Robyn Williams: Families, friends, sometimes the cauldron for ideas, but rock bands? Well, here's a story of two guys who turned their nerdy inclinations towards what may become a multi-million-dollar business and transform the way GPS operates, underground, in mines, in stores. Meet Nunzio Gambale, founder and CEO of Locata in Canberra, and former rock star.

Nunzio Gambale: I was a bass player, but if you know anything at all about bands, bass players are normally the guys that hold the whole thing together.

Robyn Williams: Paul McCartney said exactly the same thing, yes.

Nunzio Gambale: Did he? The last band that I was touring with was a very, very good band called Night Flight, and it was wonderful.

Robyn Williams: And you had long hair?

Nunzio Gambale: Yes, and used to lug the gear in an out of the truck. My whole family is very musical. In fact my brother has two Grammys, he is a very, very famous guitar player, he is extremely well known in the industry, he lives in America...

Robyn Williams: And the name?

Nunzio Gambale: Frank Gambale.

Robyn Williams: With that kind of background I suppose it's surprising to see you working on something that's in technology, especially virtual technology. How did it come to be?

Nunzio Gambale: Truthfully and honestly, David and I absolutely never set out to do what we've done.

Robyn Williams: He's your partner.

Nunzio Gambale: David Small is another bass player, a friend in Canberra, originally from Wagga, used to work for Channel 7, but in Canberra at the time in 1995 when this all basically started I owned a very large music business called Pro Audio Supplies, and David had a digital recording studio. Both of us are geeky, we like technology. Long story short, David and I were sitting chatting over a beer at eight o'clock one evening and he told me that he was working on an idea that he had of giving information depending on where you were, and I looked at him very bizarrely and said, 'Look, I'm thinking of exactly the same thing,' so it really started over a conversation over a beer.

Robyn Williams: And you're thinking of GPS, you're thinking of satellites, you're thinking of some adaptation of that?

Nunzio Gambale: Yes, it was a very simple idea. Well, back in '95 it was pretty novel. The concept was we wanted to be able to give information at a personal level relative to where you were. You know, if you went past, say, the War Memorial in Canberra, which is where we did a lot of testing, we'd basically put an area around the War Memorial, when you entered it we would give you information. The idea was to sell it as a tourism guide. We worked on it for a couple of years on and off, literally the two guys in the garage working in the background with our businesses.

But the fact was that one day when we went past the War Memorial for about the 5,000th time and we were getting the files to trigger, I said to Dave, 'Listen, I want to go inside the War Memorial and keep getting guided,' I wanted to be able to be told what I was seeing. And that's right there where we ran smack bang into the problems that we saw for GPS in the future. I was reading all of these stories about how they'd be able to find your child to within a foot in downtown New York, and as anyone knows who is using a GPS phone today, go inside, in a mall, turn it on and what does it say? 'No GPS coverage'.

So that was an absolute revelation, and the fact was that we'd already gotten the thing to work quite well outdoors where GPS works well, so the problem then became; how do we make GPS work indoors? And that's actually a problem that is still current today in your iPhone, the GPS chip, when you go indoors they have to actually start working off other technologies like triangulating off phone towers et cetera. And the question that arises is, look, GPS has been around since the Beatles, fundamentally it was designed around that time, it's a really well known technology. If the signals are so weak from the satellites or they don't work very well, why can't you put them on the ground, make them really loud and fill in the holes?

If you read a lot on the web et cetera it says that the problem is that the satellites are 22,000 kilometres away, they're transmitting the signal that's only the same power as a car headlight, and the whole industry tells you that it's weak signals, it's blockages et cetera. But that actually doesn't make sense. If the signals are weak, put them on the ground and make them real strong. Well, obviously, Robyn, we found out very quickly that the problem is not signals, it's synchronisation, it's time. Fundamentally we've developed a new technology that can actually augment or, in local areas, replace GPS without the satellites. So it's the GPS without the G, it's local rather than global. And from a business point of view that has enormous implications because all of the things that Google or Microsoft or Apple wants to do with personal position and giving you information, Locata actually, I believe, will enable. I have here a device, it's the size of a video cassette, it does the same job as a $100 million satellite.

Robyn Williams: You're kidding!

Nunzio Gambale: No. There are so many things about Locata which are just completely unbelievable. Going back to the late '90s when we really started to get this concept together, we were literally told by quite a number of people that we were crazy. Because what I'm saying is that when we deploy a Locata net (that's what we call our technology) or Locata system around a place where GPS doesn't work well, a construction site, an emergency services area, around a mine, Locata is replicating a constellation of satellites that has cost the US taxpayer $40 billion.

Robyn Williams: So what you've got there in front of me, the size of a video cassette, slightly larger, it's nice and green, is that the station? That's not what you carry around with you?

Nunzio Gambale: No, this is the equivalent of the satellite. The receiver today is about the size of my palm. One of the things that you need to understand about Locata technology is that because it looks exactly the same as GPS, we give you technically the same outputs as a GPS receiver, very few people understand that GPS is just one of the satellite constellations. There's a Russian one that is nearly finished, it should be finished by the end of this year, it's called GLONASS. The Europeans have started building their own constellation, it will cost them about 10 billion euros, and it's called Galileo. The Chinese have said that they will have their own. So if we don't talk about consumer devices, if we talk about professional GPS systems where people have to rely on a signal for their business, you will find that almost every professional GPS chip has a combination of constellations, it's GPS plus GLONASS plus Galileo. The fact is that in the future we already have companies working on chip level development where future chips will be GPS, GLONASS, Galileo plus Locata. So the way that we present to the industry is we are a local constellation.

Robyn Williams: Interesting. When we first met at the inventors awards at the University of New South Wales, you told me that the contract being signed in Canberra was going to be in October. Now it's in November. What was the contract that you've signed that you can now talk about?

Nunzio Gambale: The US Air Force, the inventors of GPS, has been using our technology at the White Sands missile range now for over three years. What they're doing at the White Sands range, which is where they let off the first atomic bomb, it's probably the most famous range in the world, is the jamming GPS. In other words, they're taking GPS out of the equation and they're continuing to position using Locata technology. The first networks that they've run were relatively small, about 50 kilometres on a side, but the contract that we have now with them will cover 2,500 square miles. That's about three times the size of the ACT, and in that area (again, this is real science-fiction stuff) we will give them that than ten centimetre positioning, and in fact that's one of the things that has come together this month.

But also in the last week of September, Leica Geosystems, who are the world's biggest GPS company, very few people know of them, there are a Swiss company and they are the instrument of choice for surveyors and engineers, they've announced the release of their Leica Locata enabled fleet management system technology for mining. And it is currently already being deployed and used for the last seven months at the Boddington goldmine in Western Australia, owned by Newmont. And in that area there, that mine is about four kilometres in diameter, we're giving them positioning better than 2.5 centimetres.

Robyn Williams: Why do they need that sort of accuracy within a mine?

Nunzio Gambale: If you've ever seen any of the explosions they let off in these mines, it's extremely high-tech. They have to break the rocks up to a level where it is not too fine to gum up the machines that big enough to crush, and they need extremely high accuracy. The other thing that's very important is some of these machines are enormous, and for safety of life and collision avoidance you need extremely high accuracy, because some of these huge trucks can roll over a Toyota and not even notice. So we have now probably the world's most important customer for GPS, the US Air Force, has signed a contract with the small Australian company, and the world's most important professional industrial GPS company, has signed on as well and is starting to release product. And all of this, Robyn, was done in stealth.

Robyn Williams: In Canberra.

Nunzio Gambale: Yes. In fact I joke that it wasn't that hard actually because not only were we told that what we were trying to do was absolutely impossible because of the scale of the problem...and the thing that I would really like to talk about is the problem that we represent in terms of synchronisation.

Robyn Williams: The physics you mean?

Nunzio Gambale: The physics.

Robyn Williams: Tell me about the physics briefly.

Nunzio Gambale: I recently heard your interview about clocks...

Robyn Williams: William Phillips, the Nobel Prize-winner.

Nunzio Gambale: Yes, a wonderful, wonderful man, I've seen him...and that's the dogma. In fact since a very, very famous guy, John Harrison back in the 1760s invented the chronometer which solved the problem of longitude...

Robyn Williams: Dava Sobel wrote the book about it.

Nunzio Gambale: That was a fantastic book, I actually have the illustrated one as well. One of the mantras, the dogma of the science community is that if you want to know your position accurately you need an accurate clock. In fact I have here a brochure from the Smithsonian Institute. The Smithsonian in 2012 is opening a Hall of Navigation.

Robyn Williams: It says Chronometers to GPS

Nunzio Gambale: Right, and one of the things that you see here which will be etched in stone above the door is that statement, 'If you want to know where you are, get an accurate clock.' The problems of the world at the moment is that the mere existence of Locata...and I've just told you that we are accurate to a centimetre, which at the speed of light is billionths of a second...Locata actually proves quite categorically that that statement is wrong. The fact is that there has been an enormous confusion between an absolute time and what is actually required to give you the synchronisation.

There is a famous saying in the GPS industry, you know, you have satellites each with four atomic clocks on board, and if you have one clock you can always be sure of the time, if you have two clocks you can never be sure. The question is, you have all of these atomic clocks flying in space, how do you keep them synchronous? Very few people realise that the satellites are what's called the space segment, but there is also a ground segment which costs the US taxpayer $1.3, $1.4 billion per annum, and it has a master clock on the ground under the mountain in Colorado Springs. And there are four stations around the world, and as the satellites orbit the world twice a day, their clocks are corrected.

So here's where the music comes in, Robyn. We thought of that as a conductor with an orchestra. If you want to place these devices on the ground and get them to synchronise to each other, they have to play like a band. They don't have a conductor. You put a metronome on the Rolling Stones and it's a mess, but it doesn't matter because relatively all the music comes out the same because they all move together. So when we deploy these devices around a mine, they're currently synchronising to better than a billionth of a second, and they do it without an atomic clock, and it's a complete revolution in the way that this technology can be deployed.

Robyn Williams: And we'll notice it as everyday citizens, will we, in the future?

Nunzio Gambale: One of the things that you will see everywhere, as more and more things become automated, as we want more and more machines to do functions, positioning is becoming critical. And the industry knows it, that's why the uptake of this by the military and by the industrial applications...but one of the other fallacies that the industry continues to propagate is that positioning is the next utility. You'll see that all over the place, and I truly believe that one day you will have a Locata net across every city in the world, and with your iPhone you'll be able to tell which aisle you need to go down in Bunnings to get the screws.

Robyn Williams: Ex rock star Nunzio Gambale from Canberra, CEO of Locata, the GPS system that will help you find your screws, and much else. And the professors of engineering seem to be impressed.