Dear all,

On behalf of the OmniSTAR team I would like to thank you all (our customers, business partners and friends) for the confidence you placed in OmniSTAR throughout 2005! It was a succesful year with many interesting projects and fairs as you will be able to read further in this Newsletter.

The staff at OmniSTAR wishes you a wonderful holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year! We hope you can use this festive period for yourself and your family to relax.

Please note that our office will be closed from 23th December 4:00pm (Dutch time) until 2nd January 8:30am. Phone calls will be transfered to OmniSTAR Perth (Australia) at no extra costs for the caller.
Faxes however cannot be transfered or answered during that period.

We look forward to making contact with you in the new year.


Erik J. Hammega
Managing Director

The Stanford Racing Team (with their car Stanley) was recently awarded 2 million dollars for being first to complete the DARPA ⁽¹⁾ Grand Challenge 2005 course.

(1) "The Grand Challenge is an off-road robot competition devised by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to promote research in the area of autonomous vehicles. The challenge consists of building a robot capable of navigating 175 miles through desert terrain in less than 10 hours, with no human intervention."

Stanley used OmniSTAR and a Novatel OEMIV receiver as the sole source of GPS correction data, finishing its journey in less than 7 hours.

The OmniSTAR service, available on a number of different GPS platforms, was the sole source of differential corrections for the leading 5 vehicles and was also used by 12 of the remaining 15 finalists.

In 2004 (during the 1^st Darpa) none of the cars, which had entered the race, finished it. This year, only 20 cars qualifed for the final race from the 195 who registered.

Visit also ... www.grandchallenge.org/

Wageningen University has chosen the OmniSTAR 8300HP receiver for use with a fully autonomous unmanned weeding vehicle. The vehicle has to weed between crop plants in rows and is able to perform automatic manoeuvres at the headlands of the field.

The unmanned vehicle, powered by a conventional diesel engine, incorporates hydraulic transmission and steering mechanism. The control system uses wheel rpm sensors, wheel angle sensors and GPS including OmniSTAR-HP. An additional onboard camera has been integrated, used to determine vehicle position and aid navigation between crop rows for intra-row applications. Fully autonomous headland turns and selection of the next crop row to enter are among ongoing developments.

Visit also ... www.sco.wur.nl

OmniSTAR-HP was until recently based solely on Network Technology allowing for highly accurate positioning results inside or around our reference station network.

OmniSTAR now introduces an addition to OmniSTAR-HP: Precise Orbits and Clock Technology.
A completely separate network of dual frequency reference stations enables us to generate information with regard to precise satellite orbits and satellite clock offset. Correcting these measurements for earth tides, ocean loading and polar motion also allows us to create accurate positioning results that are valid worldwide.

OmniSTAR-HP now combines both technologies to provide a truly worldwide, very reliable, highly accurate dual frequency differential correction service.
OmniSTAR-HP accuracies have been demonstrated as better than 10 cm horizontal and 15 cm vertical. Actual performance may vary with receiver hardware used and geographical location of the user.



Please OmniSTAR for a free upgrade!

We are currently in the process of preparing our reference station infrastructure for future expansion. This process also requires us to redistribute some of our reference stations over our satellite broadcasts.

The Bahrain and Abu Dhabi reference stations, now available on both the EA-Sat and AF-Sat broadcasts, will be, as of December 15th 2005, only available on the AF-Sat broadcast.

	Satellite	Frequency	Baudrate
Current Frequency	EA-Sat	1535.1525 MHz	1200 bps
New frequency	AF-Sat	1535.0800 MHz	1200 bps

- If you are already on the new AF-sat frequency as indicated above, no further action is required.

- But if you are currently working on the EA-Sat and in one of the countries listed on the right than please switch to the AF-Sat.



If you need assistance please per e-mail or phone +31 70 317 0913.

• Afghanistan
• Bahrain
• Iran
• Pakistan
• Oman
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• United Arab Emirates (the)
• Yemen

"PocketGIS" software allows users to capture their Field Data and link it direct to their corporate GIS system. In order to refer spatially to this Data, GPS can be connected into PocketGIS, which can then take care of any date shifting issues. As a recent enhancement to PocketGIS, the links to OmniSTAR-HP have been improved.
OmniSTAR-HP enables PocketGIS users to position themselves to an accuracy of 10 cm in real time. PocketGIS will indicate on-screen not only the Co-ordinates but also the Quality Indices including the Standard Deviations created for X, Y & Z. These Filter Criteria can be user defined in order to control the accepted quality.


OmniSTAR-HP 'Seeding' has been incorporated into PocketGIS to enable both a quick start-up and quick recovery from lost lock. This is achieved by retrieving previously logged positions. PocketGIS software has been enhanced to enable this to be done swiftly and effectively, using on screen prompted commands.
OmniSTAR-HP is currently being used in conjunction with PocketGIS for many different applications including as-laid surveys, geophysical surveys, archaeological surveys and railway surveys and more."

With more then 16,000 professional visitors, including some 1600 congress participants and 515 exhibitors from 24 countries Intergeo 2005 proved again to be the world's largest congress and trade fair for Geodetics, geographical information and land management.

This year OmniSTAR B.V. was present on the combined Fugro booth with a special focus on the OmniSTAR-HP service and its true global coverage. During these days we met many customers and partners to discuss the developments in the positioning business. Especially the GIS, Survey and Construction markets are very promising for our decimetre applications the coming months.
Major partners like Trimble, Topcon, NovAtel and Sokkia were also present with their OmniSTAR capable solutions.

The short winter months are a great time to make contacts and visit trade events. Thanks then, to all those who took the opportunity to meet our team and or visit the OmniSTAR stand at Agritechnica 2005 in Hannover, Germany. This bi-annual event never fails to impress and this year was no exception. The show is a festival of the latest and greatest of all things agricultural. There were acres of halls to explore (for those with the time and stamina!) and all the latest technologies were again on display. OmniSTARs machinery and hardware manufacturer partners did an excellent job in promoting both precision farming and the guidance products of today and for the future.

With the majority of tractors and combines now in hibernation until after the Christmas period, we would also like to offer our appreciation for all the effort and hard work put in by our partners through the course of 2005. Bringing the latest technologies to market is an exciting and ongoing challenge. Thanks largely to your endevours, use of HP in conjunction with high accuracy steering aids is generating a great deal of interest from farmers, contractors and land managers across Europe. We look forward to working with you in support of these clients and continue pushing the boundaries in our mission to remain the world's leading provider of real-time Satellite Services to farmers.

Increase your web ranking by improving your link popularity

Many search engines use the link popularity of a website as a criteria to rank it higher it its listing. We offer you the opportunity to promote your website on ours if you reciprocate by putting a link to www.omnistar.nl on your site

Please Virginie Georget (Marketing & Sales Assistant).

Get your articles published in the OmniSTAR Newsletter

Through this newsletter, OmniSTAR intends to create a real discussion instead of a monologue from its side only.

You may either react to one of the published article or provide us with your own articles (relevant story or interesting application).

Please the OmniSTAR editorial team.

OmniSTAR B.V.
Dillenburgsingel 69 * NL-2263 HW Leidschendam * Phone: +31 70 317 0900
Fax: +31 70 317 0919