Frank van Diggelen

Frank van DiggelenDr. Frank van Diggelen is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he works on high accuracy GNSS for phones, watches, and cars. He also teaches GPS: he and Prof. Per Enge created an on-line GPS course, offered through Stanford University and Coursera and available on YouTube.

Van Diggelen is a pioneer in Assisted GNSS, the technique that allows GPS to work in cell phones. He is the inventor of coarse-time GNSS navigation, co-inventor of Long Term Orbits for A-GNSS, and holds over 100 issued US patents on GNSS. He is the author of "A-GPS" the first textbook on Assisted GNSS, and Co-editor of "PNT in the 21st Century" (Morton, van Diggelen, Spilker, and Parkinson), the latest book on GNSS and Navigation. He was the President of the Institute of Navigation 2021 through 2023. He has received the Thurlow and Kepler awards of the ION, and the Harold Spencer Jones Gold Medal from the RIN. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ION, and the Royal Institute of Navigation.

Previously, he was a Navigation Officer in the South African Navy. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cambridge University, England.

In his spare time, Van Diggelen is a competitive user of GNSS and other PNT technologies, as Navigator and Co-skipper of a racing sailboat. See videos full of PNT data at youtube.com/@SunFastCam