GPS World • July 2022 • Precision at Any Level

In September 2021, Trimble released its DA2 GNSS receiver with Trimble Catalyst service. I asked Gareth Gibson, the company’s marketing director, Mapping & GIS Solutions, about the product and recent developments in GNSS-enabled mapping. For a much longer version of this interview, see gpsworld.com/Gibson_interview.

When I started in this business more than 20 years ago, we used to divide GNSS receivers into three categories, broadly speaking: consumer grade, resource grade and survey grade. Are those distinctions still useful?

GARETH GIBSON: The survey world and the mapping world have been coming together over the past 20 years or so. Probably Jack Dangermond [co-founder and president of Esri] was one of the first people to publicly acknowledge that. Surveying is an ancient profession, whereas mapping and GIS as an industry has evolved much more recently.

The techniques and the expectations of precision, and the complexity of the workflow coming from the survey side, have always been somewhat at odds with what the mapping world has been trying to achieve, so the products and the tools of these industries were quite different.

However, there has been a blurring of the lines. Today, the capabilities of mapping-grade GNSS systems are no different from those that can be used in the survey industry as well.

What does the DA2 with Trimble Catalyst service enable that was not previously possible?

GG: It enables the mass deployment of precise GNSS across organizations with tens or hundreds or even thousands of workers. They can now benefit from adding GNSS technology to their work where it was previously prohibitively expensive, too complicated, or simply incompatible with their workflows.

Catalyst and the DA2 are enabling that through the business model, which we have employed for the technology and through the technical capabilities of the platform, which has reached a point of being much easier to be mass adopted across organizations.

The significant change that we’ve made with the DA2 was the addition of support for Apple-based devices. The norm now is to use the phone or the tablet you have in your pocket, as opposed to purchasing dedicated equipment, especially as it relates to the group of workers we would describe as the location-enabled workforce. These are people typically who are not trained surveyors or GIS professionals, but are performing a function with an organization and location-enabled workflows.

Software applications are just part of their toolkit for their day-to-day work. It does not make sense to equip these teams with very expensive and complicated equipment, but the functionality that the equipment can provide can unlock some areas of productivity that would have otherwise been inaccessible to them.

What are the remaining technical challenges to mapping for GIS and asset management applications?

GG: The nut we’ve cracked is enabling precision at almost any practical level, using GNSS, anywhere around the world. We continue to strive toward having access to that level of precision in any environment.

There’s a limit to what can be achieved with GNSS alone. So, we start to see more and more the use of combined technologies, different data and sensor fusion. People are leveraging different parts of the technology jigsaw — what is available on their phones, what is available from external sensors, and what they can do with the raw data they are capturing, either directly within a piece of software on their mobile device or somewhere in the cloud, to make better use of the raw information that has been captured.

The second major area is the merging and connecting of workflows, not just the types of data that these organizations are capturing. Organizations are working with field teams, with all that data coming together and being able to be used in a toolbox to enable different types of work to get done. In the past, things were a lot more siloed. Now, technology is enabling us to work together in more clever ways. It is easier to share information.

GG: There are two elements to Catalyst. One is positioning as a service, enabled through a subscription. The other is the GNSS antenna. The latest generation of that is the DA2.

We have made some changes to the DA2 to enable some better functionality and broader applicability. Without a high-quality antenna, there’s only so much you can do with GNSS. Our focus with DA2 was to make the antenna component of the solution as small and lightweight as possible, but as high performance as possible. We’ve enabled that through a combination of very clever engineering.

The physical structure of the antenna is quite different from that of any other antenna we build within Trimble. The idea to make it simpler, lighter and lower cost influenced almost every design decision that went into how that antenna is built — from how it fits and mounts with varying carrying solutions, to how it is powered.

We have added a wireless radio to allow GNSS positions to be communicated back to your phone or your tablet via Bluetooth. So, DA2 is a lot more versatile because it enables iOS device usage and wireless transfer information from the antenna to the phone or tablet.

GG: The DA2 supports delivery of corrections over the internet or through the antenna itself — so in an offline or an online environment. Catalyst uses Trimble’s dedicated correction services, so Trimble VRS Now, which is available in parts of North America and most of Western Europe, as well as Trimble RTX, which is available everywhere in the world and is also delivered by internet or by satellite L-band. Globally or regionally available augmentation systems such as EGNOS and WAAS, and those smaller systems for DGPS-type positions, are also used where it’s necessary as a fallback option.

The receiver will choose what correction service it needs to use based on the user’s subscription level and the environment in which the receiver is currently operating.

Does the current version of Trimble Catalyst differ from the previous version in any other way?

GG: With the latest generation of Catalyst, you no longer need a high-end phone to run the service because we have removed the reliance on USB to deliver the data from the antenna to the controlling device. Now, you can effectively do all the computation in the antenna and use Bluetooth for data transfer, which makes it a bit more versatile.

Additionally, we have introduced a handle that allows you to use the DA2 in a handheld format that also stores a battery pack.