India is ditching US GPS with Desi “NavIC” Navigation System

India is ditching US GPS with Desi “NavIC” Navigation System

What is Global Positioning System (GPS)? It’s a generic term used for navigation, when you’re asking someone to use a “GPS”, you’re basically asking them to navigate. But the global positioning system isn’t exactly a global entity. It’s owned and operated by the United States Government. The GPS, like all US technological innovations, started as a military system. It achieved its full operational capacity in 1993 and needs 24 satellites to provide coverage across the globe. Presently it has 31 satellites. The constellation of 24 satellites plus spares circles the Earth every 12 hours in 11,000-mile-high orbits. The satellites are spaced so that every point on the Earth always has at least four satellites in view. Each satellite continuously broadcasts a digital signal of its position and time (using an atomic clock accurate to one billionth of a second). The GPS tremendously improved command and control across all levels of warfare and revolutionized vehicle tracking for civilian use. The US defense establishment has also been discerning in making the technology available to all. Initially, the US Air Force and Department of Defense used a technology called “selective availability” to deliberately introduce error into nonmilitary GPS receivers to retain the best accuracy for military use. The selective availability was also used to deny the GPS accuracy to Indian armed forces during the Kargil War, highlighting advantages afforded to the US because of the GPS. An outage of the GPS can disrupt shipping, power grids, cell phone networks, and other daily commercial activities.

GPS & Warfare: Almost every weapon platform in the US forces that require navigation, time, or location data is GPS dependent. Hence the unavailability of GPS, even for a few minutes due to jamming or satellites being threatened, can be catastrophic for national security. Adversaries can cripple the US defense and other critical infrastructure by targeting satellites through electronic warfare.

And they aren’t alone in building such things. There are other global navigation satellite systems that do pretty much the same thing. There’s Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), China’s BeiDou Navigation system, the European Union’s Galileo and India’s regional navigation satellite system called NavIC.

The only difference is — unlike the others, India’s navigation satellite system isn’t exactly a global version. You can find the location (longitude/latitude) of any object fitted with a receiver in India. But we can’t map the location globally. However, that doesn’t matter because the regional navigation system is built specifically to address our domestic needs. It has 8 satellites floating in orbit and it’s supposed to be more precise. NavIC’s satellites use dual frequency bands, the L5 and the S-band. And while the science behind it is complicated, it boils down to one simple maxim — 2 bands are better than 1. When an electromagnetic signal travels through space, the atmosphere can distort it. So you have to adjust for these errors before relaying the location. And it seems 2 bands work better than 1. It’s expected to offer a positional accuracy of 5 meters compared to the 20–30 meters you’d get out of GPS.

Why don’t our phones come packed with NavIC? It’s only been 4 years since full deployment. And it’s found limited use in this time. We use it to track public vehicles and deep sea fishermen (to alert them in the event of an emergency). But NavIC’s fortunes could be changing pretty soon. Indian government is pushing to make NavIC mandatory in phones and that means NavIC could soon be in everyone’s pocket, a homegrown product to beat traffic woes.

But, not everyone’s (like phone manufacturers) happy with the development as (1) the added costs as they needs to make its phones NavIC complaint, which means new chipsets, antennas & radio frequency components and may have to tinker with the phones’ hardware which could increase the price of their phones and (2) the crunched timeline as they’re already ready with their 2024 pipeline of product launches and they can’t undo that now. The phone makers like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi had to put in additional chipsets and hardware to make their devices NavIC-compatible.

Why NavIC?

Remember the Kargil War of 1999? At the time India was locking horns with Pakistan and fighting to regain control of Indian territory and we needed every advantage we could get, so we asked the US for GPS data that could’ve helped us navigate the terrain better. But it seems the US denied the request. That got us thinking about overreliance on foreign imports, particularly American Military system.

Please remember that India’s Geospatial policy doesn’t allow foreign satellite systems to collect superfine data like street information that’s accurate to less than a meter. They can only source this data from Indian firms. For gaining strategic independence, both for the civilian and military purpose, it is imperative to have an indigenous navigation system

The US Global Positioning System (GPS) is omnipresent and omniscient. In a bid to gain “strategic independence,” India is now ditching this US-owned satellite-based navigation system in favor of its own NavIC (meaning ‘sailor’ in Hindi) navigation system. India has successfully placed its 2nd generation navigation satellite in orbit which could help in bridging the gap between the technology and Indian mobile users. NavIC is as good as the GPS in terms of position accuracy. To meet the positioning, navigation and timing requirements of the nation, ISRO has established a regional navigation satellite system called Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) & was erstwhile known as Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS). NavIC has 3 geostationary satellites and four geosynchronous satellites situated in much higher orbits, making the signal less prone to obstructions. It operates in two frequency bands – L and S giving it more accuracy. Unlike the GPS, which provides a position accuracy of 20-30 meters, the Indian system gives a position with an accuracy of 5 meters.

The regional navigation system is built specifically to address our domestic needs. It has 8 satellites floating in orbit and it's supposed to be more precise. The satellite is the first in a series of 5. Now every 6 months, India will launch one satellite to complete the coverage. NVS series of satellites will sustain and augment the NavIC with enhanced features as this series incorporates L1 band signals additionally to widen the services. Its interoperability means it can be used across mobile through software updates. L1 is compatible with the handsets and can be made available through a mobile app, just like GPS.

CA Harshad Shah, Mumbai harshadshah1953@yahoo.com