Introduction: When Your Gadgets Become Illegal Overseas A British oil executive on a yoga retreat in the Himalayas found himself in an Indian jail for nearly a week – his crime was carrying a satellite phone qz.com. In another case, a Canadian traveler was detained at a Goan airport simply for having a Garmin GPS…
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Overview: Xona Space Systems and the Pulsar Constellation Project Xona Space Systems is a Silicon Valley startup aiming to build a next-generation satellite navigation network as an alternative and complement to GPS. Founded in 2019 by a team of Stanford-educated engineers (including alumni of SpaceX and Stanford’s GPS Lab), Xona’s mission is to “rebuild satellite…
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Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS have revolutionized how we find our position on Earth. Yet, the standard GPS accuracy (on the order of several meters) often isn’t sufficient for missions like precision farming, engineering surveys, autonomous navigation, or tectonic measurements gssc.esa.int. To bridge this accuracy gap, two advanced techniques have emerged over the…
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Have you ever taken GPS for granted on your phone and wondered if other countries have their own “GPS”? It turns out an intense global navigation space race is underway – and the upgrades are astonishing. The U.S., Europe, China, and Russia are modernizing and expanding their Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like never before.…
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