JAVAD is brilliant
I am glad that you are so adament about defending Mr. Javad. Meant no disrespect, I obviously don't know him like you do. I have rarely seen anyone on any of the posts defend him, in fact quite the opposite has happened. He has gotten thrown under the bus. But I still don't know anyone who is using his current brand. Are we that behind? or is the market perhaps that saturated and competitive?
JAVAD is brilliant
Around here, Javad gear is the best kept secret in surveying equipment...so why not post this on the internet...
I like that my competitors spend $21,000 for a receiver that doesn't work as well as my $9,000 Triumph. It helps keep their costs high 😀
JAVAD is brilliant
You use the Triumph? How do you like it? Do you use it for post-processing solutions also? 9000$? Is that all? Really?
JAVAD is brilliant
> I cannot believe all of the negativity towards Javad Ashee on this thread and others. The man is the most brilliant electronics engineer I know, and in my and other's opinions truly is the father of GNSS. Trimble, Ashtech (his firm), Topcon all are rooted in his innovation when he worked there. Leica, NovAtel and any others are based on receiver designs he original designed for others.
Yes, Ashtech, Trimble, Topcon, and by association Thales and Magellan, and Sokkia has rebranded Ashtech and Topcon equipment to sell under the Sokkia name, etc ...
All this did was make it more disturbing when Javad continually harped on "poorly designed receivers" while he was Lightsquared's shill. But, I can't recall him ever taking the blame for the design work. Just because you can design a receiver that would work with part A of lightsquared plan, doesn't mean you should throw everyone who owns a GNSS reciever under the bus, for your own personal gain. And why try to open the door for part A, when you know part B would mean the end of high precision gear. When Lightsquared said their plan could work with 99% of GPS gear, guess what that 1% of the gear it would never work with was ... high precision units.
He is brilliant
Absolutely brilliant. How many times do we have to keep repeating that?
No one is questioning his brilliance.
No one is qustioning his contributions to GNSS.
No one is saying he does not have amazing and cutting edge gear.
He was only scrutinized for his judgement.
It works both ways. He should not diss GNSS users by openly trying to force them to buy new gear to follow his vision of the future.
he could be a real friend of GNSS as he always had by offering top gear and letting that gear be judged and purchaed on its merits. instead he dived right in there and tried to get spectral policy changed and force people who are using perfectly good gear to have to upgrade. That is disrespect of the finances and livelyhoods of others. He may be heroic in actions, but the cause is misguided. I wish him all of the respect he has earned, but it has to work both ways. it would be very easy to erase this one instance of ill will, and being a bit more concilliatory rather than condescending could go a long way.
JAVAD is brilliant
:good: :good:
You are right, Northern. Javad has been one of the most respected driving innovators of GPS and GNSS receiver design. It's too bad the designer didn't foresee the design flaws that Lightsquared exposed until it was too late.
It's pretty easy to kill our own wounded, especially when we don't understand their impact upon our profession and the loss we would suffer without them.
JBS
JAVAD is brilliant
> You use the Triumph? How do you like it? Do you use it for post-processing solutions also? 9000$? Is that all? Really?
Like I said before, we have 8 Triumphs. My crews prefer Javad over the Trimble R8-3 (which we also use).
I don't do much post processing...never really saw the point to be honest with you. I bought the post processing software (Justin), and successfully played around with it in the beginning...but it is so much easier to do OPUS and RTK...so that's how we do things now.
If RTK is your thing, the Javad seems to fix better/quicker than any other receiver I've used. It is a quality unit...no doubt.
BTW, $9,000 is the price...internal radio, GLONASS, the works.
He is brilliant
Well said Dean. I respect Javad for his technical abilities but his performance on a webinar provided by GPS World erased any chance he ever had of selling me ANYTHING.
Doug
JAVAD is brilliant
I think you are right about Javad. I have met him only once but have watched his career for about 20 years. If and when I buy new GPS equipment I will look closely at whatever he is doing.
We shouldn’t let his Light Squared performance blind us to what he has done for surveying in the past and what he might do for it in the future.
JAVAD is brilliant
Good Filter...Bad Filter, why even a filter? They were unnecessary until LightSquared showed up. I could care less, when light square starts setting towers it's time to get the C4 filter in use.
Pablo
He is brilliant
I hope LightSquared gets their towers up asap. This will strengthen the US in communications and also help surveyors out tremendously, not to mention add some competition to the wireless market. Just like cell phones revolutionized the phone market, this is a game changer. I guess they are going to try the other band option which will require more power to transmit, if they have any money left. This situation reminds me of a subdivision I was involved in in a resort town that had a old grass strip running parallel with a lake channel. Across the lake a developer tried to put in aviation subdivision with a 3500+ asphalt airstrip (gets the twin jet engines) perpendicular to the grass strip. A small group from town jumped on the developer and the smear campaign started. The deal was shot down eventually. I still helped with laying out the lake lots and was working about 3-4 weeks on this job. Not one time did I see a plane land or take off from the grass strip runway. I wonder how better the town would be. If it could just see the benefits of a better attraction than the grass strip. Hey, that's the way things work. If people just sit down and talk almost everything will get worked out someway. The way I see it, jumping on people that are trying to solve a problem is wrong. I also think higher powers pulled all the strings and danced the naysayers like puppets in a kindergarten class. I didn't see Javad, not one time, put a gun to somebody's head and say buy my filter or I'll pull the trigger. What I did see was a man confront a problem head on and come up with a solution. Which seemed to be an inexpensive solution to the surveying community. For just a few hundred dollars per receiver and the problem is solved. And call a spade a spade. The problem was created before LS was just an idea. GPS is out of its band not LS. Probably could have worked out a deal that LS would foot the bill for the filter. And if you cannot afford a few hundred per receiver then I can see why you are mad and you must have greater problems than this LS debate. As for other communities, that is probably a completely different story.
He is brilliant
> I hope LightSquared gets their towers up asap. This will strengthen the US in communications and also help surveyors out tremendously, not to mention add some competition to the wireless market.
No, not really. If you think Lightsquared was going to be the answer for network RTK out in the boonies, think again. Lightsquared was only going to offer terrestrial service in places where Sprint already had towers. There are no "towers going up ASAP", and there never were. As for their satellite service, I beleive the cost was $10,000 per Gigabyte of data transmission. So, either the area already has cellular service, or it's going to be too expensive for any real data trasmission use.
> Just like cell phones revolutionized the phone market, this is a game changer. I guess they are going to try the other band option which will require more power to transmit, if they have any money left. This situation reminds me of a subdivision I was involved in in a resort town that had a old grass strip running parallel with a lake channel. Across the lake a developer tried to put in aviation subdivision with a 3500+ asphalt airstrip (gets the twin jet engines) perpendicular to the grass strip. A small group from town jumped on the developer and the smear campaign started. The deal was shot down eventually. I still helped with laying out the lake lots and was working about 3-4 weeks on this job. Not one time did I see a plane land or take off from the grass strip runway. I wonder how better the town would be. If it could just see the benefits of a better attraction than the grass strip. Hey, that's the way things work. If people just sit down and talk almost everything will get worked out someway.
A better analogy would be if the town had a busy airport, used by millions, but a developer tried to move in and rework the landing strip in such a way that only airplanes built by his company, built after 2012, could land or take off there ...
> The way I see it, jumping on people that are trying to solve a problem is wrong. I also think higher powers pulled all the strings and danced the naysayers like puppets in a kindergarten class. I didn't see Javad, not one time, put a gun to somebody's head and say buy my filter or I'll pull the trigger. What I did see was a man confront a problem head on and come up with a solution.
Thing is, there is no problem. Javad was taking out ads and writting letter to FCC BEGGING for them to create a problem, so he could sell his solution. GPS recievers were designed based on the current allocation of spectrum. They work great. So, they look out of their band. If you had followed along, one of the reasons they look into lightsquared's band is because lightsquared's predessors sold bandwidth in that spectrum that was used by recievers.
>Which seemed to be an inexpensive solution to the surveying community. For just a few hundred dollars per receiver and the problem is solved. And call a spade a spade. The problem was created before LS was just an idea. GPS is out of its band not LS. Probably could have worked out a deal that LS would foot the bill for the filter. And if you cannot afford a few hundred per receiver then I can see why you are mad and you must have greater problems than this LS debate. As for other communities, that is probably a completely different story.
I'm pretty sure you are mistaking, here. Javad said he could "fix" his own brand of recievers, for $500 each, but even that was never proven. He tested an external antenna on some older non-Javad units, but let's get real here, how many modern day GNSS devices have external antennas? What is the real cost of cracking open a GNSS reciever and replaceing the internal antenna?
But, on point, even at $500, why should GPS users have to foot the bill for lightsquared's bandwidth reallocation? You said GPS is out of it's band. That may be somewhat true, but putting terrestrial cellphone broadcasting in a satellite band is also "out of it's band".
He is brilliant
I didn't think LS was going to be the answer for network RTK. I said and read this slower "This will strengthen the US in communications and also help surveyors out tremendously, not to mention add some competition to the wireless market." Now how would more wireless data service not help out surveyors?
Never said that towers were going up asap. Here again read slower "I hope LightSquared gets their towers up asap". Key word is hope!
Your analogy is not even close.
Javad never begged the FCC to create a problem. That is your opinion.
You need to reread my post obviously slower and think instead of instantly commenting without comprehending what I said. I think that is your problem with you misunderstanding the whole situation.
I get it, you hate Javad with the way he tried to run you business into the ground. Demanding that you do whatever he says. Because if it was to go down like you described he would be the ONLY one that had a fix. I can't believe that he tried to make the world a better place with better technology. He should be ashamed of himself.
If only it was about a few hundred
Hi Phillip.
I would also like to see game changers in telecommunications, and would be quite willing to upgrade for a few hundred. I was excited in the begninning, but then found out that those types of assumptions missed some really big points. I try to find information that is not from the GPS Coalition or from LightSquared, and I'll put some of these sources below.
If it were only a few hundred, that would be nice. But even that number has been reworked. We see 300, 500, 800, 1000, 2000, 5000. No matter, if it were a real game changer I'd be willing to pay 5000. But so far the only solutions offered were for the lower 10 mhz in question and only for some equipment. Would we have to upgrade again when the upper 10 is opened? And no one has an upper 10 solution, at all. The upper 10 tests last summer hit everyting, not just high precision. And would it only be a few hundred for all of the other types of GPS? If someone thinks every airplane can be fixed for 500 they are kidding or uninformed. Go talk to an aircraft mechanic, I did. There would be costs to surveyors, and maybe not too bad for the lower band (but god knows what for the upper band if at all) but enormous costs to taxpayers and civil aviation.
But what if it was worth it? Not so sure. You mention the cell phone as a game changer. "Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cellphone, says that claims by mobile carriers of a so-called spectrum crisis are largely exaggerated", this from the following peice about the "spectrum crisis" and how tech solutions already at hand are going to handle this "spectrum crisis" that might really be a spectrum bubble". But even if we could get more comms, that would be a good thing, but at what price? Ever wonder why other countries that use GPS and have better broadband than we do did not have to hurt GPS to do it?
And is it such a game changer? A mixede system that would only have covered the same area as sprint on the ground and then very, very pricey satellite in the other areas? The prices and bandwidth for the sat areas would be in some ways worse than the current sat comms people can get now. See something from LS2's own documents filed with the FCC that show how poor that would have been. Reead the whole page 8 and footnote. The coverage would not have been as good as some would have wishedespecially the rural people and thier reps that were courted so heavily. More competition would have been good, but not a game changer.
GPS is doing wrong in saomeone eleses spectrum? Not really as some GPS look into that spectrum to get SBAS tranmission that are even transmitted by LS2 themselves! And completely authorized to do so. And there is the matter of the allocation tables. The FCC did not change the allocation tables for the MSS part of the L band. It is still for satellites but they did authorize ancillary (ATC) as a non-conforming use, but limited back years ago. Yes, ATC is a non-conforming use, authorized but non-confroming. Please read CFR 25.255, it explains that ATC is subject to very strong conditions about interference. And the FCC stuck to that condition. They have to, it is a CFR. And GPS is a conformning use because it is satellite. LS2 even has citations on those very rules in thier own filings.
I'm not against LS2 or more boradband or anything or people who would make solutions for an engineering challenge. But the solutions were incomplete for the whole of the problem, the value of the tradeoff was not as good as we hoped, and the costs would be too high. People wanted this too fast to fix things and get it right. And pardon me if I find it offensive that some people were pushing this too fast, I don't care if they are saints, if they advocate for too fast then they are doing us harm. The FCC had conditions and they were not met on the agreed timeline. This can be argued til the end of time, but if one does enough research they would likely find that the deal was not so wonderful as to sell our fellow surveyors, taxpayers, and aviation safewty down the river.
Sometimes even the greatest of ideas do not work out for very valid resosns.
Even Einstein reached the point where he was so caught up in his past that he couldn't see the conclusions of his own work... Maybe Javad has reached that point...?
He is brilliant
> I didn't think LS was going to be the answer for network RTK. I said and read this slower "This will strengthen the US in communications and also help surveyors out tremendously, not to mention add some competition to the wireless market." Now how would more wireless data service not help out surveyors?
>
> Never said that towers were going up asap. Here again read slower "I hope LightSquared gets their towers up asap". Key word is hope!
>
> I get it, you hate Javad with the way he tried to run you business into the ground. Demanding that you do whatever he says. Because if it was to go down like you described he would be the ONLY one that had a fix. I can't believe that he tried to make the world a better place with better technology. He should be ashamed of himself.
Still don't understand how you think LS serving the same area as Sprint is going to help anyone with data transmission ... unless you want to pay $10,000 per Gig. And your statement "I hope LightSquared gets their towers up asap. " sure implies to me that your were under the mistaken impression that Lightsquared planned to build towers. But that's not your fault. If you only listened to LSQ's talking points, they were absolutely trying to give the false impression that were going to bring broadband to rural America. That's a half truth, at best.
> Javad never begged the FCC to create a problem. That is your opinion.
Have you read his letter to the FCC? Sure sounds like begging to me. Even says "please".
The Honorable Julius Genachowski
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20554
Ex Parte Communication. IB Docket No. 11-109
February 27, 2012
Dear Chairman Genachowski:
For the reasons outlined below I find your recent decision regarding LightSquared's network deployment to be unfair and harmful to not only the U.S. economy, but to the future of innovation.
It has been proven time and again that GPS and LightSquared can coexist. I demonstrated this to the PNT earlier this year, and results from independent labs confirmed my results. Even more telling, the recently published recommendations from the NTIA to the FCC do not dispute this fact.
The only real issue is retrofitting faulty GPS units. Let's take into consideration the aviation industry, which is highly regulated and extremely safety conscious. You can subpoena their retrofit histories and see when they found a problem in any parts of their aircrafts and how long it took them to fix the problems. Considering that changing a GPS antenna is easy task compared to other retrofits that they conducted, it will not be surprising to see this retrofit can take in some weeks.
The cost of such retrofits is under $500 per aircraft. It would cost less than $20M to fix any existing issues within the industry and only take a few months to complete. Please also note that all existing GPS receivers are semi-obsolete and will soon need to be replaced anyway (with or without LightSquared) because current systems do not track the modernized signals of GPS, GLONASS and Galileo.
Please do not allow $14B of private investment in the nation's broadband infrastructure to disappear, especially when it will cost less than $100M to solve any problems associated with existing units. Your decision could render years of innovation and investment obsolete.
GPS manufacturers should not be able to get away with faulty designs and the U.S. government should do not promote, support, and encourage design of flawed units. Even now, when the GPS industry is aware of a simple solution, they keep manufacturing and selling defective units to compound the problem.
Please do not allow technology to lose to politics. It will be a national disaster if we lose 4G competitiveness and discourage investment in this country. If FCC loses control of the precocious spectrum in this case, who knows what will happen in the future?
Sincerely,
Javad Ashjaee
CEO, Javad GNSS
San Jose, California
He is brilliant
You said it yourself that satellite service costs 10,000 not terrestrial. Way to spin that message. You didn't even remember what you said! And of course they are going to start small and then grow. I guess they should have called you up and discussed their business plan with you to start with every square inch of North America first then take over the world.
And it doesn't sound like he's begging at all. Sounds to me like he is trying to point out some very obvious points that a bureaucrat/government employee should but probably doesn't know. Here again, if you go back and reread the letter slower I bet it will make more sense. But now that I can put myself in your shoes I can see you make your mind up on whatever you THINK you hear or read.
He is brilliant
> You said it yourself that satellite service costs 10,000 not terrestrial. Way to spin that message. You didn't even remember what you said! And of course they are going to start small and then grow. I guess they should have called you up and discussed their business plan with you to start with every square inch of North America first then take over the world.
I'm not spinning my message at all and it has not changed since this $10,000 per gig was discovered and exposed several months ago on the TMM blog. I said:
"Still don't understand how you think LS serving the same area as Sprint is going to help anyone with data transmission ... unless you want to pay $10,000 per Gig."
I.e. with lightsquared, you either get the same service area as Sprint for the standard cost, or you can pay 10,000 per gig in the areas that Sprint does not service. Seems like what I wrote is consistent with facts and not spin at all, nor have I forgotten or changed what I said ... Those are the facts based on what lightsquared said to the FCC.
And tell me, Phil, where in lightsquared business plan, FCC testimony, etc., does it say they had a massive plan to expand from the terrestrial range Sprint now covers? You got a link to that, or are you just assuming and/or making things up? If it were cost effective to expand into rural areas with 3G coverage, then don't you think Sprint or other cellular providers would already be there?
> And it doesn't sound like he's begging at all. Sounds to me like he is trying to point out some very obvious points that a bureaucrat/government employee should but probably doesn't know. Here again, if you go back and reread the letter slower I bet it will make more sense. But now that I can put myself in your shoes I can see you make your mind up on whatever you THINK you hear or read.
I know exactly what I read. The point is that Javad wasn't trying to solve the problem just in case lightsquared plan was approved, he was actively campaigning for lightsquared and saying "Please do not allow $14B of private investment in the nation's broadband infrastructure to disappear ... " ... "Please do not allow technology to lose to politics." That sounds like arguing politics and money over good spectrum policy, to me.
Bottom line is that they wanted to put cellular service into a band that was reserved for satellite transmission. The burden was on them to prove it could work, not GPS users to retrofit nearly every device made in the last 30 years.
Start small get bigger?
Give it up PR, the sales pitch blinded folks who will not take the time to research and find out there was the same old bait and switch. Those who claim a game changer do not offer up just what part of what game would actually be changed. As you have pointed out it would be the same terrestrial coverage. Sure more competition would be great but there other plans going to do just that without having to hand GNSS users and taxpayers a bill for something they did not ask for nor desrved to have forced on them.
The old mantra in telecomm about starting small and getting bigger to help rural broadband is a hollow promise every time. How would the rural be covered? maybe poorly as each satellite only has the capacity of one tower (ref same LS documents relased) then maybe they mean they will launch 40,000 more stelites? Or maybe they will add 40,000 more towers beyond the current ones they would have used from sprint?
Not likely, as rural is not profitable enough. Too many miles with too few customers. Why do you think they were really interested only in the same coverage as the other carriers and that the satellite coverage was an impotent joke? One of thier ex guys Harriman said that they viewed satellite like gym meberships; they hope everyone has one but never uses them. Satellite was jsut a means to and end to convert allocated MSS to terrestrial and nothing else.
So just what was a game changer on the level of the invention of the cellular phone? Never can get those kinds of answers. I'd say stop trying. The FCC has eveoked their own condition set explicitly in CFR 25.255 about interference, and no amount of hysterics and dreams of game changers will change that.
That being said, I certainly hope that new plans, better plans, and plans that engage the GNSS community in a much less condescending and adversarial manner do come down the pike. And the rural broadband initiative can be alive and well and under way without plans that harm GNSS.
He is brilliant
> ...I'm not spinning my message at all and it has not changed since this $10,000 per gig was discovered and exposed several months ago on the TMM blog...
Pseudo I think you meant the TMF Blog. Great reading from an expert in the MSS field.
