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In Development · Bench Validation Underway
Know Where Your
Sensors Are.
Every emplaced sensor needs four facts about itself: where it is, how high above the ground it sits, which way it points, and what time it is. Today those numbers are typed in by hand. AnchorDatum measures them — and streams them as machine-readable data, completely offline.
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The Problem With Typed-In Numbers
Antenna height above ground. Sensor azimuth. Mast tilt. These are direct inputs to RF line-of-sight prediction, Fresnel clearance, radar horizon, camera ray-to-ground geolocation, acoustic ground-reflection modeling, and radar alignment verification. In nearly every deployment, an operator eyeballs "about three meters," types it into a field, and every downstream prediction silently inherits that guess.
The errors are not hypothetical. A consumer GNSS receiver's internal geoid model is coarse enough to misreport geoid separation by more than a meter — an error that propagates directly into every mean-sea-level to ellipsoid altitude conversion, including radar track altitude. A magnetometer bolted to a steel mast is worse than no heading reference at all. And a mast that settles two degrees over a winter invalidates an alignment nobody re-checked.
AnchorDatum replaces the guess with a measurement, attaches an uncertainty to it, and keeps watching after the install crew leaves.
Capability
Four Facts. Measured, Not Assumed.
Each value carries its own uncertainty and its own provenance. A height derived from a terrain database and a height measured by laser are different claims with different failure modes — AnchorDatum never conflates them.
01
Position
WGS-84 latitude and longitude with both height references: height above ellipsoid, and mean sea level computed from an onboard EGM2008 geoid grid rather than a receiver's coarse internal model.
Decimetre class, offline
02
Height Above Ground
Direct laser ranging to the surface beneath the sensor, tilt-corrected and quality-flagged. Independent of GNSS quality — it still works when GNSS is degraded or denied.
±5 cm
03
True Heading
Dual-antenna GNSS azimuth referenced to true north. No magnetometer, no declination model, and complete immunity to the ferrous structure the sensor is mounted on.
Sub-0.15° target
04
Disciplined Time
GNSS-referenced time with a pulse-per-second hardware output, giving every sensor at a site a common timebase without reaching a time server.
PPS output
Variants
Fixed Site and On-The-Move
Static emplacements and vehicle-mounted sensors need the same four facts, but they do not derive them the same way. A gravity-referenced inclinometer is accurate to a hundredth of a degree standing still and meaningless under a third of a g of cornering. The two variants share an output contract and diverge where the physics requires it.
Fixed Site
AnchorDatum FS
For masts, towers, tripods, and permanent emplacements. Performs a guided survey-in at installation, produces a signed emplacement record, then stays installed and watches for drift.
- Guided survey-in with convergence indicator
- Signed emplacement record to the COP
- Drift and tamper alarms on azimuth, tilt, height
- Mast sway and vibration spectrum
- Three independent height references cross-checked
- Power over Ethernet, single-cable install
- USB CDC NMEA · Modbus RTU · PPS · CoT
Pricing TBD
In development — not yet available for order
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On-The-Move
AnchorDatum OTM
For vehicle masts, telescoping and pneumatic masts, and relocatable kits. Attitude comes from acceleration-immune GNSS and gyro fusion rather than a gravity-referenced inclinometer, on a hardware-synchronised timebase.
- Motion-independent heading — valid at a standstill
- GNSS and gyro attitude, immune to vehicle dynamics
- Hardware-synchronised sensor sampling
- Filtered height above ground over broken terrain
- Mount integrity monitoring in the vehicle frame
- Real-time corrections or satellite-broadcast augmentation
- USB CDC NMEA · Modbus RTU · PPS · CoT
Pricing TBD
Follows FS — second variant in the roadmap
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Integrity
A Position You Can Argue For
Most position sources degrade silently. Under jamming they hand you a worse number with the same confidence, and under spoofing they hand you a wrong number with the same confidence. AnchorDatum reports which of those is happening, and says so in a way an operator can act on.
Authenticated
Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication verified against current cryptographic key material. The signal is proven authentic, not merely plausible.
Unauthenticated
Key material is stale or absent — authentication is unavailable, not failed. Integrity falls back to heuristic monitoring, and the operator is told how old the key material is.
Authentication Failed
Key material is current and the signature is invalid. This is a spoofing indication, and it means something precisely because it is never confused with the state above.
Underneath the authentication layer: per-satellite carrier-to-noise monitoring, interference and spoofing event logging so a site can report its history rather than just its present state, and frequency diversity across four GNSS bands so a jammer sitting on one band degrades the solution instead of blinding it. Cryptographic authentication covers Galileo only, so heuristic jam-versus-spoof discrimination remains the primary path — the two corroborate each other.
Cryptographic key material reaches the device through GridDown Maps at sync time. No cellular link, no cloud service, no internet dependency — and when GridDown is not present, an explicit and documented staleness window rather than a silent assumption.
Interfaces
Speaks NMEA. Ignores the Cloud.
Comparable instruments produce PDF and spreadsheet reports for a human to file. AnchorDatum produces data for a machine to consume, and it does so in formats that already exist on the wire.
Outputs
- Standard NMEA — GGA, RMC, GST, GSA, HDT pass through unmodified, so anything expecting an ordinary GPS receiver works with zero integration
- Proprietary sentences — explicit HAE, geoid-corrected MSL, height above ground with quality flag, attitude, refractivity, integrity state and key age
- Modbus RTU — native ingest into BlackAtlas Sensor Hub Pro alongside existing sensors
- Cursor-on-Target — direct emission for TAK-native consumers
- Pulse-per-second — hardware timing reference on a wire
By Design
- No cloud, ever — nothing to phone home to, nothing to subscribe to, no service that can be discontinued
- No wireless by default — wired interfaces only, keeping the emissions signature of an emplacement unchanged
- Onboard record and replay — every session reproducible for after-action analysis and dispute resolution
- Onboard geoid — a full global EGM2008 grid resident in flash; correct MSL anywhere on earth without a lookup service
- Receiver-independent — normalizes any upstream position source, not just its own
Ecosystem
What It Makes Better
AnchorDatum is an enabler. Its value is measured in the accuracy of everything downstream of it.
GridDown Maps
Feeds measured antenna height into RF line-of-sight, Fresnel clearance, and viewshed, and replaces the assumed atmospheric refractivity k-factor with a measured one. Uncertainty propagates into the output instead of vanishing.
Radar Alignment
Seeds the bearing offset directly from a surveyed position and true heading, so landmark observations verify the alignment rather than deriving it. Measured mast sway sizes the residual budget on evidence.
AtlasBridge
Supplies a correct geoid separation for MSL-referenced radar track altitude conversion, plus a disciplined timebase for correlating multi-sensor streams and an integrity state that fits the existing sensor-health model.
Sensor Hub
Arrives as a Modbus device on a hub that already speaks Modbus. Emplacement metadata joins the existing sensor catalog with no new plumbing.
Acoustic Arrays
Microphone height above ground drives ground-reflection null structure, and measured temperature, pressure and humidity give the local speed of sound instead of a standard-atmosphere assumption.
Electro-Optical
Camera height above terrain and true boresight azimuth set the ray-to-ground intersection. Geolocation accuracy is bounded by how well the camera's own pose is known.
Status
Where This Actually Stands
BlackAtlas would rather publish an honest roadmap than an optimistic datasheet. AnchorDatum is a validated concept, not a shipping product.
- Component selection complete. Every subsystem is commercial off-the-shelf and available today. No custom silicon, no long-lead parts.
- Bench validation in progress. The gating question is whether a real mast, in real multipath, holds a repeatable azimuth across sessions and days. That is a fact about the physical world, discoverable only by standing in a field with instruments.
- Performance figures on this page are component specifications and design targets, not measured system results. They will be replaced with measured numbers, including the ones that come back worse than hoped.
- Software layer under development independently. The position and altitude normalization service, onboard geoid, and integrity state machine are being built into GridDown Maps regardless of the hardware outcome, because they improve products already in the field.
- Freedom-to-operate review pending. Prior art in GNSS-based antenna alignment exists and is being cleared by counsel before any production commitment.
- Not yet available for order. Pricing will be published when the specifications are measured rather than projected.
AnchorDatum is a BlackAtlas LLC product concept in active development. Export classification is assessed per product; see the Export Control page. Nothing on this page constitutes an offer to sell or a representation of delivered capability.