2015 Fellow

Presented to: Dr. Frank van Diggelen

Citation: For contributions to satellite-based navigation for
consumer applications, especially mobile handheld
devices.

Dr. Frank van Diggelen has been working in navigation his entire career. At age 19, he was a navigation officer in the South African Navy before going on to college. He has worked on GNSS for Navsys, Ashtech, Magellan, and Global Locate. Following the acquisition of Global Locate, he is currently Vice President of GPS Technology and a Broadcom Fellow at Broadcom Corporation.

Dr. van Diggelen is also a passionate teacher. He is a consulting professor at Stanford University; and is coinstructor of a free online GPS course, offered through Stanford University and Coursera. In its first release, this course attracted 25,000 registrants from 183 countries.

Dr. van Diggelen is a pioneer in A-GPS. He is the inventor of coarse-time GNSS navigation, co-inventor of Long Term Orbits for A-GPS, and holds over 80 issued, and many more pending, patents on A-GPS. He is the author of the first textbook on A-GPS: “A-GPS: Assisted GPS, GNSS, and SBAS,” which is available in both English and Chinese. He is currently vice chair of the ION’s Satellite Division.

Dr. van Diggelen obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Cambridge University, England.