Image: Locata system at White Sands missile test range. Locata Corp.
What’s New: GPS World has published a series of interviews with PNT providers with systems that complement and/or can be alternatives to GNSS. We will be featuring each over the next several weeks.
Why It’s Important:
- We need PNT to maintain most every aspect of daily life in the developed world.
- In the west we over-rely on GPS. Per the U.S. National Security Council “GPS is a single point of failure.“
- As GPS World editor Matteo Luccio says in this interview “We now have four GNSS but they have some common failure points.”
What Else to Know:
- From the article “…the solution to satellite-based problems is not more satellites!” – Locata CEO Nunzio Gambale
- Full disclosure, some of the companies profiled in this series are members and supporters of the RNT Foundation. Locata is one of those.
PNT by Other Means: Locata
An exclusive interview with Nunzio Gambale, Co-Founder, President and CEO, Locata. For more exclusive interviews from this cover story, click here.
Image: Locata
In brief, how does Locata work? What are the key concepts?
Almost everything you know about GNSS pretty much applies to Locata. We are an extremely close cousin. We use trilateration; in other words, we use time of flight from transmitter to receiver as our pseudorange. We work with both code and carrier solutions. We transmit CDMA Gold Codes, chipped at 10MHz. Everything in the algorithms that you use for GNSS is pretty much the same, and so it feels extremely familiar to any GNSS engineer. We have an interface control document (ICD) that describes our over-the-air interface, exactly as GPS or Galileo does. That’s available to our integration partners. So, the similarities are incredibly close.
