Locata, a terrestrial positioning company, has been working in "stealth-mode" for the last few years supplying ground-based, radio-location technology in areas where GPS is not adequate. The company has had a relationship with Leica Geosystems to integrate its positioning technology for open cast mining operations. Locata boasts centimeter level accuracy and the U.S. Air Force will soon be deploying Locata's technology at the White Sands Missile Range to provide positioning in "GPS-denied" environments.

"We've been on the periphery of the technology for some time, developing [technology] over the last 10 years or so ... to turn GPS technology on and replicate the GPS positioning on the ground," Nunzio Gambale, CEO. "[It's] not been a small undertaking and we've had a clear picture of all the pieces to put this together as an alternative to GPS."

Locata has had a vision of GPS as a utility. Gambale believes that the system should be locally owned and deployed at certain frequencies, densities or power levels that allows it to be considered just like a utility. " The GPS constellation has done a superb job globally and stretched to fanatics level for engineering," said Gambale. "But the constellation has some fundamental problems, failings or shortcoming that is becoming more evident today … We're ready to present this to the technology to the industry."

Gambale positions the technology this way: Think of Locata's solution as a "GPS hot spot." It can be deployed whenever or wherever positioning is needed and as supplemental to existing GPS receivers.

Gambale thinks that his solution should be likened to GPS of the early 1990's. That is, GPS wasn't embedded in many devices, it was expensive, and the applications were only just beginning to be understood. Gambale thinks that Locata can follow the same development path from being expensive to one of a consumer-level cost and scaled to become embedded onto chipsets. "We're not trying to replace GPS but augment it. Satellite plus terrestrial is the wave of the future," said Gambale.

Gambale wants you to think of Locata exactly the same as GPS but in the same way that GPS grew up, it will be partners like Lockheed to make the applications. Today Locata is an industrial-oriented solution that Gambale hopes would move up the value chain to eventually become embedded within consumer apps ... just like GPS.