Special Projects

FSL’s versatile Micro controller, the FS-M4, is now one of our best selling products, with recent orders exceeding sixteen hundred in the last six months. Designed to work with GNSS, this controller has lead to many exciting projects one of which is our work for Assisted GPS (AGPS).

Over the past years a major telecoms company has purchased many NovAtel ProPak receivers in order to provide an AGPS mobile network for their customers. Each ProPak is connected to one of their Network Controllers, which enables transmission of AGPS data to the mobile phones. This data received by the mobile created a service, which could help obtain a quicker solution for cellular AGPS subscribers. Typically GPS phones in urban environments compute positions in a few seconds when using AGPS.
 However, when the Micro controller was designed Forsberg Services saw an opportunity in which they could work alongside their customer and design a system, which could talk to up to 8 RNC’s at one time. This would cut down on their cost enormously and thus set in motion a working partnership between FSL and their telecoms customer to design a new receiver.
Our engineers set to work on implementing the Micro controller on to a PCB board, in which it was able to interrogate the full range of NovAtel GPS cards and transmit data to the cellualr network.  A small, lightweight yet robust housing then had to be designed and rated to IPX7 and pass CE and FCC regulations. The MICROpod-M8 was born and using bespoke engineered software called NavPlex the MICROpod-M8 was able to receive and send the GPS data required to 8 RNC’s at one time.