Announcement: Patent Allowance for RTK Extend

NAVCOM TECHNOLOGY, INC.
A John Deere Company

April 19, 2006

Several claims in a U.S. Patent application entitled A Method for Combined Use of a Local RTK System and a Regional, Wide-Area, or Global Carrier-Phase Positioning System, Richard T. Sharpe, Ronald R. Hatch, and Y.Yang, Inventors, were recently allowed.

The method combines two of our strongest positioning and navigation services, our StarFire Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) and the RTK service in our GPS and StarFire receiver products, to create a more reliable and powerful precise positioning service. The continuous, global availability of the StarFire SBAS service is used as a backup to extend centimeter-level navigation through periods of RTK unavailability.

Simply put, the method protected by the patent helps to reduce the disadvantages of using only a local Real Time Kinematics (RTK) system or a Wide-Area Differential Global Positioning System (WADGPS) by combining the two techniques in a synergistic fashion. When a high quality RTK solution is available, it is used as the source of the receiver's position output while at the same time it is also used to continuously initialize the StarFire SBAS solution which is kept running in the background. This greatly reduces the potentially long pull-in times associated with SBAS/WADGPS services. When the RTK solution quality degrades (usually due to loss of the correction stream from the RTK base station), the system switches automatically to the SBAS/WADGPS solution as its source of position output. Since the SBAS/WADGPS solution has been fully initialized to be in agreement with the high quality RTK position, it provides a seamless transition to an alternative, high quality positioning method. When the RTK solution is once more available, the system automatically transitions back to that mode since it is again the statistically preferable method.

NavCom's and the GPS industry's RTK algorithms are continually evolving and resulting in improved performance over longer ranges. Private and public RTK base station networks are being established to extend RTK over large geographic areas. The emerging new GPS and Galileo signals will further enable longer range RTK techniques. All of these factors will push even farther beyond the limits of many conventional wireless data communication links and will further increase the value of the technique protected by this patent.

James D. Litton,
President & CEO, NavCom Technology, Inc.

INTERGEO-EAST Fair, Belgrade, 23 - 24 February 2006

Trade Fair and Conference for Land Management, Geoinformation, Building Industry, Environment

From 22 till 24 February 2006, INTERGEO EAST – the Trade Fair and Conference for land management, geoinformation, building industry and the environment - will be held in Belgrade (Serbia and Montenegro). This will be the third event of its kind in South-East Europe.

Geographically, Belgrade is the ideal venue in South-East Europe for this trade fair with its themes.

Over 80 national and international exhibitors and more than 3.000 visitors are expected to attend the third INTERGEO EAST.

Geo Info Strategies will present the latest technology in Geoinformation Industry and Projects realized in Balkans Region.

Belgrade Fair, Hall 3, Booth D433

PENTAX - the name you know for many years
Meet Mr. Jean-Pierre Josqui, PENTAX Europe and discover the latest developments in high quality surveying instruments.

High quality, dual frequency GPS Receivers from NavCom Technology

• Digital Mapping and GIS data collection in Real Time
• Centimeter precission in RTK Mode,
• Better than 10cm horizontal accuracy using StarFire System - no need for base stations
• Local language support

Special discounts during the Intergeo East

Satellite imagery

• QuickBird - Satellite imagery with the highest commercially available resolution,
• Belgrade in CitySphere programe

ER Mapper MBC - new afordable product from ER Mapper

Turn your image tiles into valuable, easy-to-use image mosaics

• Create high-value image mosaics from image tiles
• Compress a massive 10GB of data!
• Access imagery faster in your desktop and web applications,
• Distribute large amounts of imagery on CD, DVD or the Internet!
• Reduce the hard disk requirements for storing your images

Integrated IT Solutions for Utility companies

We will present results from one of our projects realized recently for water utility company in Budva, Montenegro.

Solution is based on water-industry standard database design, integrated with GPS data acquisition and mobile GIS through hand-held controller. System supports exctraction of data from geodatabase, their updating in the field, and integration back into the company IT system.

As topographic background, orthorectified QuickBird satellite images were used in combination with cadastral maps.

Web based GIS systems

with online feature editing capabilities, an ideal solution for cooperation between regional and local companies, applicable to any local administration or utility company.

Friday, February 24th, 17:30 - Happy hour!