With LocataLite stations like this one at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Locata wants to reinvent GPS. Photo: U.S. Air Force
How do a couple of bass-playing Australian entrepreneurs end up building an incredibly precise positioning system that the U.S. Air Force wants to use at its White Sands Missile Range?
For starters, they work hard. And they don’t give up. Nunzio Gambale and David Small started out in the mid-1990s, trying to figure out a way to give ferries a way to automatically trigger audio files during Sydney Harbor tours. Now, 17 years later, they have built up a 34-person company called Locata that can deliver more accurate positioning data than the global positioning system (GPS) — at least over small swaths of land.
Locata is just one of many efforts to improve on the accuracy of location-based services. Both Google and Apple have built their own systems for use with iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, and they were following in the footsteps of a pioneering outfit called Skyhook. But Gambale, Small, and Locata have taken things in a very different direction. Their system doesn’t have the same reach — that may never happen — but it does provide an added degree of accuracy, according to those who have used it.
“There are a lot of people who probably still believe that what they do is impossible,” says Paul Benshoof, Director of the GPS Test Center of Expertise at the 746th Test Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.
Instead of using cell-phone signals, satellites or measuring existing wireless networks’ signal strength like Skyhook, Locata sets up its own network of 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi-band signal stations, called LocataLites, on the ground, which then cover the Earth with positioning signals, much like GPS. This provides more precise location data on a network that can be set up in places where GPS can’t reach — in deep open-pit mines or in dense urban areas where buildings block GPS transmissions.
It’s an unlikely journey taken by two friends who, when they started, had deeper roots in the music business than in high technology. When they first met in the early 1990s, Gambale ran a music store and a small post-production studio. They both played bass guitar. But Small had always liked tinkering with radios, and gradually, the ferry project he’d been working on evolved into a full-fledged location system. Today, Leica Geosystems Mining sells Locata systems to help mining companies keep track of their diggers and trucks in pits that are out of GPS range.
Benshoof wants to use Locata at the White Sands Missile range where the Air Force runs GPS-jamming exercises to test military grade GPS gear in what the Air Force calls a “denied environment.” With Locata, the Air Force can have a reference point to figure out how well the systems it tests are really working.
Nunzio Gambale (l) and David Small Photo: Locata
After running tests on 16 LocataLites at White Sands last fall, the Air Force is on track to roll them into a $12.2 million reference system that it will use to keep track of where things are at White Sands, starting in late 2014, Benshoof says.
Timing is everything when it comes to positioning systems. GPS works by sending messages at the speed of light, broadcasting them from satellites to receivers and taking note of the time it takes to reach the receiver. Because light moves at a constant velocity, this indicates how far away the satellite is. With signals from four satellites, you can get a pretty good idea of where in the world you are.
The thing is, if your timing is off by a little bit, it messes the whole thing up. That’s why GPS satellites use super-accurate atomic clocks, which synchronize with GPS receivers in order to keep the system working smoothly.
The interesting things about Locata, Benshoof says, is that they’ve managed to solve the time problem cheaply, without having to use expensive atomic clocks. “They’ve figured out a proprietary methodology — they call it TimeLoc — where they’re actually able to synchronize all of the ground stations without the use of an atomic clock and get comparable accuracies to GPS,” he says.
That’s not bad for two Australian college dropouts.
Gambale, the salesman of the team, seems to almost relish playing the underdog, and he can get defensive when he’s defending his positioning-system baby — especially if the question is about why existing WiFi positioning systems such as Skyhook, or those developed by Google or Apple are not good enough. Gambale calls them “crap,” and quickly points out that his system can provide much more accurate data — and the Air Force tests at White Sands appear to support him on that last point.
“I’ve had a lot of years of people saying that we were out of our minds because this couldn’t be done,” he says. “But the fact is that WiFi will not position buses going down the street. It will not position emergency services people when they’re inside a building.”
“You could turn the entire area of San Francisco into 1 meter cubes that have an address,” he says.
Of course, someone would first have to foot multi million dollar bill for a Locata system that covers San Francisco. And before that happens, Locata must also be tested in an urban environment, to see how it performs with real-world Wi-Fi interference and buildings.
Locata’s idea is that as cities start to add its LocataLites to support their own custom programs — giving pinpoint location data to first responders, for example — that will, in turn, give mobile phone makers an incentive to add Locata receivers their handsets.
In the wide open deserts of New Mexico, a 1 watt LocataLite has a range of several miles. In city canyons, that range could be closer to a half-mile, says Chris Rizos a professor of survey and navigation at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
“The big question to be asked is how many do we need to cover an urban area,” he says. “We can’t get to the answers until someone sticks their neck out and basically sets up a network to test.”
Rizos plans to team up with the State of New South Wales to run the first such urban test near Sydney Harbor in October.
A LocataLite station at White Sands Photo: Locata
