Who it is for

In the field

• Emergency services and disasters. It keeps ambulance, disaster response and other teams visible in tunnels, indoors, between tall buildings and in disaster areas. Where the radio or the network will not hold, the map and sensors on the device keep giving a position.
• Road, freight and public transport. Public vehicles, buses, tankers carrying dangerous goods and valuable loads gain a second way of being tracked that does not look at the satellites. In tunnel and motorway operations it helps keep the position continuous.
• A map of jamming. Every time the satellite position and YERKON's disagree, that is an event. Collected centrally, the events give the Ministry a map of where and when jamming and spoofing happen across the country.

Strategic

• Position stops depending on one foreign technology.
• It gets less likely that one thing breaking stops everything in a critical service.
• In a crisis a second layer of position, working from the ground, is already there.
• Border regions and busy corridors hold up better against interruption.
• The knowledge of how to build, write and put together such a system stays in the country.

Institutional and academic

• It comes out which service depends on the satellites how much, and the events go onto a national map.
• Institutions look at the same event data, and how good the service has to be can be defined from it.
• What is left is a dataset gathered from several sensors, covering satellites cut off and satellites fooled.
• The methods that work out position get written here, with universities, the state and industry on the same work.

Commercialisation

YERKON's aim is public value. What follows is where the income to meet the running cost can come from, the first commercial steps and the products to be sold.

How it pays for itself

The model is not privatising public infrastructure. The aim is controlled extra services on top of a public core, enough to cover what running it costs.

The first area is tunnels and critical transport corridors, where satellite access is structurally limited. There the need can be stated plainly and performance measured under control, so the boundaries of a first deployment are clear. Carrying it out is what settles accuracy, coverage, service continuity, how dense the units have to be, and how much of the existing infrastructure can be reused.

In the short term the work starts on off-the-shelf hardware the team already has, while the domestic software and the rules the radios follow get written and the first broadcast and receiver boards are designed. With the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure's support, if it can be had, a joint field trial could fit the units to existing cabinets and poles on a chosen stretch of road already fitted with intelligent transport systems. In the medium term, partnership with domestic embedded and radio firms, hardware developed together with the defence and communications industry, and two suppliers for every critical part.

In the long term

• A terrestrial positioning answer for neighbouring and developing countries.
• Regional installations around critical corridors and ports.
• Licensing the YERKON protocol and the receiver family.
• Installation and integration for countries at high risk of disaster and of GNSS jamming.
• A side output: a domestic positioning and navigation industry growing up around it.

The products

• Infrastructure. The urban and rural broadcast unit (one set of hardware; in open country with a solar panel and a battery), the critical area broadcast unit, and the system that manages the units and their keys.
• User. The vehicle receiver, the pedestrian receiver (a portable field receiver), and the internet of things receiver. Later products: an integration module for unmanned aircraft, and a receiver for rail and maritime.
• Software. The management panel, the GNSS integrity and event map, interfaces for fleets and critical infrastructure, analysis and reporting software, and an offline map of where the units are.