The January Institute of Navigation Washington Section meeting was held at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The meeting had 21 full attendees, 1 student attendee, and 1 guest (speaker). The ION President Larry Hothem and the ION National Office Director Carl Andren attended along with the section officers: Jim Doherty (Section Chair), Chuck Schue (Treasurer), Jim Simpson (Program Chair) and Dave Winfield (Student Stipend Committee Co-Chair). The agenda of events was the following:

6:00 - 6:45
Meet and Greet

6:45 - 7:15
Business Meeting
1. Discussion of the Congressional and Executive Fellows programs (former ION Congressional Fellow Clark Cohen was present and offered to discuss programs with interested members. The date for applications is 30 April 2004 for the 2004-05 Fellows, and ION is asking all Sections to talk up the programs.

2. Student stipend--Dave Winfield gave an impromptu discussion of the status and plans for the stipend effort and invited participation in the committee. The meetings are on the 2nd Tuesday each month, noon at FAA HQ cafeteria.

3. Questions about the Bylaws, membership, and what constitutes a quorum for the meetings. There seemed to be three issues--need to shrink the zip codes included in the section area; but invite volunteers from outside these zip codes; and set a fixed number (eg, most thought 15) for a quorum. Before the next business meeting to discuss the Bylaws, however, we agreed we would announce this item well in advance and publish the recommended final Bylaws for review and comment in advance.

4. Jim Simpson discussed future meetings and suggested that noon meetings are not as successful as evening meetings. He received one suggestion that we get someone from the FAA to give us a discussion on WAAS and LAAS.

5. Jim Doherty asked if there were any issues for the ION Council meeting, and there were none.

6. Randy Clark, an officer of the section before it went dormant in the early 1990s, attended the meeting and presented to the Section Chair with a portable overhead (viewgraph) projector which belongs to the Section.

7. The treasurer (Chuck Schue) reported that $430 was collected and covered the $356.60 of expenses.

7:15 - 7:45
Satellite Time Transfer Talk
The speaker was Jay Oaks and the discussion regarded the history of time transfer technology. Joe White and Ron Beard were other NRL representatives present, and they along with Jay answered questions during a Q&A that followed the presentation.

Time transfer by satellite began in the mid to late 1960s, and much of the initial work was performed by members of the Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) community who reported at the PTTI Systems and Applications Meetings. The talk discussed an account of experiments published in past PTTI Proceedings that traces the development of satellite time transfer. It focused on applications using passive ranging techniques with navigation satellites and in particular the development of time transfer via GPS. Another passive ranging satellite navigation system discussed was the Navy Navigation Satellite System (NNSS), also known as TRANSIT. TRANSIT was a low-altitude Doppler system that provided time transfers on the order of 10-50 microseconds of accuracy. There were also efforts that used synchronous communications satellites for two-way time transfer. Applications of two-way time transfer have matured in their own right and are considered a different method. The methods and experiments described in this talk began with the Navy TIMATION satellites, continue with the Navy Navigation Technology Satellites (NTS), and conclude with the DoD GPS satellites.

7:45 - 8:30
Tour of NRL Facilities
Joe and Ron gave a tour of NRL's satellite assembly facility, including the impressive acoustic and physical vibration facilities.

9:00
Meeting adjourned.