SAT-SURFING in Vietnam

After the successful workshop carried out in Thailand at the AIT (see previous post), the tutoring activities continued on 24 and 25 November in the framework of the PROGENY project, introducing SAT-SURF and SAT-SURFER tools also in Vietnam. A second seminar, hosted at the Hanoi University of Technology (HUT), has been organized thanks to the cooperation between the ISMB and Prof. Nguyen Thi Hoang Lan, Dr. Ngo Hong Son and other hard working people of HUT. The two day seminar has been managed by two members of the NavSAS Group (Fabrizio Dominici e Davide Margaria) and it included a presentation of background, features, and potential applications of these educational tools. Attending such a workshop, the students of HUT had the opportunity to face real measurements on GNSS signals, understanding the most important receiver performance parameters through extended practical exercises and open question sessions.


In spite of the short time allocated to the workshop, it has been a successful initiative, achieving all its initial objectives. In fact, the students had the opportunity to see and to try on their desks all the potentialities of both SAT-SURF and SAT-SURFER, stimulating their interest on GNSS technologies. Very positive feedbacks have been obtained from the students, who would like to spend more time using these tools. In addition, some interesting suggestions and ideas for future developments have been collected.

We hope that SAT-SURF and SAT-SURFER could be a first step in the “ocean” of GNSS signals for many other students in the World!

PROGENY Pilot Project in Thailand

On November 21-22, Fabrizio Dominici and Davide Margaria presented the SAT-SURF & SAT-SURFER solution at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) of Bangkok. The two days workshop was carried out under the Progeny project (funded by the European GNSS Supervisory Authorithy) and organized by ISMB and AIT with the support of Prof. Nitin K. Tripathi and Prof. Kiyoshi Honda. The seminar has been attended by 45 students from AIT.

DAY 1: The day started with an introduction of the NavSAS Group research activities. In particular it has been showed the background for the SAT-SURF & SURFER realization, providing also an overview of the NAVKIT. Moreover in the morning the presentation included details about architecture, functionalities and application fields for both the hardware and software platforms (SAT-SURF & SAT-SURFER). The morning session has been concluded with the setup and configuration of the demonstration platform with a quick view of the main features previously described. In the afternoon it has been faced the first data collections and the solution of some exercises provided with SAT-SURFER.

DAY 2: The exercise session has been concluded in the second day proposing additional exercises and providing the solutions. The students have been also assisted for the setup and configuration of the educational platform on their PC. The seminar ended with a fill out of the tutorial evaluation questionnaires and an open question session for deepening on SAT-SURF & SAT- SURFER.

We hope that the positive feedbacks and the useful suggestions received by the students can feed the discussion on this blog and help to learn how to practically SURF with GNSS!!!

PNT challanges and Opportunities Symposium @ Stanford University

Fabio Dovis has been invited to attend a workshop at the Stanford University, PNT challanges and Opportunities Symposium, organized by the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation and Time. The workshop attendance is limited to 150 people and the symposium gathers high level speakers both involved in the GPS system development and in the GPS market.

It's being an awesome chance to get pieces of information on GPS future from the US standpoint, and an opportunity for good networking.

N-GENE presentation @ the Asilomar conference

Today, dr. Fabio Dovis of the NavSAS group presented at the IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers 2008 a paper on the novel algorithms implemented in the N-GENE fully software receiver.

The paper is entitled Efficient Signal Acquisition for a Real Time GPS/Galileo Software receiver and is co-authored by Maurizio Fantino, Marco Pini and Fabio Dovis.

It describes some architectural choices for acquisiton, in order match the real time constraints, keeping the performance level high, and for the tracking in order to make it robust to lock loss at low C/N0.l

The presentation was hosted in a special session, where also other papers reated to GNSS signal processing have been presented by University of New South Wales, Stanford University and University of Westminster.

Sat-Surf & Sat-Surfer Suite brought to life!

Education on GNSS topics is sometimes difficult and often lacks of practical experience. In order to train students and professionals to face real issues and manage satellite navigation data, the NavSAS group developed Sat-Surf and Sat-Surfer: the Training Board & the Software Suite for GNSS Training!
This solution includes hardware and software facilities as well as practical exercises. It is dedicated to the GNSS students but it can be also useful for all the professionals in the field of navigation.

For a complete GNSS training the theory is provided by the NAVKIT distance learning tool, and the practical skills are trained by means of the Sat-Surf & Sat-Surfer suite. The Sat-Surf is a compact, lightweight and versatile device able to accommodate different GPS receiver. It can embed different kinds of GPS receivers, such as: the new uBlox5 Galileo Ready, the uBlox – Antaris4, the Falcom JP13 LP based on SiRF Star III technology and the Falcom JP15 based on SiRF Star II. In the next months the platform will be adapted to accommodate also other chipsets.

Sat-Surf includes communication capabilities using a GSM/GPRS quad-band unit that enables the development of innovative A-GPS strategies as well as the study of DGPS techniques.

The Sat-Surfer software thanks to its flexibility allows the interface to the Sat-Surf and includes the possibility of data collection and storage.Hardware and software are complemented by a set of proposed exercises, included in the package, that ranges from a simple level of usage, to an advanced for development of original navigation algorithms for data processing.

More information are available on the official web site: http://www.navsas.ismb.it/sat-surf or contacting us at: sat-surfer@ismb.it

IRGAL Workshop

Today in Torino a major event is concluding the activities of the IRGAL project. The IRGAL project has been co-funded by the European Union, the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Piedmont Region within the DOCUP 2000-2006 Mis. 3.4 programme and aimed at increasing the competitive edge of the Piedmont ICT district in the crucial areas of Time and Receivers that can be regarded as the core of satellite navigation. Specifically, research was focused on the areas of atomic clocks, optical links for time transfer, GNSS SW receiver and HW RF components with the objective of developing innovative technologies and finalizing them up to pre-competitive prototypes.

In the demo session the software receiver developed by the NavSAS group is presented, working in real time on the L1 band.

160 attendees made the workshop very successfull, demonstrating the capability of the sinergies between research and industry in the Turin area on the GNSS topics.

ION GNSS conference closed

The ION GNSS conference finished today, and as every year it has been an amazing experience of scientific growth, discussion and networking with the best people in the world dealing with Satellite Navigation.

The NavSAS team had the chance to present 8 papers (eventually all the alternates became oral presentations):

• Signal Compression for an Efficient and Simplified GNSS Signal Parallel Acquisition: M. Nicola, A. Nordio, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; M. Fantino, M. Pini, P. Mulassano, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
• Reduced Complexity Circuits for Serial Code Phase Search Acquisition: G. Girau, L. Lo Presti, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; M. Fantino, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
• User Terminal/Local Element System for Network Based Positioning using RTK/EGNOS in Urban Environment: G. Marucco, C. Porporato, M. De Agostino, A.M. Manzino, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; F. Dominici, A. Defina, K. Charqane, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
• Cooperative LBS for Secure Transport System: A. Tomatis, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; G. Pau, University of California, Los Angeles; P. Mulassano, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy; F. Dovis, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• An Interference Impact Assessment Model for GNSS Signals: B. Motella, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy; S. Savasta, F. Dovis, D. Margaria, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• The IRGAL Project: Innovation and Research on Galileo in Piedmont: M. Pini, M. Fantino, P. Mulassano, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy; L. Lo Presti, Politechico di Torino, Italy; L. Bragagnini, Consorzio Torino Time, Italy
• Differential Data/Pilot Joint Acquisition Strategies for Indoor Galileo E1 Signal: T.H. Ta, L. Lo Presti, F. Dovis, D. Margaria, R. Lesca, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• GNSS Signal Analysis and Monitoring Tools Developed within the SWAN Project: E. Falletti, B. Motella, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy; D. Margaria, CNIT-Politecnico di Torino, Italy; L. Giugno, Wiser, Italy; M. Luise, CNIT-Universita degli Studi di Pisa, Italy; R. Marracci, Intecs, Italy; F. Longo, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana

and another paper was presented by our colleagues of the geomatics department of Politecnico

• The New L2C GPS Code: Signal and Positioning Quality Analysis: M. De Agostino, M. Piras, C. Porporato, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Next year the conference will be again in Savannah, and we will be ready to the funny experience of getting the boat to reach the convention center on the other side of the river facing the city !

ION GNSS conference started

Today the ION GNSS conference started in Savannah, GA. more than 1000 attendees are expected, and 6 people of the NavSAS group are there to give presentations, discuss cooperations, and collect pieces of information on the latest developments in the Satellite Navigation fields.
Again, an outstanding experience for all the researchers of Politecnico and ISMB.

NavSAS at the GNSS Summer School

Here is the report of the first day at the Second International Summer School on Global Satellite Navigation Systems by Gianluca Falco, a NavSAS Ph.D.

After a long trip, finally I reached Berchtsgaden, a quite small village close to the Bavarian Alps that is the established site for the GNSS summer school. Few minutes after my arrival, I had the chance to meet some participants to this school. They come from a lot of countries spread all over the world: Germany (of course), Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Russia, also outside Europe such as Brazil, Australia, USA, and even from Rwanda! I spoke with lots of them: four of them work for Septentrio company in Belgium, other guys work for DLR (German Aerospace Agency) testing GNSS system. Then I talked with Russian guys that work for the Russian Space Agency in Moscow (of course the navigation system they use is GLONASS).

At 6 PM professor Guenther Hein started the opening ceremony.
He provided us an overview of what we'll do in the next ten days of the school, speaking about the content of the lectures we'll follow. A very interesting topic of his speech is that we'll have the chance to receive and test a real Galileo signal computing the user's position thanks to three pseudo-like satellites set up on the top of the mountains nearby Berchtsgaden.

Then he introduced three other famous professors: Prof. Per Enge of Standford University, Prof. Michel Bousquet of ISAE (French Aerospace Engineering Institute) and Prof. R. Grohe of the Technical University in Aachen.

Then we moved to the Congress Hall to follow a lecture given by Thomas Reiter, a former astronaut for ESA who experienced twice how life in space is. In fact he was on board engineer for the Euromir mission in March 1995 when he spent 179 days on board of the space station. Then a couple of years ago he took part to the Astrolab mission, the first European long-term mission on board the international space station. During this lecture he showed us some videos about life on board a space station and what are the tasks that each astronauts has to fulfill every day to maintain a right working of the space station. Then he explained us that a lot of experiment were made inside the space station: biologic ones (about the study of the growth of some vegetables and to make them more robust against disease), tests about plasma particles (used for example to manufacture more advanced semiconductors) and, last but not least, lot of tests on human beings focused, in particular, on heart check up.

NavSAS Mid Term meeting.

Yesterday the NavSAS group had the Mid Term plenary meeting. It has been a chance to verify the personal and team objectives foreseen for the 2008.

The meeting aimed also at sharing among people of the NavSAS who work on different sub-topics the milestone achieved by everyone, sharing some of the good results, and also the weaknesses still to be improved.
Any weakness is in fact also an opportunity.

There are still 6 months for everyone to achieve the year's objectives. Now back to work !!!!