Spatial Intelligence:​ Integrating GPS and Field Data for Smarter Decisions – Virtual Brew 5/15/25

This Virtual Brew will discuss the trends in the GPS industry and how they improve access, lower cost, and improve efficiencies of GNSS technologies.

To learn more, read Location Intelligence: Integrating GNSS and Field Data for Smarter Pipeline Decisions, where we explore topics like location intelligence, GNSS vs GPS data, and geospatial analytics for smarter pipeline compliance and asset management.

Transcript

Introduction and Poll

Aaron Cysensky
As mentioned, my name is Aaron Cysensky— I’m the product manager for Cartopac, but I’ll introduce myself in more detail in a few minutes. I’m here to talk with you this morning about spatial intelligence, and how we can integrate GPS and field data technology for smarter decision-making in your business processes.

Before we get into it, I want to kick off with a quick poll — this is my first time using this platform, so bear with me. The poll is centered on how effectively your organization is using high-accuracy GNSS technology in your business processes today, whether by you or other teams in your organization. We’ll give it about 30 seconds before looking at the results.

This is shaping up pretty close to what I expected, and the reason I chose this question is that no matter how the group answers, it means we’re in the right place — whether you’re well on your way with GNSS technology, haven’t started yet, or are just beginning, either way we’re in the right place for the conversation we’re here to have today. I’m encouraged to see 55% of you indicated that both your GIS and cathodic protection operators are using this data effectively today — that’s pretty encouraging.

Agenda

Quick agenda: we just went through our poll, thank you for participating. We’ll go over who I am and why I’m here, talk a bit about GNSS versus GPS — a little 101, cutting the jargon — talk about GNSS devices, GIS, and correction services, and lastly focus on what’s new in the world of high-accuracy GPS/GNSS technology.

About Aaron Cysensky

So, who am I? I’m Aaron Cysensky, product manager for Cartopac. I’ve been with the Cartopac team since 2018, and with American Innovations since 2019, when they acquired Cartopac. In my past life, I served eight years in the United States Air Force doing satellite communications and overseeing nuclear security systems, so satellites have been part of what I’ve done for as long as I can remember.

Before becoming product manager here at AI, I also worked on the implementation team, so I have about eight years of experience with the Cartopac application and deploying it to our users — a good understanding of our software, our customers, and how we help solve their problems. I’m here today to talk about the changes we’re seeing in the GNSS world, and what that means for us here at American Innovations, and for you as a user of these products.

AI PCS field data collector users are becoming more acquainted with high-accuracy GPS workflows through the nature of the technology and the business evolution, and we want to use this opportunity to share some of the exciting changes in the industry and how we can improve your workflows using these new technologies.

GNSS vs. GPS: The Basics

A little bit of basics, cutting the jargon on GNSS and GPS. We’re all familiar with the term GPS — something we’ve used since before our phones could navigate us around, back when we had TomToms and Garmins navigating the streets. At that point, we all called them GPS devices, because that was correct — they used one constellation, the Global Positioning System, a U.S.-based constellation of satellites providing basic navigation.

Today, the technology has shifted quite a bit. GNSS stands for Global Navigation Satellite Systems — think of it as GPS, with more. Other countries and bodies have their own satellite systems for global navigation, and we want to include those in our technology: Galileo, a European constellation; BeiDou, a Chinese constellation; and GLONASS, a Russian constellation. These can all be used alongside the U.S.-based GPS system under the broader term GNSS, which includes all constellations around the globe.

There are additional ways to increase accuracy beyond just satellites, which I’ll get to shortly. I hear GPS and GNSS used interchangeably often, and you may catch me doing that too, since it’s how we’ve all learned to speak over the last 20 years. But whether you’re locating a test station or recording a distribution tie-in, GNSS helps you collect faster, reduces rework, and increases confidence in the work you did out in the field.

Why GNSS, Why Now

Why are we talking about this now, after all the years cathodic protection operators have been out collecting this data? All of a sudden, PCS field data collector users are becoming far more acquainted with high-accuracy technologies, and as that trend continues, your organizations are also becoming more tightly coupled with your GIS teams — the people who take highly accurate collected data and maps and align them to tell unique stories, make better process- and data-driven decisions, and use information in the smartest way possible. GPS technology has really helped move that forward.

We’re enabling both cathodic protection and Cartopac teams to collect high-accuracy, GIS-ready data on the exact same hardware, using the tools you already have available. With a much broader audience being enabled with GNSS technology, I want to talk about why and how we can improve accuracy, and what that means for your GIS teams.

What GIS Teams Expect

GIS teams expect high-accuracy data — why? The easiest answer is regulatory confidence. We all have different regulations we try to abide by, and GIS is no different — it’s bound by regulations around data accuracy, PHMSA requirements, DOT requirements, and reporting regulations. So they want data that comes in accurate and trustworthy. Having to ask field users to go back out to a site, or dig up a backfilled piece of pipe, costs time, money, and effectiveness. The hope with high-accuracy GPS technology is that we get the data right the first time, supporting meaningful audit trails and survey history for your assets in the field.

It also provides better spatial insight and reliability — dependable high-accuracy collection even in “GPS-hostile” environments, which is a bit of a silly term, but at the end of the day it means GPS technology is limited by your environment: trees, buildings, solar flares, even adverse interference from other nations. GPS isn’t a perfect technology by any stretch, but with the tools available today, we have a very dependable, high-accuracy solution available to us at all times.

Clean Integration with GIS Data Models

GIS also expects clean integration into the existing data models that feed data-driven decisions — models like PODS, the Pipeline Open Data Standard, or UPDM, put out by Esri, eventually leading into the Esri Utility Network, which many of you are either already dealing with or more than likely will be soon, as it’s becoming the future for many GIS teams.

At the end of the day, our real goal, and the goal of the GIS team — who can do this better with clean, hierarchical data — is to make spatial data your ultimate foreign key. I say this a lot, it’s one of my favorite catchphrases, and it probably resonates best with the GIS and database folks in the crowd — but allowing location, allowing spatial data, to be what relates your asset to nearby assets in a digital world is incredibly powerful. And making spatial data the ultimate foreign key starts with high-quality, highly accurate data.

GNSS Receivers We Support

I’d like to take a quick second to talk about some of the GNSS receivers we support here at American Innovations — not an exhaustive list, but the ones we see most frequently. It’s worth mentioning that these modern receivers use all four constellations we mentioned to improve accuracy and perform reliably in tough, hostile environments — improving accuracy, reducing acquisition time, and increasing reliability.

Common GNSS receivers we see include Juniper Systems’ devices, which many PCS FDC users are familiar with — the Geode, Geode 3, H, or M, which all have a very similar form factor. We also see a lot of Eos Positioning Systems receivers, including the Arrow Gold and the Arrow Scotty on the far right, a next-generation system we’re seeing a lot of traction with. And lastly, I don’t want to forget the DVM — it may not be purely a GNSS receiver, and we may not use it that way, but many on the FDC team know there’s a GPS device in there used for timing, and we can also pull spatial data from it if you don’t have a more accurate solution available. It’s part of the toolkit that helps us get these higher-accuracy points we rely on.

Out of the box, all of these are incredible receivers — you can get yourself down to about a foot of accuracy just walking around with most of these. But sometimes that’s not quite the accuracy your GIS team is looking for, so let’s talk about how we can improve that further, through correction services.

Improving Accuracy: Correction Services

There are various ways to take the signal received from a GPS and perform mathematical calculations against it to derive a more accurate location. I’ll talk about a couple of these.

RTK (Real-Time Kinematics)

First is real-time kinematics, or RTK — the process of using an active internet connection to reach out to other GNSS receivers broadcasting their location, and using that information to triangulate your specific location with a high degree of accuracy, down to the decimeter level. It’s highly accurate, highly reliable, fast, and effective, with very low downtime — you’re able to begin collecting data immediately.

The downside is it requires an active internet connection at all times. Many of you on the FDC team know you don’t always have an active connection — that’s why we have offline workflows. It may also require a subscription service, though not always — many state departments of transportation provide statewide RTK networks, but that’s not always the case, and you may need to pay for a subscription. RTK is the top of the line for highly accurate collection in the field, but there are other options too.

Post-Processing

Post-processing also gets you highly accurate data, but it typically requires an after-hours, back-office process to correct your data to the accuracy GIS expects. It works on the same principle — your own base station data and rover data out in the field can be compared to triangulate and correct location — but without needing internet at the time of collection.

Instead, all that information is saved in the background on both ends, and at the end of the night, the data is shared and the location is corrected for you. It doesn’t require any active internet at the time of collection, and the accuracy is comparable to RTK — a good, low-cost alternative. However, it provides limited field confirmation of accuracy — you don’t know how good your data is until it’s been post-processed, since you don’t know the quality of the data from surrounding base stations at the time, so there’s some inherent risk. It also has a longer acquisition time, since it requires logging more information from nearby satellites for the later calculations — so it’s a bit slower and doesn’t give you that real-time confidence.

As a bit of a joke, you may have noticed I used the same image for both of these — the idea is that it’s the same type of technology, the same process and principle, just applied at different times, which is what gives you the illusion that one is real-time with real-time feedback, versus something handled in the back office.

Q&A: RTK Use Cases and FDC Device Compatibility

We had a couple of comments — one from William, and a question from Casey. William made a comment that some countries in Latin America, with rough terrain conditions, use RTK GNSS base stations and transmitters to verify pipeline deviations due to changing climate conditions, landslides, and earth movements, to help establish HCAs (High Consequence Areas) — a really interesting example of how these use cases and this technology overcome challenges you might not think about if you’re not involved in the GNSS world.

Casey asked a great question: are we limited by the FDC application in terms of which GPS/GNSS equipment we can connect to our device? Absolutely not — all the receivers shown here today, aside from the DVM, are generic GNSS receivers that can connect to pretty much any mobile device, Windows, Android, or iOS, via Bluetooth, and there’s a wide array of applications you can use to collect this data, whether real-time corrected, post-processed, or, in the future, with Galileo High Accuracy. You’re not bound to the FDC application, or to Cartopac — the technology is pretty universal. I hope that answers your question — if not, feel free to follow up. Thank you, Christian.

Introducing Galileo High Accuracy

As I’ll show in a moment, Galileo High Accuracy is currently slated for about two-thirds global coverage, which is a really powerful swath of the earth. It’s cost-effective, in the sense that it costs you nothing, assuming you have a high-accuracy receiver capable of receiving the new L5 frequency band that Galileo High Accuracy leverages. It has multi-constellation support, and, more specifically, very good multipath and frequency defenses — the idea being that as satellites push out GPS signals, they bounce off everything they come into contact with, including the atmosphere and ionosphere, and multipath-reducing technologies help the signal get through those barriers more effectively without losing quality along the way. So we’re not just operating on new frequency bands, we’re also getting better handling of those refractive signal issues.

Q&A: Geode Support in FDC

That’s an excellent point, Lon, thank you for that — the Geode is currently supported in FDC. The Geode, in case I didn’t highlight it well enough — let me go back — is the Juniper device on the far left. Thank you for that, Lon.

Galileo High Accuracy: What Is GIAS

So, Galileo High Accuracy — sometimes referred to as GIAS — is in addition to the technology we have today. It operates on an additional frequency band with better protection against multipathing and frequency interference, giving us the ability to get additional corrections in the field down to 25 centimeters — just shy of a foot, close to 8 inches of accuracy — with no additional correction services required. That means no post-processing, no real-time corrections needed — with purely autonomous data, you’re able to get sub-foot accuracy in the field using these next-generation GNSS devices, which is incredibly exciting.

Coverage Map and Rollout Timeline

Here’s a quick data map showing what we’re seeing with Galileo High Accuracy as it continues to roll out — roughly two-thirds of the globe is covered. We lose Australia, New Zealand, and some areas directly north of that, and it also excludes a bit of Alaska and roughly the Vancouver area. But we do get all of Central America, the majority of North America, Africa, and the vast majority of Europe.

Galileo High Accuracy is currently deploying worldwide and is already live, but right now it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to get down to that accuracy level. Once all the satellites are deployed, expected within the next year and a half, it could take less than five minutes to get that acquisition and correction signal — really encouraging. They’re about a year and change out from being fully deployed, with what I’d call near-worldwide Galileo High Accuracy coverage — there are currently no plans to expand into the areas that remain blocked out, as far as I’m aware.

What This Means for You

So, what does this mean for you? I’d like to challenge you to think about how you and your organization could benefit from higher-accuracy GNSS workflows. Understand who those people are in your organization, and whether you’re using that technology today. Is the spatial data you collect as part of your daily job being used in the decision-making process yet? I’d argue it should be. And lastly, do you even know who in your organization would be interested in high-quality GNSS data — are you talking with those teams yet? If not, there’s a good chance you will be, as GIS becomes a bigger decision-maker in the processes we participate in, the tools we use, and the technology we leverage.

Closing

Thank you for taking the time to sit with me today and talk about high-accuracy GPS. We have about four minutes left for questions — I also touched on a couple other options I’m excited to talk about with anyone interested, including RTK-enabled line locators, GNSS technology with tilt compensation, and hands-free GNSS mounting options. I’m happy to talk GNSS with anyone interested. Thank you very much for joining today, I really appreciate your time.