
Successful entrants will be invited to a ‘dragon’s den’ style pitch to a panel of UK space industry experts, who will decide the winning idea to go forward to the international competition.

The competition is sponsored by Collins Aerospace, SPRINT, Nottingham Scientific Limited, the Manufacturing Technology Centre and the Royal Institute of Navigation with the support of the Satellite Applications Catapult and the UK Space Agency.
More information and details on how to enter the competition is available at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/grace/galileo-masters/index.aspx

The closing date for entries is July 31 2019.

The Geospatial Commission will invest up to £1.5 million to fund projects for crowd-sourcing the creation and/or maintenance of geospatial datasets.

The proposal must focus on improving one of the following:

• the delivery of public services at local authority level
• social or environmental outcomes by working with third sector organisations
• existing public sector open datasets

Competition opens: Tuesday 27 November 2018
Competition closes: Wednesday 30 January 2019 12:00pm

For more information or to apply, please click here...

A first series of Reports on User Needs and Requirements on position, navigation and time has been published on the European GNSS Service Centre web portal in the section “GSA Publications”. The publication of this series paves the way to the 2018 edition of the User Consultation Platform to be held in Marseille on 3-4 December 2018 as part of European Space Week.

The User Consultation Platform (UCP) is a periodic forum organised by the European Commission and the GSA that aims at listening to users’ needs and feedback. The event is a part of a process developed at the GSA to collect user needs and requirements and take them as inputs to support the provision of user-driven Galileo and EGNOS services.

In preparation for the next UCP, which will take place in Marseille on 3-4 December 2018, a total of eight reports are being published:

Report on Aviation User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Maritime and Inland Waterways User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Location-Based Services User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Agriculture User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Surveying User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Time & Synchronization User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Rail User Needs and Requirements;
Report on Road User Needs and Requirements.

The reports are available in the European GNSS Service Centre (GSC) website, in the Electronic Library under the “GSA Publications” section.

All the reports are structured in the same way: they start with an overview of the GNSS trends applicable to the segment in question, an in-depth analysis of the user needs and requirements, and finalising with a user requirements specification applicable to the particular market segment.

Finally, as the reports are publicly available, they serve also as a reference for users and industry, supporting planning and decision-making activities for those concerned with the use of location technologies.

Details from GSA

For more information please visit the Tourism NI website by clicking here.

Hitherto, modern small inertial navigators have used quartz micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers, with a typical area of 8.8 x 7.0 mm. But new accelerometers are using capacitive sensors to measure acceleration in similar size packages.

A typical example is Silicon Designs’ Model 2227 module - claiming to be best-in-class as a low-mass, low-power module, electrically and mechanically compatible with, and designed to replace and upgrade, industry-standard quartz accelerometers.

The MEMS accelerometer combines 2 capacitive silicon sense elements and a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit in the hermetically sealed package.  The differential output voltage of the accelerometer is converted on the PCB into a current proportional to the detected acceleration.

These devices have detection ranges of +/-10, +/-25 or +/-50G and can withstand a shock of 5,000G.  Weight of the chip is 5.6g.

Full details available from Silicon Designs

Spirent, a RIN Corporate member, announces its approach to ensure continuity of test and evaluation facilities for the Galileo Public Regulated Service. The announcement is made at the Institute of Navigation’s conference in Miami, Florida, USA.

See InsideGNSS for more...

The International Union of Radio Science (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale – URSI), the world’s major radio science scientific community, organised its 2nd URSI Atlantic Radio Science Conference (URSI AT-RASC) in ExpoMeloneras Convention Centre, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain on 28th May, 2018 – 1st June, 2018. Renowned experts in radio science across the world gathered on Gran Canaria to present their recent scientific results in radio science in the programme that ran in a continuous series of parallel sessions. Split into ten Scientific Commissions, the conference addressed the subjects of electromagnetic metrology (Commission A), fields and waves (Commission B), radio communications and signal processing systems (Commission C), electronics and photonics (Commission D), electromagnetic environment and interference (Commission E), wave propagation and remote sensing (Commission F), ionospheric radio and propagation (Commission G), waves in plasmas (Commission H), radio astronomy (Commission J), and electromagnetics in biology and medicine (Commission K). Commissions were chaired by eminent scientists such as Professor Patricia Doherty, of Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA and the former US ION President, and Professor Iwona Stanislawska of Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, who both chaired the Commission G scientific activities.

The Royal Institute of Navigation was represented at the 2nd URSI AT-RASC through participation of Ms Mia Filić, MSc Comp Sci & Math MRIN, a satellite navigation, statistical and machine learning, and space weather specialist, and the Annual Baška GNSS Conference Programme Chair and the Conference Proceedings Editor, in the Scientific Commission G sessions. The audience heard of development of the machine learning-based forecasting model of the space weather-induced GNSS positioning errors, during the presentation of Ms Filić’s paper On development of the forecasting model of GNSS positioning performance degradation due to space weather and ionospheric conditions. Ms Filić received the Young Scientist Award for her scientific contribution.

URSI made all the scientific papers presented at the 2nd AT-RASC publicly available at: http://www.atrasc.com/content/stick/code.html.

Mobile brand Xiaomi has launched a dual-frequency GNSS smartphone.

Fitted with a Broadcom BCM47755 chip, the Xiaomi Mi 8 provides up to decimeter-level accuracy for location-based services and vehicle navigation, the company said.

The Mi 8 smartphone represents a breakthrough in GNSS technology as the first commercial deployment of Broadcom’s dual-frequency BCM47755 chip designed for the mass market and introduced in September 2017.

Until now, mobile location-based applications have been powered by single-frequency GNSS receivers whose location accuracy is limited to a few meters. However, in recent years GNSS systems have been launching satellites broadcasting signals on new frequencies to open up new possibilities. Specifically, Galileo has the majority of satellites with E1/L1 and E5/L5 frequency capabilities.

The E1/L1 + E5/L5 GNSS chip can compute location with an accuracy of up to a few decimeters.

Details from: GPSWorld - http://gpsworld.com/dual-frequency-gnss-smartphone-hits-the-market/