LightSquared’s executive vice president, Martin Harriman, presented the company’s vision for building the nation’s first coast-to-coast wireless broadband network to the PNT Advisory Board at their second annual meeting. Harriman detailed the company’s extensive efforts to solve interference issues related to faulty GPS devices reading into spectrum licensed to LightSquared. Among the mitigation efforts taken by LightSquared has been a revised deployment plan to move the portion of spectrum it uses as far as possible from frequencies assigned to GPS. LightSquared has also agreed to lower its power levels and take further steps to reduce power levels as measured on the ground. These steps have eliminated the interference issue for general navigation devices which account for more than 99 percent of GPS equipment.
In addition to Harriman, the PNT Advisory Board also heard from Dr. Javad Ashjaee, president and CEO of Javad GNSS, who has developed high precision GPS receivers that are compatible with LightSquared’s network. Ashjaee showed the panel data proving that the high precision interference issue has been resolved and that LightSquared does not present a threat to high precision GPS, which is used by the agriculture, construction and survey industries.
“Today’s meeting was a watershed moment for LightSquared for three reasons,” said Harriman, Executive Vice President of Ecosystem Development for LightSquared. “One, Dr. Ashjaee presented irrefutable evidence that the GPS interference issue can be solved and is not — as the GPS industry has led the public to believe, an unsolvable physics problem. Two, Trimble, a leader of the lobbying effort against LightSquared, acknowledged that it believes its own solution for the interference problem is ready to test. And three, the entire debate has turned from whether there is a solution to who pays for it. And that’s a conversation we’re willing to have.” Javad is one of the pioneers of high precision GPS and played a key role at several GPS equipment companies including Trimble, where he served as the chief engineer. Javad GNSS’s current clients include NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Air Force.
LightSquared… Seeking Solutions To Spectrum Seepage (SATCOM)
[SatNews] This latest meeting for the Company also involved a presentation by the developer of high precision GPS receivers…
