Interview with Steve Ault (Part 2 of 4: Navcom & SF-3050)

This is the second segment of a 4-part series of interview questions posted to Mr Steve Ault, the Technical Support Manager of Navcom Technology, Inc., who conducted training for our sales and field personnel in early November 2009.

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PointsandPixels: Who is Navcom Technology, Inc.?

Steve: The founders of Navcom Technology, Inc., (NTI) were pioneers in the GPS industry. Most of them worked for Magnavox GPS research and development for more than a decade before joining NTI. In fact, some of them even worked on the old Transit satellite system and Omega rover navigation system primarily used in commercial marine and military applications.

Some members of our research and development team have spent more than half a century in the fields of surveying, navigation, and geodesy instrumentation. Their experience is propagated to a much younger and culturally diversed group of engineers coming from different countries around the world.

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PointsandPixels: What is your connection with John Deere, Inc.?

Steve: NTI is a wholely-owned subsidiary of John Deere, Inc. (JDI). While one can read about the successful relationship cultivated and merged by the founders of JDI, the depth of knowledge and experience within this industry seems nearly as old as JDI itself. Just like John Deere, the Navcom brand holds high performance standards and expectations, builds reliable and durable products and works closely with its dealers and channel partners to ensure that customer issues are addressed appropriately.

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PointsandPixels: The latest offering by Navcom are the SF-3050 GPS/GNSS Receivers. What is so special about these machines?

Steve: The SF-3050 has incorporated many innovations of previous generations of GPS technology. To name a few, ethernet and USB high speed data ports, bluetooth interoperability, increased internal memory and new GUI design have helped to fulfill the needs of present day applications.

...like John Deere, the Navcom brand holds high performance standards and expectations, builds reliable and durable products and works closely with its dealers and channel partners...

ASCII command interface is easy to understand and this makes configuration of receivers very flexible. The StarUtil-3000 GUI program provides a tool for parsing binary data to ASCII format (which allows further analysis to be carried out in spreadsheets).


The scalable software features makes the SF-3050 a very economical product to systems integrators as well. Customers can start off with low-cost receivers and, as time for integration and testing comes, upgrade to higher levels of capability to help control integration costs. This is a benefit not inherently obvious in this product.

Tools for integrating third-party applications (such as Carlson SurvCE and Grade) were co-developed leading into its production. Also included in the SF-3050 toolbox is the Rinex conversion utility which allows users to user SF-3050 data in most currently available post-processing programs.

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Related posts/links...

1. Interview with Steve Ault. Part 1/4: His experience with GNSS/RF, history and future trend of the industry

2. SF3050 data sheet/brochure in pdf file.



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