NavList:

I'm down here in Florida for the week attending the ION GNSS+ 2018 international technical meeting of the satellite division of The Institute of Navigation. The first two days of the meeting are taken up with a meeting of the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee, which, amongst other reports, included one by Dr. Stefania Römisch of NIST. I asked her about the threatened closure of WWV/WWVH/WWVB. She didn't really tell us anything new except that she said it was up to Congress to approve or modify the president's proposed budget. The House or Senate could add a specific line item funding the broadcast services. A couple of other reports mentioned the need for resilient PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) and the need for one or more back-ups to GPS. WWV/WWVH/WWVB was alluded to.

There were some free short courses on Monday. One was "Using a Sextant: Celestial Navigation" given by Richard Hartnett, an EE professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. There was a nice turnout for his talk (20+).

-- Richard Langley