Today I was back on the road – and back in France.

I am travelling with a colleague from AGI HQ – Greg Gerten – who is one of the “gurus” of navigation solutions within AGI. What Greg doesn’t know about GNSS could probably be written on the back of a very small postage stamp – and I can tell you, I’ve been learning a lot about navigation systems over the last few hours!

We were here to visit part of the French government which deals with research into navigation systems. Nowadays, this doesn’t just mean GPS, but also the other proposed/operational systems such as Glonass, Compass etc. as well as the overlay and augmentation systems like EGNOSS.

Greg has a very nice tool that can take a GPS almanac file and create an entire STK scenario from it (together with satellites, transmitters, receivers etc. This saves a lot of time for someone who wants to look at system performance data in STK and doesn’t want to spend most of the morning getting STK set up to do the analysis (OK, I was joking about taking a whole morning – probably more like 30 minutes if you have all the data at hand).

I’ve put this tool on my server, so if anyone wants to get a copy, you’ll find it here (3MB).