GNSS Markets and Applications - Understanding GPS: Principles and Applications - page 642

Roots of commercial GPS

Early 1960s 1967 1973 oil crisis Late 1970s

U.S. Navy
transit
SATNAV

Limited
commercial
use for survey
and ship nav

- Increased use by oil tankers
(Saved $$)
- Increased demand
- Lowered equipment cost

Expanded
ship navigation,
fishing,
land survey
(100,000 users)

Transit experience

1973
Congress funds Mil SATNAV to replace Transit and provides for civil use

Figure 12.1 Roots of commercial GPS.

developed the first GPS set to use only the L1 C/A signal. It was a sequencing receiver
and could handle low flight dynamics. It was tested by NASA and the FAA. Another
early civil GPS developer was Trimble Navigation. In Europe, THALES has a sub-
stantial GPS business that developed internally and from acquisitions that date back
many years.
The established, public, pure GPS commercial companies Trimble, NovAtel,
and GARMIN were joined on the stock market in 2004 by SiRF, which has been
developing GPS chipsets since 1995. SiRF described its current competition in its
Securities and Exchange Commission filing [9]: “For chip sets, the main competitors
include SiRF, Analog Devices, Motorola, Philips, QUALCOMM, Sony,
STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Trimble, as well as some start-up com-
panies. For modules, the main competitors are Furuno, JRC, Motorola, Sony,
GARMIN, THALES and Trimble. For licensed intellectual property (IP) cores, com-
petitors include QUALCOMM and Trimble.”

12.2.1 Marine Navigation
While not the largest market segment, marine navigation was the first to embrace
satellite navigation. Today the market is maturing. Along with radios and radar, a
GPS receiver is a piece of standard equipment on any boat operating far from shore.
There are about 20 million boats in North America, and 50 million worldwide. Of
these, almost 98% are pleasure craft. Commercial coastal and inland vessels com-
prise about 1 million potential platforms for GPS, and there are more than 90,000
registered merchant vessels worldwide, most of which are involved in fishing.
The International Loran Association estimates that there are currently well over
one million Loran-C receivers installed in North America alone. Most of these are in
ships and boats, and all, shipborne or not, are candidates for replacement with GPS.
The U.S. Coast Guard's system of differential correction broadcasts (discussed
in Section 12.6) has been widely accepted, and other countries have similar systems,
particularly in the North Sea and Scandinavian waters. These systems provide accu-
racy in the 1-m-3-m range within about 150 miles of a correction beacon, and they
yield speed over ground (SOG) accuracy of about one-tenth of a knot. This can be a