How do we explain what took a rather unobtrusive boy from an unobtrusive family, an only child, from a city in Spain to foreign lands and then to the capital of Europe, to play an essential role in the European Union’s flagship space program? How did he get from there to there? Shall we say fate, or destiny? Or was it just hard work?

Ignacio Fernández Hernández has worked very hard, and relentlessly, mostly quietly, and with discipline and creativity, and the fruits of his labor are clear to see in the long list of his academic distinctions, publications and patents, and, even more so, in his accumulated technical achievements with the EGNOS and Galileo programs.

Fertile Soil

Fernández was the kind of kid who grows up to become an engineer. He was calm and studious, and enjoyed being on his own, and he was fascinated, as all engineers should be, by computers, videogames, science fiction, and Marvel comic books.

He is an authentic “gato madrileño,” a pedigreed “Madrid cat,” that is a native-born Madrilenian whose parents were native-born Madrilenians. One senses he is proud of that fact, and well he might be. Madrid is one of the world’s great cities, the capital of Spain and one of the most populous cities in Europe. With its impressive remains, and its glorious renaissance, baroque and neoclassical art and architecture, today’s Madrid is nevertheless a thoroughly modern city, alive with energy and excitement, nurturing poets, musicians and artists of the highest order, but also scientists, researchers and engineers.

Fernández’s father was an economist by training but an artist at heart, as was Fernández’s paternal grandfather. “They were both amateur painters,” Fernández said. “I may have inherited some of my more chaotic side from my fathers. As a child I liked drawing, and then, later on, as a teenager, I got very interested in music and even played in some indie bands.” We did say “mostly” quietly.

For the balancing elements in his character, he credits his mother: “I learned discipline from my mother; she came from a more conservative family where many worked for the army. She studied pharmacy and was the first woman in her direct family line to earn a university degree. She always wanted me to become a medical doctor.” Fernández didn’t do that, but we suspect his mother is quite happy with the direction her son, the Doctor of Philosophy, did take.

“I always liked more science-related matters,” Fernández said. “When it was time for university, I hesitated between telecommunications and industrial engineering, choosing the latter because it was more generic, but also because the engineering school was five minutes from home—that’s a lot of travel time saved over a six-year degree. The telecommunications might have come in handy, like when I find myself having to deal with signal theory, but I can’t complain.”

Fernández continued to shine in college. He earned his MSc degree in industrial engineering, specializing in electronics, in 2001, from Madrid’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales ICAI, scoring a grade of 10/10 on his thesis. That’s perfect. And he followed up by landing the perfect job, his first one, working for GMV Aerospace and Defence.

Backing up slightly, we note he had already found the perfect partner, in a bar in Madrid. “That’s where I met Paloma,” he said, “but we might have met somewhere else, because we were from the same neighborhood and had many interests and friends in common.

“It was the summer after my freshman year. I was playing drums in a band and after we met, I invited her to come see us play. That was when we started going out together. I never have enjoyed much being on stage,” he added, with a wink, “but it did pay off that time.” The pair have been together ever since.

GNSS from the get-go

Fernández was hired by GMV in 2001. “Getting that job was really a matter of luck,” he said. “Isabel Castrillo was recruiting engineers out of ICAI to work in aerospace, and she became my first boss.”

He started working with GNSS right away. GMV was building a platform to validate the EGNOS Central Processing Facility (CPF). “I knew almost nothing about GNSS,” he said, “so I was mainly in charge of configuring drivers and ensuring everything worked. Later, I was assigned more tasks and got familiar with EGNOS, GPS and so on. After two years, I was detached to Langen, Germany, as part of the assembly, integration and validation (AIV) team, where EGNOS was being AIVed in a big workshop, ‘the factory.’”

Fernández was responsible for the Central Processing Facility—Processing Set (CPFPS), the central element of EGNOS calculating GPS integrity and corrections. “It was like working on Noah’s ark,” he said, “with a bit of everything, processing and control stations, signal uplink racks, receivers… Of course, things never worked the first time, but eventually it all came together. In the control center, some kilometers from the factory, someone sent a command and a few seconds later a little box turned green on the screen, which meant the EGNOS signal was being broadcast all over Europe from the geostationary satellite. It was a great and exciting time.

“In my years as a system validation engineer,” Fernández said, “I gained a lot of respect for AIV and ops teams. Their work is not as visible as some others’, but there is some great engineering that takes place in those teams, and every signal we provide depends on them.”

By 2004, Fernández had been promoted to EGNOS test manager, a job that took him to all the EGNOS control centers at the time—to Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK—to test new EGNOS versions. “Unlike many of my friends, I never applied for an Erasmus scholarship when I was at university, although I had always longed to spend time abroad. Now, I was finally getting the chance to travel, and the fact that it was for EGNOS made it that much more satisfying.”

Galileo, OSNMA and HAS

In 2008, Fernández joined the European Union’s GNSS Supervisory Authority, the GSA, the organization that would become the European Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA). In 2009, he moved on to the European Commission (EC), where he is currently Galileo Authentication and High Accuracy Manager.

“About a decade ago,” Fernández said, “we had the EU GNSS Regulation, which said Galileo had to provide a ‘commercial service’ [CS] as an added value.” The CS concept would eventually evolve into separate services, the Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) and the High Accuracy Service (HAS). A third, the Signal Authentication Service (SAS) is now in the works. Fernández has been instrumental in the development of all these new services.

“The idea for OSNMA,” Fernández said, “was to use Galileo OS spare bandwidth to ‘digitally sign’ the message. We proved early on that we could do something simple and efficient, but Galileo is a complex system, with many stakeholders and priorities, and not everyone shared our enthusiasm. It was like jumping on a train that had already departed.

“HAS was initially foreseen as a broadcast data service from commercial providers. However, we got the instruction from top management, who deserve full credit for the move, to develop our own service for free, and our work shifted to defining the best possible HAS with the infrastructure already in place.”

In his typical style, Fernández credits others for the success of OSNMA and HAS, including EUSPA, EU-funded research projects AALECS and NACSET, the EU Joint Research Center (JRC), GSC and WP1X engineering support, the European Space Agency (ESA) and his many excellent colleagues at the European Commission. “The beginnings were very modest,” he said, “but there are many teams involved now, so any success we may see with HAS and OSNMA is the result of their work.” He won’t say it, so we will—it’s the result of his work too.

Working order

“We are close to officially launching the OSNMA initial service,” Fernández said, “after transmitting the signal publicly for three years, with very good stability and performance. The service will be here just in time, given the recent cases of spoofing in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Our HAS initial service was launched in 2023, and since then we’ve been providing very precise Galileo and GPS orbit, clock and code bias corrections worldwide, very reliably, allowing dm-level or even cm-level positioning with PPP [Precise Point Positioning] algorithms.”

New HAS- and OSNMA-based applications are appearing across all continents. In Europe, these services are considered flagship capabilities, used in smart tachographs, for satellite orbit determination, timing, in drones and consumer applications, and, Fernández said, “We like to think they have helped improve the way Galileo is perceived.”

All of this has certainly improved the way Fernández is perceived. With a grin, he explained, “When I started, CS was not precisely the highest priority for the Galileo program, and I had to bear with office colleagues who, in a friendly way, teased me about how ‘important’ my new responsibilities were.” We will forgive Fernández now if he feels a “friendly” satisfaction, the one-time Ugly Duckling, at last in full flight. He and his team are currently working on the upcoming SAS as well as the so-called HAS Phase 2.

Still Going Strong

Fernández and GNSS hit it off from the start, and he’s never cooled. “It was love at first sight,” he said. “And, as in any good relationship, there are things that you only discover with time. I’ve come to appreciate the breadth of satnav engineering, a science of sciences. We use the work of Kepler, Newton, Einstein, a lot of geophysics and geodesy for atmospheric propagation and reference frames, control and signal theory, a lot of algebra and statistics. And of course this is mixed with cutting-edge engineering, like the two-mm² chips that carry multi-GNSS, multi-band receivers.

“Finally, I’ve met so many talented and nice people from all regions of the world. I feel very lucky to be part of this community. And the importance of satnav for society is undeniable, so I like to think we are doing our little bit toward building a better world.”

Somehow, in between those amazing projects, Fernández managed to earn a Graduate Certificate in Management from Boston University, Brussels Campus, a master’s in business administration degree (MBA) from the London Business School, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) from Aalborg University, making his entire family very proud. He also has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s GPS Lab and currently serves as visiting professor of Electrical Engineering at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Home Base

And all along the way, there has been Paloma. “I met my wife when we were both very young. She is a journalist, but she quit her job when we came to Brussels, which I will always appreciate. But she has done so many other things, helped me in so many ways. I owe it all to her, more than to anyone else, any of my own personal achievements.”

We know of at least two things Paloma has given Fernández. They’re called Alejandro and Nachete (little Ignacio). “My boys are still pre-teenagers,” Fernández said, “so it’s early to say which way they will go in life. I tell them I’m a very tolerant father and will support them in any subject they want to pursue… within engineering.” Another wink means he’s kidding, we think. “Anyway, they do seem to be science oriented. One assembled his own computer at a very young age. I will support them, they same way my mother supported me, even when she didn’t get the medical doctor she wanted.”

By the way, Fernández still enjoys music, and while he doesn’t play as much as he used to, he can occasionally be seen performing at ION GNSS+ open mic night. Yes, the photo is real.

“Usually, during the week, we have a lot of stuff going on,” he said, “so when we have a free moment we like to just hang around at home with the kids.” He doesn’t get to see his parents as often as he’d like, but he stays in touch. And to Madrid he will always return.

Fernández is an engineer at heart. “That’s what I enjoy most,” he said. “It has to do with trying to approach things analytically and objectively, being curious about how things work, and looking for solutions.” He seems to have found the solutions to a few exciting problems, not least the one called life. And, yes, it was probably the hard work that got him there.

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The Institute of Navigation’s (ION) Satellite Division awarded Dr. John Raquet its Johannes Kepler Award on September 20, 2024, during the ION GNSS+ 2024 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, for significant technical contributions to GPS/GNSS integrated navigation systems; sustained leadership in the Department of Defense (DoD) and international community; and for the education of navigation professionals.

Dr. Raquet invented the first network of differential receivers that performed carrier-phase differential GPS over a large region using the data from the entire network, developing the concept of a “virtual reference station” that significantly impacted the precision navigation community. These precise GNSS positioning algorithms have since been commercialized and adopted by several companies throughout the world. 

Dr. Raquet is a recognized expert in GNSS signal processing, where he has had patented impacts on ultra-tight GPS/INS integration and multipath characterization. Additionally, he has pioneered several different complementary GPS techniques, including vision-based navigation, navigation using signals of opportunity, magnetic field-based navigation, and barometer map-matching techniques (baronav). His analysis of the long-term statistics of the GPS satellite broadcast ephemeris error using precise orbits continues to impact ongoing research in improving GPS accuracy. 

Dr. Raquet spent his career in the development of the next generation embedded GPS/INS systems for military aircraft. He was pivotal in the early adoption of military GPS into U.S. Air Force (USAF) platforms. In the 1990’s he served on the team of technical experts integrating military GPS receivers into USAF aircraft for the first time. He led the development of the first flight truth reference systems for DoD that used carrier-phase differential GPS and his work enabled DoD to test aircraft navigation systems with unprecedented accuracy. He was also instrumental in the development and maintenance of navigation test systems used by the DoD.  He developed GPS navigation warfare training systems for the USAF which enabled pilots to experience realistic jamming environments without the cost and limitations of flying in a broadcast jamming field.

Dr. Raquet taught hundreds of students during his 21-year tenure at the Air Force Institute of Technology, with many officers becoming DoD leaders. He has taught GNSS to thousands at countless venues, including the DoD, the ION, and the ION’s Africa Outreach Program. Throughout his career, he has been a dedicated leader who worked to connect the civilian and military navigation communities. 

Dr. Raquet is currently a Senior Vice President at Integrated Solutions for Systems, Inc., and is the Director of the IS4S Dayton Site, where he is leading the development of open architecture approaches to developing navigation systems.  Previously, he was the founding director of the Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center at AFIT, and he was a Fulbright Scholar.  He holds a BS in Astronautical Engineering from the USAF Academy, an MS in Aero/Astro Engineering from MIT, and a PhD in Geomatics Engineering from the University of Calgary.  Dr. Raquet has served ION as both Satellite Division Chair and ION President, and he is an ION Fellow.

The Kepler Award recognizes and honors an individual for sustained and significant contributions to the development of satellite navigation. It is the highest honor bestowed by the ION’s Satellite Division. 

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Fruition is a word that comes to mind when examining the life and career of Steve Woolven. Experiences at an early age, at work and at school, left significant and lasting impressions, preparing him for a ground-breaking career in the research, development and commercialization of inertial positioning technology.

First, the Backdrop

“I was born in Toronto, Canada,” Woolven told Inside GNSS, “and then, as an infant, I moved to Ottawa, the capital, with my parents. I can remember as a kid the snowbanks being so high by February that you could stand on them and touch the eavestroughs of the roof.” He was already reaching for the sky. “Things like that stick out,” he said. “We lived in Ottawa until I was about 12, and then moved back to Toronto.”

Young Woolven grew up playing football, Canadian football, which is very similar but not identical to American football. “The Ottawa Rough Riders were my favorite team,” he said. “I still watch the Canadian Grey Cup.”

By the time he got to high school, his career had taken an academic bent. Both his parents were very supportive of his scholarly endeavors, and that meant a lot to him, but his hands-on involvement in the family business had an equally telling impact. “My dad was an entrepreneur and was quite proud of his real estate business,” Woolven said, “but they also ran a family resort, with cottages that we rented out. It was an idyllic place. I remember we had just one phone out there, and it was a party line, so people could come up and just literally drop off the grid.”

Seeds Sown

“My dad was occupied running two businesses, so by the time I was 14, maybe 15, he basically handed me the reins of the family resort. I ran it, with my younger sister, with my dad as a backstop.”

The fact his father trusted him to take on the job says something about young Woolven’s character. His responsibilities included looking after the guests, and much more. “I learned to do all kinds of repairs,” he said, “plumbing, electrical and outboard engines. We worked with tractors, launching boats, cutting hay, grading roads, so I got a pretty wide set of experiences, and learned to be self-sufficient.”

It was about problem solving: “You had to do a lot of thinking on your feet,” Woolven said, “when you had guests standing at the door with a hot water tank that was leaking, or a boat motor that wouldn’t start.”

And about good business: “I guess today we would talk about the customer success perspective; if you do a good job, the guests come back, and they came back year after year. We were tremendously successful at getting repeat customers. Today, we refer to this as recurring revenue. We didn’t use that term back then, but that’s what it was.” And that was something Woolven would remember.

The Academic

Unsurprisingly, the president of a highly innovative technology firm was interested in math and science as a student, but also history, and he credits a tough Grade 13 English teacher with instilling in him an appreciation for the written word.

Woolven became the first in his family—though not the last; he was followed by his younger sister—to graduate from university. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, including a doctorate, from the University of Toronto.

“As an undergrad I did a program called Engineering Science. It was a mix of pure sciences, two years of heavy physics and math, and then four years of engineering specialization crammed into the last two years. It was a tough undergraduate degree, hugely broad, from general relativity, special relativity to thermodynamics, and then all the engineering courses. And we had a terrific group of people, some of whom I still run across in business today.”

In grad school, he was all about integrated optics, blending lightwave theory in physical optics with electronic digital signal processing. “At the time, it was pretty leading-edge stuff,” he said, “and to some extent it still is, and from day one my goal was to come out of university with a Ph.D.”

“We were working under contract with one of the Canadian defense research institutes,” he recalled. “My thesis was around developing an optical computer for real-time target detection and recognition. Woolven did a master’s and then a Ph.D. in accelerated style. He was zeroing in on his true calling, though he didn’t know it yet.

“That was really good practice for later commercial and industrial experience,” he said. Indeed. “We faced the same kind of challenge when I joined Applied Analytics [now Applanix],”Woolven said, “where we wanted to take the research, IP technology, something that you can demonstrate on a bench, and move it into the field in a reliable product, something a customer can use to actually solve a problem.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Woolven first had to make the big move. “The fact is, I had my mind set on a career in academia. I loved the research and teaching and that’s what I wanted to do.”

From College to Applanix

“The next step for me was post Ph.D. research work at U of T, extending the research I’d already done, while also lecturing graduate students. One of the people I was doing research with at the defense institute happened to be sitting across the hall from another researcher who was working with the founders of a new start-up. These were the Applied Analytics founders, Blake Reid, Erik Lithopoulos and Bruno Scherzinger. The person I knew thought I should meet them. Of course, I didn’t know a thing about them. And I couldn’t Google them.” It was the early 90s. “They’d come out of Honeywell’s Advanced Technology Center, here in Canada, and had won several defense research contracts, doing integrated navigation for industrial applications.”

Woolven set up an interview with Reid and learned they had a story and a vision. “The dream was inspiring,” he said, “to take a technology developed for defense applications and move it into the industrial space, the professional survey and mapping space. I remember leaving the interview, calling my wife and saying—”

What a minute. Wife? We missed something here, but we’ll catch up with that half of the story later.

“—calling my wife and saying, ‘I don’t know if these guys have a hope of succeeding, but this looks like it could be a really fun ride.’” Woolven joined Applied Analytics full time in 1992 as employee No. 8.

That first Applied Analytics Technology

“The company was using inertial technology, GNSS technology and other sensors to create what we now call a sensor fusion engine,” Woolven said. “In other words, it was the grandfather of the technology that is in all Applanix products to this day. It was a big five-foot rack back then, what the first fielded Applanix POS systems came out of, written in Ada. They were using it as a benchmark to test the accuracy of new helicopter navigation systems, and also in underwater towed body research, using acoustics to look for—you can guess what they were looking for—undersea bodies that are bigger than a bread box but smaller than a car.”

As the company grew, Woolven went from research engineering to industrial engineering to project manager and eventually became head of engineering. But the company still had a way to go. “We were a bunch of really smart engineers,” he said, “but when it came to understanding what the market needed, we probably thought we knew more than we did.”

The company made a series of thoughtful moves, bringing in key personnel, with the right experience and perspective, who would ultimately help to transform the business. Dieter Zeuner joined Applanix out of Zeiss, formerly in East Germany, and helped the company understand the pathway into the aerial photogrammetric market. “Dieter led us down the path of taking this technology and making it work in the digital photogrammetric space and the brand new aerial LiDAR space,” Woolven said. “And on the marine side, we partnered with Roger Hutchins, who helped us understand the marine hydrographic segment.

“These individuals knew what the problems were that needed to be solved in the real world. They understood the hardware we needed to work with and most importantly the customer workflows. We needed that practical knowledge. Without it, I don’t think we would have been anywhere near as successful as we ultimately have been.”

There was something about Applanix, a certain, dare we say, “magic,” and the world of surveying and mapping was starting to feel it.

The Trimble Affair

By the late 1990s, Applanix was growing rapidly. “We had inertial technology down pat,” Woolven said, “but in order to push the performance and drop cost, we needed to get access to GNSS. Not just the boards, but to get into the actual IP of GNSS. We also knew that Trimble had great technology and great access to markets, customers and distribution.”

To be sure, anyone who was around at the time knew Trimble was a big-time navigation and positioning company that had its act together. Discussions ramped up between the two companies in early 2003, and by July of that year, Trimble was able to announce that it had agreed to acquire Applanix, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“The intent was always to bring Applanix technology into the Trimble fold,” Woolven said, “so that our sensor fusion engines would become available right across the Trimble product line, and then to build, to integrate their GNSS with our aided inertial technology.” The first generation of tightly coupled technology, after the acquisition, was dubbed, for internal purposes, mPOS.

Applanix was already known as a premium, high-end brand. “Our products tended to live in the upper end of the price points,” Woolven said. “After the acquisition, we worked to build out our portfolio, to service customers from entry level requirements right through to high end products, and we’ve continued to push that barrier.

“Our technology has demonstrated the ability to work in really difficult GNSS or GNSS-denied areas,” he said. “Of course, open-sky technology is important, but anybody can do GNSS in the middle of a farmer’s field. It’s a different story once you get into more complex, urban environments. It took a lot of hard work. We did testing in downtown San Francisco, for example, which is a nightmare for GNSS, and in many ports and harbors, where you’re in and around bridges, large vessels, big cranes overhanging, constantly causing GNSS occlusion. It was those kinds of issues that we couldn’t solve without tightly coupled algorithms. Then, to be able to take the technology into difficult areas, holding accuracy for a longer period of time, or giving you high-accuracy, direct georeferencing data, at a price point that makes sense for your business model; that was really the game changer.”

What’s That Magic?

“One of the things that makes us special is the way we serve our customers, being there when they need us and finding solutions,” Woolven said. “Having great technology is crucial, but it’s the ability to provide the whole product, from the hardware to the post-processing software, and Trimble RTX®, which is our advanced precise point positioning technology, and then we bring our entire customer success organization, where, when the customer has a problem, say you’ve got a survey vessel sitting at the dock or an airplane sitting on the tarmac and it can’t take off. We’re able to support those customers, walk them through things, whatever it needs, to limit their downtime.

“And then, we’ve had those true visionaries, Dieter, Roger, Erik Lithopoulos, who could actually see that the industry was changing, moving toward digital photogrammetry, for example, knowing that LiDAR scanning wasn’t going to work without direct georeferencing. It’s about knowing what those new businesses are going to need, and mapping out what the end game is going to look like. Then you can bring that vision back to engineers, so we can go away and develop it.”

Today, many people think of Applanix as a hardware company, and it still is that, but Woolven said it’s much more. “We’re good at making hardware, but that’s not really our core IP. What we do is make algorithms that solve people’s problems. We code them up, make embedded firmware, desktop and cloud software, and that, married with the hardware, is what makes the magic happen. It’s the application of those algorithms to solving people’s real-world problems. That’s what we’re really good at.”

Better Than Ever

Woolven has continued to work to move Applanix into new markets, like the UAV market. “We launched the Trimble PX-1 RTX, targeting commercial drone navigation,” he said. This is the much lauded, robust, centimeter-level, continuous GNSS-inertial positioning engine with over-the-air Trimble CenterPoint® RTX correction service.

“It’s meant a different approach to our customers in that market,” Woolven said. “Rather than a single-sale type of product, it’s more like a cell-phone business model, where you buy the hardware for a small amount of money, it gets integrated into the UAV, and then you buy the capability you need, depending on what type of job you’re flying, whether that’s a single-base type solution, or you might want to use CenterPoint RTX technology…It allows our customers to tailor their own business models so that the costs fit the projects they’re trying to do.”

All that attention paid to customers, understanding their issues, solving problems on the fly and keeping everybody happy, sounds kind of like running a family holiday resort as a teenager in Canada. “There was less sensor fusion back then,” Woolven said.

No Place Like Home

Woolven still lives in Toronto, where he has been and remains a family man. It was his wife, readers will recall, in whom he confided, all those years ago, when it was time to decide on his pathway forward.

“My wife has just as many degrees as I do,” Woolven said. “She’s a medical doctor, currently chief of Family and Community medicine at one of the downtown Toronto hospitals, so she’s got a few things on her plate. She’s a well published author and was just recognized as the family medicine physician of the year here in Toronto. She’s pretty accomplished and I’m pretty proud of her.”

The results of this stellar union were, among other things, two children, a boy, now 28, and a girl, now 25, who just graduated with a master’s degree in Psychotherapy. “We had our hands full when the kids were young, two kids, two dogs and two active careers. But we made it run by working as a team,” Woolven said.

Woolven’s mother passed away several years ago, but his father, now 90, remains the rock-solid foundation of the Woolven line, and he still enjoys keeping young Woolven on his toes. “We still go out hiking,” Woolven said. “Not too long ago we went out to hike Zion National Park in Utah, like we used to do when I was younger. This time we took my son, so we had three generations raising dust out there.” To celebrate his dad’s 90th, in 2023, Woolven took the family up to the Muskokas, near Georgian Bay, for another week of hiking. It seems you can’t keep those Woolven boys down.

The old family resort is still there, now under a different owner, the senior Woolven having sold it some 20 years ago. The descendants of some of the guests Woolven used to serve still come back every year. Credit his own proficiency in attending to their needs. No doubt management of the place has suffered since he ran it as a boy, but his attention was needed elsewhere. We think he’s kept the place with him, in his heart and in his head, the whole time. He’s worked his own kind of magic to help turn Applanix into a very successful concern. Fruition, we said. Fruition, indeed.

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Succeeding O’Connor as president and CEO is Ivan Di Federico, who currently serves as executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Topcon Positioning Systems. After two decades with the company, Di Federico will assume his new role on September 1, 2024.

“It has been a true privilege to lead Topcon Positioning Systems for the past three decades and witness the incredible growth and evolution of the company,” said Ray O’Connor. “I am immensely proud of what our team has accomplished, and confident that Ivan is the right leader to take the company into the future. His deep technical expertise, strategic vision, and proven track record of driving innovation make him the ideal choice to lead the company through its next chapter of growth and success.”

Under O’Connor’s leadership, Topcon Positioning Systems has experienced dramatic organic growth and expansion into new markets and product lines. During his tenure, he was responsible for numerous key acquisitions, as well as the expansion into GNSS, radios, machine automation, and global positioning software and workflow solutions for the construction and precision agriculture industries.

“Ray has made significant contributions to the global positioning industry through his many patents, inspired by his product vision and application experience — I am honored to succeed him as president and CEO of Topcon Positioning Systems,” said Ivan Di Federico. “Ray has built an exceptional company and a talented team, and I look forward to building upon this strong foundation to drive continued innovation and growth. As we navigate an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving market landscape, I am confident that our strategic focus, operational excellence, and world-class solutions will position the company for continued success.”

In addition to the leadership transition, Topcon also announced that Philip Thach will be promoted to executive vice president (EVP) chief operating officer, and EVP chief financial officer, effective September 1, 2024. Thach joined Topcon in 2018 as CFO and has been instrumental in developing financial controls, strategic planning, and operational efficiencies.

The announcement of these executive leadership changes reflects Topcon’s commitment to a thoughtful and well-planned succession process that will ensure a smooth transition and continued momentum for the company, while maintaining its customer-centric culture and values. With a strong leadership team in place, Topcon is poised to build on its history of innovation and market leadership.

For more information on Topcon Positioning Systems, visit topconpositioning.com.

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David Somerville, General Manager, Silicon Sensing explains: “This is an exciting development for us and reflects the growing demand for our products in the region, a growth which is forecast to continue over the coming years as the need increases for precision motion sensing for ever-more compact platforms, whether on land, sea, air or in space.” 

Silicon Sensing supplies gyros, accelerometers and inertial measurement units into diverse markets including autonomous vehicles, surveying and mapping, space, defence, aerospace and construction and industrial machinery. Some of these markets are projected to experience double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for inertial sensors through to 2030, alongside fast-evolving inertial requirements for a new generation of applications. 

Somerville continues: “We expect our next generation of products, currently in development, to take micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) inertial performance to new levels, redefining what this technology is capable of. This vital new presence in North America will ensure we are prepared with effective, responsive in-region support.” 

The new office will be situated in Lake Mary, FL and will support personnel covering all US time zones, with direct access also available for customers in South America and Canada. 

Kevin Swain, Head of Sales – Americas, comments: “Our goal is to ensure our existing customer base, in both the commercial and defense markets, is well supported, recognising how critical their projects can be.  And then to provide an accessible response to new customer enquiries in the region. These are exciting times when we are regularly approached to discuss new, innovative – sometimes unexpected – projects that require effective, sustained precise motion sensing. This role and this office will offer a local contact for those discussions.”

Kevin Swain comes to this new role from Psionic where he was Sr. Director of Defense. He started his career in inertial products with Silicon Sensing some 20 years ago, assuming positions of increasing responsibility until 2020. He then took a position outside of the company, returning to Silicon Sensing to take up this role. Kevin is excited to be returning to lead the expansion in North America. 

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IGM: Jamie, we’ve been hearing a lot about Inertial Labs, especially regarding GNSS vulnerability and operations in GNSS-denied environments. Can you tell us about Inertial Labs’ solutions for these challenges?

Jamie Marraccini: Inertial Labs has been around for 20 years, focusing on building core technologies in inertial navigation. We develop inertial sensors, from small ones suitable for GNSS navigation to high-performance ones competing with fiber optic gyros. We combine these with magnetometers, receivers, and other inputs to create robust navigation solutions.

IGM: So, you’re GNSS receiver agnostic and integrate with various systems based on customer needs?

Jamie Marraccini: Exactly. We test and work with different receivers to choose the right one for each project. This flexibility allows us to tailor solutions to specific customer requirements, ensuring optimal performance and integration.

IGM: Beyond inertial sensors, what other technologies are you incorporating into your solutions?

Jamie Marraccini: We’ve expanded to include computer vision, antennas for receiver protection, and time-of-flight sensors. We also integrate data from various sources, such as altimeters, to enhance navigation. These technologies allow us to create comprehensive, customizable solutions for different platforms and use cases.

IGM: How do you ensure these solutions meet the specific needs of your customers?

Jamie Marraccini: We engage with customers early in the project to understand their use cases and requirements. Our mission computers are open for users to modify, enabling collaborative integration. This approach helps us recommend the right components and configurations to solve their navigation problems effectively.

IGM: Given your extensive experience, what trends are you seeing in terms of navigation requirements and solutions?

Jamie Marraccini: The main trends are reducing size, weight, power, and cost. There’s also a growing need for multi-input solutions tailored to specific use cases. Many customers are now looking for robust navigation in GNSS-denied environments, which requires innovative approaches and technologies.

IGM: How important is it to educate your customers about the complexities of GNSS-denied environments?

Jamie Marraccini: It’s crucial. Many developers focus on building their vehicles and take navigation for granted, assuming GPS will always be available. We help them understand the challenges of GNSS denial and the importance of incorporating multiple inputs for a reliable navigation solution.

IGM: What are some specific applications where Inertial Labs’ solutions are making a significant impact?

Jamie Marraccini: We’re seeing a lot of activity in airborne operations, both fixed-wing and multi-rotor, as well as surface vessels and unmanned ground vehicles. Our solutions are used in diverse applications, from extending operational ranges to ensuring precise navigation in complex environments.

IGM: How does Inertial Labs optimize performance for different customer requirements?

Jamie Marraccini: We tailor our solutions based on the customer’s operational needs, ensuring the right balance of performance, size, weight, and cost. Our goal is to provide reliable and effective navigation solutions that help our customers achieve their mission objectives.

For more information, visit Inertial Labs.

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Trimble, stands alongside the likes of Hexagon/NovAtel and Topcon as a key provider of global precise positioning solutions, and continues to make rapid inroads into new and expanding areas of activity.

“You can extend this into all the adjacent industries,” Casabianca said. “PNT is becoming a prevalent need in the telecomms business, for example, in IoT [internet of things], and also in the automotive industry. Within Trimble, within my own Positioning Services division, we are working closely with OEM manufacturers, car manufacturers, providing precise positioning engines and Trimble RTX correction services for cars.

“We don’t need a telecommunication devise for our corrections,” he said. “With some other services you have to talk about ground infrastructure, so those are really regional services. Ours is coming from the sky. You could be in the middle of Africa, in Latin America, in the middle of China or somewhere in the desert, you get centimeter accuracy.

“I consider absolute positioning as a core technology. You build from there, so if you’re doing visual odometry, you’re doing LiDAR positioning and so on, you need to rely on absolute positioning first.”

GNSS alternatives

It is now widely posited that while GNSS is a fundamental provider of PNT, it is not a sufficient provider of PNT. The issue of identifying alternative-PNT solutions, and, more recently, ‘complimentary-PNT’ solutions, has been raised, in Europe, in the U.S. and beyond.

Casabianca said, “I think one thing you will see in the future is a lot of companies, start-ups, in Silicon Valley, or even Elon Musk with his Starlink, looking at putting up LEO constellations, being able to provide data that could be used for PNT. There is obviously some benefit associated with that. The LEO signal would be stronger, so you could work in more challenging environments, inside a building, and think about some new applications, timing applications, for example.

“However, there are so many players right now trying to launch these LEO constellations. Who is going to do it for PNT, versus communication? But we need to look at it, Trimble, as a company, because, again, positioning, PNT, is our DNA, and we will support it and follow it and be a part of it.”

“Other people, ourselves included, are looking at mixing GNSS with Wi-Fi and other signals, for indoor positioning. You can also use video. If you look in the automotive industry, in autonomous driving, we see different approaches to positioning and navigation. You have the Tesla way, for example, which is 100 percent based on video imaging. Then there are approaches based on the use of sensors. For me, the ideal, the ultimate solution is a combination of all of the above.”

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NextNav Co-Founder Ganesh Pattabiraman has decided to step away from his role as CEO and Board of Directors member to spend more time with his family. Sorond joins NextNav with more than 28 years of technical and strategy experience in the telecommunications industry.

“Mariam’s extensive spectrum expertise and proven track record of evolving telecommunication technology and strategy align perfectly with the ongoing development of NextNav’s broad spectrum portfolio and industry-leading 3D geolocation and GPS resiliency capabilities,” said Gary Parsons, NextNav’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, according to a news release. “In recent years, Mariam led technology efforts at both VMware and CableLabs and was instrumental in architecting DISH’s wireless spectrum and network. Her deep skill set, and vast technical acumen will be invaluable to the team as it drives toward the next phase of its growth.”

Sorond most recently served as chief technology officer, SEBU for VMWare, where she helped to “define and evangelize its technical strategy as well as lead its digital transformation.” As the chief research and development officer at CableLabs, she focused on the future of converged connectivity of broadband cable and mobile networks.

Before joining the cable industry, Sorond served in several senior positions, including chief wireless architect of DISH, where she led the company’s entry into the wireless market. She also was responsible for spectrum technology and strategy, end-to-end technology development, and creating the next generation of network architecture and standards development. She currently serves as a member of the NTIA Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee and the FCC Technological Advisory Council.

“Having devoted my career to advancing and commercializing innovation in technology, I am thrilled to continue this journey at the helm of NextNav,” Sorond said, according to the release. “I am deeply committed to realizing the full value of NextNav’s spectrum asset and next-generation 3D PNT technology to drive growth and deliver long-term shareholder value.”

Pattabiraman “was instrumental” in Sorond’s recruitment, Parsons said, according to the release. He will continue to support the company as a senior advisor.

“Sixteen years ago, we had a vision for the next generation of GPS,” Pattabiraman said, according to the release. “With the roll out and adoption of the Pinnacle service nationwide for E911 and Public Safety, and recent steps by the Federal Government toward enabling resilient PNT in national critical infrastructure, I believe we are not only realizing that vision, but positioning NextNav as a global leader in next generation resilient PNT. With the company on strong foundational footing and a clear growth strategy in place, I feel confident this is the right time to hand over leadership to such an impressive and experienced executive as Mariam, while continuing to support the company’s key strategic initiatives.”

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Dr Mark Marshall has been appointed as Chief Engineer of Silicon Sensing Systems Ltd. Dr Marshall joined Silicon Sensing in 2017 as the lead engineer on numerous inertial programmes. Immediately prior to commencing as Chief Engineer he was the company’s Consultant Engineer and Electronics Discipline Manager. In this role he was responsible for the electronics and mechanical design of the company’s latest generation, tactical grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) – the DMU41.

Dr Marshall comments: “These are remarkable times in inertial sensing with a long held technological status quo now rapidly shifting. A number of recent micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) inertial product launches are truly challenging fibre-optic gyro (FOG) performance for the first time – with products that are much more compact and rugged – and less power consuming. One of these market disrupting products is our DMU41 9 degrees of freedom (DoF) IMU.”

He continues: “But we know there is so much more we can achieve. The generation of products we are developing today will significantly extend these performance gains, increase endurance and extract even more from system size, weight and power consumption. I am looking forward to leading our engineering team as we evolve these new products and bring them to the market.”

Before joining Silicon Sensing Dr Marshall worked as a senior research engineer in the field of laparoscopic electro-surgical instruments. He has a 1st class honours degree in Computer Aided Engineering, an MSc in Advanced Manufacturing Systems and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

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On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his one small step onto the surface of the Moon, and with that step, and with his moving words, he was assured a place in history. An estimated 650 million people around the world watched the event live, in homes, in auditoriums and in schoolrooms. It was a towering achievement for the men who stood on the lunar surface, but the lives of many others would also be changed forever.

Cheryl Gramling was a little girl in 1969. On that historic day in July, she was watching television while on vacation with her family in Atlantic City. “I was 8 years old at the time of the Apollo 11 landing,” Gramling told Inside GNSS. “Perhaps it sounds a bit cliché, but it was the Apollo missions that led me to my career. Watching the news broadcasts, particularly Jules Bergman with the Apollo trajectory drawn on the screen, inspired me. I wanted to design those trajectories.”

It was a profound desire that stuck with young Gramling. As a child, she liked going to summer camp, swimming, and playing tennis, but in school, her favorite subjects were math and physics. “When I was 14 years old,” Gramling said, “a friend of the family explained to me that to design those Apollo trajectories meant I needed to be an aerospace engineer. At the time, I thought engineers were just the fellows who drove trains. I had a lot to learn. But that is what led me to aerospace engineering.”

Gramling was the first in her immediate family to go to college. Her mother, who was s born in England, came to the USA in 1957 and found work as a secretary. Her father, from Baltimore, was an accountant.

First Stage

Gramling attended the University of Maryland at College Park, not far from the nation’s capital, where, aside from her classes, she enjoyed hiking and ice skating. She continued playing tennis and came to appreciate literature. She studied hard and was awarded a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1983. By 1985, she was doing what she’d dreamed of, designing flight trajectories for NASA.

Gramling served as flight dynamics lead for WIND, POLAR and GEOTAIL at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) from June 1985 to November 1991. She designed trajectories for the WIND and GEOTAIL missions, a series of double lunar swingbys, and the highly elliptical POLAR mission, also analyzing navigation strategies for WIND and POLAR. These were collaborative projects involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of Japan. They entailed coordinated, simultaneous investigations of the Sun-Earth space environment over an extended period of time.

It was during her early years at NASA that Gramling first came to grips with GNSS. “In 1986,” she said, “working for NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, I was developing systems for onboard autonomous navigation using signals from NASA tracking, telemetry, and command networks, mostly the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System [TDRSS].”

That GNSS Thing

Gramling said, “I was working with the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer [EUVE] project to fly an ultrastable oscillator and additional hardware in the flight transponder to extract the Doppler from a TDRSS forward link, then process through an Extended Kalman Filter to obtain a navigation solution for the spacecraft.” The system was called the TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS). “The Project Manager, Frank Cepollina, thought it would be awesome to have a ‘Fly-Off’ between TONS and a GPS system,” Gramling said. EUVE was also flying an engineering prototype GPS receiver from Motorola.

The TONS demonstration was very successful and resulted in an operational flight system on the Terra spacecraft, which was launched in December 1999. “The solution from the GPS pseudorange data was compared offline to the TONS solution and the calibrated standard GPS solution was found to be comparable to TONS,” Gramling said. “The distinction in the era after EUVE was that TONS didn’t require separate hardware for the solution—it was part of the comm system, whereas GPS required a separate antenna, RF front end and receiver.”

Gramling remembers this as a pivotal moment, a turning point in her own trajectory. “The advantage of an instantaneous realization of your orbital position from the kinematic GPS solution was evident in the EUVE demonstration,” she said. “Once the community realized that spacecraft needed to estimate the position and the velocity, I think it changed the game in receiver processing, leading to more filtered estimates to solve for the full state.”

The GNSS deal was sealed when, in the early 2000s, Gramling worked on the Magnetospheric MultiScale Mission (MMS). “Our team was analyzing different navigation solutions for the formation of four spacecraft in a tetrahedron with varying interspacecraft distances.” MMS are 3rpm ‘spinners’ in highly elliptical orbits: phase 1 orbit was 1.2x12RE, where RE is one Earth radius, and phase 2 was 1.2 x 25RE. “Both apoapses [orbital high points] were far above the GPS constellation,” Gramling said. “The team at GSFC had been working on both fast-acquisition and weak signal reception techniques for GPS receivers, and navigation simulations showed that use of GPS could provide very accurate navigation solutions for MMS.”

Flying autonomous navigation was not yet widely accepted, but the MMS navigation team made the case to fly GPS and the Goddard Enhanced Onboard Navigation System (GEONS) flight software onboard MMS. “Our case was based on the success of TONS onboard Terra and other LEO missions flying GPS receivers, a planned inflight use of the new receiver design in a LEO environment to qualify it and calibrate it, and analysis that clearly indicated use of GPS for MMS was a mission enabler,” Gramling said.

All of this set the stage quite handsomely for her current work, developing systems for cislunar PNT, both orbital and lunar surface-based. NASA has set the ambitious goal of establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon. A diverse set of commercial and international partners are currently engaged in this effort, aiming to set in motion a new round of scientific discovery, lunar resource use and economic development on both the Earth and at the Moon. Further, NASA believes lunar development can serve as a critical proving ground for deeper exploration into the solar system. Certainly, space communications and navigation infrastructure will play an integral part in realizing these goals.

NASA’s Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation System is part of an international architecture known as LunaNet, a services network that will enable lunar operations. This encompasses a wide variety of topology implementations, including surface and orbiting provider nodes. Four LunaNet service types are defined: networking services, position, navigation and timing services, detection services and science utilization services. “Lunar Relays will provide the Lunar Augmented Navigation System in the LunaNet framework,” Gramling said, “stemming from the terrestrial GNSS and the TDRSS to deliver a broadcast PNT service capable of providing common and mission-unique data to the lunar environment.”

Finding Love and Starting a Family

As if Gramling’s rise within NASA wasn’t stimulating enough, she managed to find another key source of interest, in the form of her husband. “We met while working at GSFC, although we didn’t work together at the time,” she said. “He is an engineer by education and is currently a program manager at NASA headquarters.”

When the couple started their family, Gramling cut back on her hours but still stayed involved. “My husband and I have three children,” Gramling said. “I was lucky enough to have a boss who supported my husband and my decision for me to work part-time while raising our children. This was before the days of official telework options.”

Gramling’s boss at the time, Jerry Teles, allowed her to work at home and was instrumental in piloting a telework program at NASA/GSFC. “Jerry was my first supervisor, as branch head, and he did not deprecate the importance or relevance of my work assignments,” Gramling said. “Working part time through the mid-years of my career was instrumental in enabling me to stay involved, continue to contribute meaningfully to missions, and then seamlessly return to full time work in 2005.”

Teles was a fierce defender against misogynistic attitudes in the workplace in the 1980s, Gramling said. “He held the bar high and expected his employees to take responsibility and to learn. After the Challenger accident, when the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory launch was delayed, Jerry developed and executed a plan to ensure all his recent early career hires, including me, received on-the-job training in relevant flight dynamics analyses to prepare this junior team for the mission.”

When Gramling showed an interest in advanced trajectory design, Teles introduced her to Dr. Robert Farquhar, under whom she learned multi-body trajectory design for lunar and Sun-Earth Lagrange missions. “Jerry also encouraged me, and others, to lead teams and take responsibility, supported by his mentorship,” Gramling said.

A Well-Rounded Life

Gramling’s three children now range in age from 30 to 25. “Our older son was a liberal arts major, and our daughter and youngest son both majored in engineering,” she said. “Outside of work, I like to bake, garden, hike, bike, walk, do needlework, read, and travel.” A quick glance at her family photos confirms Gramling indeed loves to travel, and she shares that passion with her family.

So, after a nice holiday, it’s back to the grind for Gramling, which may not be such a grind after all: “I have one of the coolest jobs in the world,” she confesses. “Working for NASA is an honor. Working on advancing technology and on navigation and guidance systems to ensure success for complex missions in challenging environments makes you want to go to work every day.”

Like so many top-flight engineers of her generation, Gramling was deeply inspired by NASA’s stunning accomplishment of landing men on the Moon. Within what seemed like just a few short years, she was working for the organization that had put them there. And there, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, she’s still doing her thing. And we can be sure she’s not just sitting at a desk with stars in her eyes. Gramling is not a dreamer, but a real moving force at NASA, as that esteemed and admired institution pushes forward on its return to the moon.

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