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Re: Rockwell to Develop GPS Backup
From: Alejandro Purgue
Date: 2015 Oct 14, 16:57 -0400
From: Alejandro Purgue
Date: 2015 Oct 14, 16:57 -0400
Can anyone shed some light as to why is important to a achieve picosecond time synchronization?
For this third technical element, Rockwell Collins is tasked with developing multifunction communication system solutions that yield DARPA STOIC objective picosecond-accurate time transfer and enable GPS-levels of relative positioning accuracy in contested environments.
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Alejandro Purgue
Looks like Rockwell Collins has the job to develop a backup for GPS.
Interesting. The press releases are light on details, but it seems different from local one-way systems like Locata. It sounds like a cooperative network of ranging measurements, using existing or modified communications links, that would perhaps be tied to the global frame by distant stations with clean GNSS. Since the stations are cooperative, there could be a flooding protocol where each station ends up with the complete network for its navigation filter.
The question is how long will it take to get a new system in place? In the meantime CN becomes the unexpected backup positioning method for areas outside of eLoran coverage.
I certainly hope eLoran happens worldwide---it's a sensible complement to GNSS. Automated CN could conceivably participate in one of these networks, but it's getting harder to come up with a plausible use case: in the middle of the ocean, the inertial estimate will be better than CN for quite a while, unless some disaster takes out the inertial system.Cheers,Peter
