Locata Corporation: Location hot spots -- beyond GPS

at Holloman AFB, the 746 has deployed a Locata net. I believe it now covers an area of 50 kilometers by 10 kilometers, using 16 LocataLites, and what they are actually doing is jamming GPS and continuing to position using Locata. Our constellation looks exactly the same as the GPS constellation, but our signals are on the ground and over a million times stronger than the GPS signals.

It is evident to me that the world increasingly needs the services provided by positioning technology and that that technology — in its traditional GPS form with its satellite based weak signals  cannot keep up.

The military have realized their vulnerability and thus the need for a back up.

Locata’s technology makes no pretensions at being global but where you want to cover a campus, or a large area in Washington DC or some strategically important area, you can place a Locata net that works seamlessly with GPS.

HSNW: Your company must be in demand?

NG: It is difficult to keep up with the current interest we are seeing.

We have customers in the military, mining (Newmark, Anglo-American, Global, American) and industrial markets (including Caterpillar), and a number of customers that I cannot disclose.

We also have a lot we still need to do. We want to reduce the size of our receiver to chip form. Today it is 5” square by 1” deep and we need 3 to 4 years to reduce it to a size that is embeddable in a mobile phone.  We are also currently working on a new device that will incorporate both the Locata system and the world’s present Global Navigation Satellite Systems - presently GPS and Glownet (the Russian equivalent of the U.S.’s GPS). (The abbreviation GPS actually refers to the American satellite constellation and is the best known of GNSS systems. The European Union is building their own system called Galileo.) This would be the first and only technology to have this capability and will allow one device to use these different systems interchangeably.

We developed our technology in secret over a long period of time as we were getting our intellectual property in place. Today we have 32 granted patents and 60 more in the process. One of the downsides, however, of developing technology stealth style is keeping a really low profile. We only put up a Web site in mid 2008.

It has been an adventure and we have already come a long way. I hope to live long enough to see positioning technology implemented in a place like New York City to be able to locate the position of someone in an emergency down to a couple of feet. That’s my dream.

HSNW. Thank You.