La Plata, Md., resident Dr. Alan Evans—a retired Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) principal electrical engineer—was named a 2013 Fellow Member by the Institute of Navigation (ION), the Navy announced March 18. During his NSWCDD career, Evans was the Principal Investigator for many R&D projects sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. His career in navigation has spanned over 30 years and he has contributed to both military and civilian applications.
DAHLGREN, Va.—Dr. Alan Evans—a La Plata resident and retired Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) principal electrical engineer—was named a 2013 Fellow Member by the Institute of Navigation (ION), the Navy announced March 18.
ION honored Evans with the title based on his distinguished sustained professional contributions to the advancement of the technology, management, practice and teaching of the arts and sciences of navigation and his lifetime contributions to the institute.
"I feel very indebted to my friends and colleagues at Dahlgren," said Evans. "It was their assistance and support that enabled our global positioning system (GPS) projects to continually move forward over the years. They were smart, enjoyable to work with and always helpful."
In collaboration with other NSWCDD personnel, Evans demonstrated the very first basic use of the GPS phase measurements to achieve high accuracy position changes.
"Supporting GPS, as it was developing, was very exciting," said Evans who demonstrated the Stanford Telecommunications receiver, capable of one-measurement-per-minute, single satellite tracking. It was used to obtain centimeter-level accurate position changes as the satellites moved across the sky.
Evans reported his most recent contribution at the 2011 Joint Navigation Conference.
He presented current software developments for a military GPS augmentation system composed of a global network to compute and provide low-latency corrected GPS ephemeris and clock state estimates to the users. As demonstrated, these developments enable very high-accuracy absolute GPS position, navigation/attitude estimation and time on a dynamic platform using a military geodetic GPS receiver tightly-coupled with an inertial system. The network-assisted GPS substantially improves the real-time accuracy and supports additional GPS anti-jam signal processing important to military applications.
During his career at NSWCDD, Dr. Evans was the principal investigator for many R&D projects sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. His career in navigation has spanned over 30 years and he has contributed to both military and civilian applications.
Evans has six navigation-related U.S. Patents and has authored or co-authored 64 papers (100 presentations) at national, or international, navigation and geodetic conferences; including 37 ION conferences (3 Best Presentation Awards), and seven invited papers in academic journals. He received the Defense Mapping Agency Research and Development Award in 1989 and the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award in 2007.
Since retiring from the Navy in 2010, Dr. Evans has continued to support GPS Navigation research and development at the Penn State University Applied Research Laboratory.
Evans earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Widener University. He holds a Master's Degree and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University.