Shared Facilities and Equipment:
Consortia and Partners

In recent years the SNAP Laboratory has worked closely with colleagues at universities and industry to expand access to equipment and facilities that it would not ordinarily be able to own or use. The following can be mentioned:

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2005 ARC-LIEF Equipment

In 2005 funding granted from the ARC's LIEF (Linkage Infrastructure Equipment & Facilities) scheme to purchase to purchase a Receiver Test Facility. The proposed Facility comprises a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) RF Signal Simulator which allows laboratory testing of new signal tracking and navigation solution algorithms, under different scenarios. Simulation of the operation of current and future GPS satellites, and of the new European GNSS "Galileo", is vital for testing new receiver designs. For example, the Facility could be programmed to generate a GPS satellite signal with user-selectable physical variations in the signal path, including the presence of RF jamming sources, high atmospheric disturbances, diffraction effects and multipath. As many of the signal variations are rare and/or unpredictable, the Signal Simulator is the only means to carry out such tests. Partners are the School of Electrical Eng. & Telecommunications (UNSW) and the School of Information Technology & Electrical Eng. (University of Queensland).

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2002 Faculty of Eng. Special Equipment Grant

In 2002 two separate grants from the Faculty of Engineering have contributed to the purchase of a variety of equipment. One was a Research Infrastructure Block Grant (RIBG) to purchase a Sigtec Software Development Kit, as well as several pieces of sensor equipment (Inertial Measurement Unit, magnetometer, accelerometer, and Dead Reckoning system), primarily for the use of final year thesis students of the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications.

The second was a $50,000 special grant to support research in location, wireless comms and IT, through the purchase miscellaneous IT platforms, laptop computers, wireless comms accessories and GPS receivers, to establish a pool of 10 Compaq iPAQs, 10 laptop PCs, 10 GPS receivers, and ten of each 802.11a & b network cards, WiFi access points, GSM/GPRS modems, Bluetooth cards, and assorted antennas. This pool of equipment will be used by undergraduate and graduate student projects, and research projects, from the schools of Surveying & SIS, Electrical Eng. & Telecommunications, and Computer Science & Eng.

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1999 ARC-RIEF Equipment

In 1999 funding was granted from the ARC's RIEF scheme to purchase ten dual-frequency GPS receivers, with choke-ring antennas and notebook PCs, to create a pool of GPS equipment which will support geodetic research projects at a consortium of Australian universities. The SNAP-UNSW was the lead institution for this application, and included the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University; School of Computing, University of Canberra; Centre for Spatial Information Science, University of Tasmania, and the Dept. of Spatial Sciences, Curtin University of Technology.

The researchers named in this proposal already have strong links with each other, evidenced by joint publications and a number of existing collaborative grants supported by the ARC. The GPS Receiver Pool will be used to collect field data essential for ongoing and new research projects, many in collaboration with other Australian and overseas investigators. The projects will address a wide variety of geodetic problems, including the monitoring of deformation of man-made and natural features, global and regional tectonics, measurement of sea-level change, precise mapping of Antarctic ice sheets and their flow, and the sounding of the atmosphere. In May 1999 the consortium selected the Leica CRS1000 GPS receivers for this facility, and in June took delivery of ten units. In 2003 the units were upgraded to the Leica MC500s.

The GPS Receiver Pool at UNSW being tested, August 1999.

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Singaporean Multi-reference Station Testing Facility

This is a collaboration with several staffers Goh Pong Chai and Tor Yam Khoon, of the Surveying & Mapping Laboratory, at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU). NTU and UNSW jointly submitted a National Science & Technology Board (NSTB) grant application, "Development of an integrated multiple base station infrastructure to support concurrent high precision differential GPS positioning applications", seeking funding to establish a GPS test laboratory in Singapore based on a network of five high precision permanent GPS reference stations linked by high speed data lines to NTU. In September 1998 funding of S$350,000 was approved by the NSTB. The project commenced May 1999. The Survey Department (Ministry of Law) is also a partner and has supplied several receivers as well as support in the operation of the GPS reference stations.

Such a multi-receiver "open air laboratory" allows NTU and UNSW researchers to address several significant shortcomings of current commercial centimetre-accuracy GPS systems, leading to improvements in accuracy, reductions in user costs, increased suitability of GPS for critical applications, and increased flexibility in system implementation. For more details of the Singapore project, click here. Since mid-2002 the network has been operating on a continuous basis.

In 2003 work commenced on establishing a similar network in Sydney, known as "SydNet".

The integrated multiple GPS base station infrastructure in Singapore

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In mid-1999 a collaborative project was launched with Dr. Predrag Rapajic, leader of the Mobile Communications Group (MCG) within the School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, The University of New South Wales. A Research Infrastructure Block Grant (RIBG) of $34,000 was awarded to SNAP and MCG to establish a GPS Development Laboratory which would allow various UNSW projects to build GPS systems tailored to specific requirements. This will provide GPS positioning resources to projects that cannot be filled by commercial off-the-shelf products, as well as enable the digital signal processing capability at UNSW to be further applied to new applications.

The Laboratory will be jointly managed by SNAP and MCG, and researchers will address a range of applications in positioning (such as GPS signal reception in low signal strength environments, quick signal recovery in urban canyon environments, pseudolite designs, indoor positioning, indirect signal reception), space applications (e.g. the UNSW BLUEsat microsatellite project), and mobile communications (such as adaptive GPS-directed high-gain antenna systems, Antarctic mobile communications, precision beam pointing for optical laser communications, and so on).

The Laboratory will benefit from the purchase of the Mitel Architect GPS Development Kit, allowing chip-level optimisation for custom GPS receiver construction. The kit consists of 12 channel "all-in-view" hardware as well as software. All source code is provided and developers can modify the software to suit the application.

Several Mitel-based GPS receiver boards permit system development to be conducted by several groups of students at the same time. These boards are specially modified Canadian Marconi Allstar receivers.

GPS Architect

Block diagram of GPS Architect

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Since late 1999 the SNAP group has established an active collaboration with Prof. Elizabeth Cannon's GPS research group. The motivation for this is to work together on the new research topic of pseudolites and their integration with GPS (for outdoor positioning applications), or on their own (for indoor positioning applications). SNAP owns one IntegriNautics pseudolite. Prof. Cannon's group owns two of the same brand of pseudolite.

A second IN200 pseudolite was purchased in mid-2001. For details of SNAP's pseudolite research click here ...

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1997 ARC-RIEF Equipment

As a result of a successful Australian Research Council's (ARC) Research Infrastructure Equipment & Facilities (RIEF) application with Curtin University of Technology in 1997, the following equipment was purchased (and is available to SNAP-UNSW for research and teaching purposes):

KVH Autogyro Navigator

KVH Continuous Positioning System

Ashtech GG24 GPS +Glonass Receiver