Last year, GPS World marked its 30th anniversary. That is a testimony to this magazine’s continued relevance, its commitment to its marketing partners, and its unmatched audited audience of 54,000 GNSS/PNT buyers, integrators and specifiers.

Taking on my new role on GPS World’s edit team was a homecoming of sorts because I began my current career a little more than 20 years ago as this magazine’s managing editor. I look forward to an ongoing conversation with many of you in the GNSS/PNT community—scientists, engineers, civil servants, uniformed service members, company executives and product managers. You may get an e-mail message from me, and I will always welcome yours, at the e-mail address below.

Let me tell you a little about three passions that led me to this job. Navigation has been one of my passions since I was a kid. When I was five years old, I lost track of my mother as she entered a store in Berkeley, California, and I kept walking down the street. It happened again when I was seven and had insisted on walking home alone from school in Milan, Italy. I was determined never to get lost again. So, when I was 11 and my family moved to Pisa, I was the only kid I knew who walked around — from school to sabre-fencing practice, to piano lessons, to my bus stop — studying a map and a compass. When I was 13, in shop class, I built a crude opticalrange finder, based on trigonometry. Next, came the topo maps I used for hiking the hills and mountains of Tuscany. A few years later, as a graduate student at MIT, I began to sail around the Boston Harbor islands and off the coast of Maine. I learned to navigate using nautical charts, sextants, radio direction-finders, sonar, radar, Loran-C and, finally, GPS receivers.

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