10 November 2010
GLA R&RNAV presented papers in the Maritime Applications session on "GNSS availability during solar maximum: a threat to maritime navigation?" and "The Role of GNSS in e-Navigation and the Need for Resilience". "Radar Aids to Navigation in the age of GNSS" was given in a session on Augmentation Systems and "Monitoring the performance of GNSS and its augmentations" was provided as a poster. All papers, presentations and the poster are available from the R&RNAV publications webpage.
Summary
The ENC is the major navigation conference of the year in Europe and rotates round members of the European Groups of Institutes of Navigation (EUGIN). Following opening plenary sessions, with status presentations on different GNSS and a panel discussion, the conference was conducted in three parallel streams. Topics included Galileo Development & Test Results, Timing & Synchronisation, System & User Requirements, GNSS Integration, Software & Algorithms, Augmentations, Receiver & Antenna Technology, Signal Protection, and the different transport sectors. In common with previous conferences in this series the majority of papers related to GNSS, with a high proportion on EGNOS and Galileo.
The maritime papers occupied one session of five papers, two from R&RNAV. These were: "GNSS availability during solar maximum: a threat to maritime navigation?" and "The Role of GNSS in e-Navigation and the Need for Resilience". A presentation "Radar Aids to Navigation in the age of GNSS" was given in a session on Augmentation Systems and "Monitoring the performance of GNSS and its augmentations" was provided as a poster.
Amongst many presentations on EGNOS, it was noted that the Open Service had been declared available in September 2010 and that the Safety of Life service was due to be declared operational in December 2010. It was stated that "Maritime can profit from better accuracy". However, the use of the EGNOS signal for safety critical applications by other sectors would need to be defined and would need Minimum Operational performance Standards. Working agreements had been reached between the EGNOS provider (ESSP) and air navigation service providers.
A generic approach to standardisation, GAUSS, noted "precise docking" as a potential maritime application, but had identified only two relevant documents on maritime standardisation, compared with many more for aviation and rail.
The other maritime presentations were from Bulgaria on "Information Characteristics of a Man-Operator for ensuring the Vessel’s Safety of Navigation", from Korea on "A Computation Method of Differential Corrections for Virtual Maritime Reference Stations Based on AIS" and from Poland on "Exploitative properties of different types of satellite compasses".
