The Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Market is one of the fastest growing and most exciting technologies in the world. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.3% from 2025 to 2030, reaching USD 28.3 billion. With this growth comes many new possibilities, but central to the transportation revolution that will be driven by UAM is the problem of robust and secure navigation. This article by InsideGNSS takes a deep dive on how these concerns are being addressed and highlights NextNav’s Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS) as part of the solution.
“A terrestrial radionavigation system (TRNS) is the second line of defense in the DLN concept, and the current focus. Its pseudorange measurements to surrounding beacons are independent of, but fully interchangeable with, GNSS measurements. TRNS beacons provide much stronger signals compared to GNSS, operate at a different frequency, and offer a full absolutely-referenced backup PVT solution to GNSS. In particular, we explore tight coupling with NextNav’s Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS). MBS is particularly attractive for UAM because its signals carry not only wideband (multipath-resistant) synchronization sequences for ranging, but also corrections data for barometric altitude determination and for CDGNSS.”
Read the full article complete with a detailed report of an artificial long-scale GNSS outage and the key takeaways of that testing.