White House May Turn UAV Privacy Role over to NTIA

[SIGNALS Exclusive] A reported White House plan to rely on voluntary adoption of privacy best practices for unmanned aircraft operations appears unlikely to address concerns that the aerial vehicles will be used to spy on people in their homes or abused by law enforcement officials conducting surveillance. (more)

<http://www.insidegnss.com/node/4131>

Washington View: New Leaders at the GPS Helm

Washington, D.C., has a peculiarity of seasons. While most of the world marks the shifts between winter and spring, summer and autumn, the politicos on the streets of the U.S. capital count the passage of time in two-year increments. (more)

Applications for Commercial UAS Operations Draw a Crowd

[SIGNALS Exclusive] Seventeen companies have now applied to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for services that range from filmmaking and photography to oil flare stack monitoring, package delivery and real estate marketing. (more)

<http://www.insidegnss.com/node/4132>

Galileo Team Reports Successful Tracking of Encrypted Commercial Service Signals

The European GNSS Agency (GSA) announced Tuesday (July 29, 2014) that a recent 10-day test has successfully tracked and demodulated data from encrypted signals of the Commercial Service (CS) from available Galileo satellites. (more)

Thinking Aloud: The Next Big Mac

Here's the coolest "technology-meets-ingenuity-meets-sustainable-economics" story that I've heard in a long time: the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) Reboot Project, a crowd-funded rescue mission to repurpose a 36-year-old NASA spacecraft. (more)

AFRL ANGELS Take Flight with GPS On Board

While the GNSS community waits for the scheduled launch on Friday (August 1, 2014) of the seventh GPS Block IIF satellite, the United Launch Alliance successfully lifted a three-satellite Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) payload into geosynchronous orbit on Monday (July 28, 2014) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. (more)

GPS Directorate to Hold Public Forum for Feedback on GPS Technical Specifications

The Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Directorate will host an open public forum on August 22 for the following NAVSTAR GPS public documents: IS-GPS-200 (Navigation User Interfaces), IS-GPS-705 (User Segment L5 Interfaces), IS-GPS-800 (User Segment L1C Interface), and ICD-GPS-870 (Navstar Next Generation GPS Operational Control Segment [OCX] to User Support Community Interfaces). (more)

U.S. Geological Survey Releases New National Seismic Maps

Updated National Seismic Hazard Maps released by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on Thursday (July 17, 2014) indicate a higher level of earthquake risk for the West Coast and some areas of the Midwest and East Coast then previously thought. (more)