MOBILE 5 BLUETOOTH GPS RECEIVER BY TOMTOM BV
12 December 2005 - Sarantel Limited

The TomTom Mobile 5 Bluetooth GPS Receiver turns smartphones into personal navigators. Compatible with dozens of smartphones and PDAs, it provides a simple, intuitive way to navigate directly from your device's address book. It's the smallest and lightest Bluetooth GPS receiver available, easily slipped into a pocket or purse while maintaining its connection to both the GPS satellites and the phone.

In order to accomplish the goals of small size, reliability, and ease of use, TomTom needed to choose a GPS receiver chipset with rapid acquisition times and high sensitivity, and a GPS antenna that was easily embedded and provided maximum flexibility in reception angles. TomTom turned to two leaders in providing high-sensitivity GPS receiver and antenna technology for difficult user environments: SiRF and Sarantel.

SiRF, a global leader in location technology, provided TomTom with the SiRFstarIII high performance, 20-channel GPS chipset, powered by more than 200,000 correlators for extremely fast time-to-first-fix and indoor sensitivity. The SiRFstarIII tracks GPS signals down to a power level of -159dBm, ensuring positional and tracking reliability in highly attenuated environments. "The SiRFStar III is on the cutting edge of GPS receiver technology, providing industry leading navigation performance" commented Kanwar Chadha, Founder and Vice President of Marketing at SiRF.

Sarantel's GeoHelix-SMP GPS antenna solved problems of design and usage flexibility for TomTom. The GeoHelix antenna's constrained near-field and omni-directional pattern made it easy for TomTom to conceive and design a product with a completely embedded GPS antenna that would retain its efficiency and pass the maximum signal strength to the GPS receiver, even when the product was sitting next to the user's body under layers of clothing in unpredictable orientations.

Embedding an antenna is usually an iterative engineering exercise in which the antenna is tuned and retuned for changes in the electronics, case materials, shape, and size of the device. Fortunately, Sarantel's GeoHelix antenna tunes predictably with materials in very close proximity, e.g., less than 3mm, and not at all with materials outside that diameter. Sarantel shipped antennas with a thin plastic sleeve to ensure frequency centering, and TomTom was required to make no further adjustments.

Another consideration for TomTom was the unpredictability of orientation of the receiver. Conventional antennas would have required that the GPS receiver be placed on a flat surface with the antenna oriented upwards due to constraints in the antenna reception pattern. GeoHelix antennas, however, have a very broad beamwidth, and are therefore able to track satellites over a much broader angle of view. Nor do they require a ground plane that effectively blocks reception of conventional antennas when the device is upside down.

The resulting power of the combined GeoHelix antenna and SiRF receiver power, TomTom's CEO, Harold Goddijn, is confidently able to assert that "the sensitivity of the Sarantel GPS antenna ensures the accuracy of the TomTom Bluetooth GPS receiver, even when it is in a bag or a pocket. The antenna is a major contributor to our GPS receiver's excellent performance and ensures that TomTom MOBILE 5 is easy to use and for the first time makes personal navigation truly mobile." SiRF's Chadha added, "The TomTom product with our SiRFStarIII receiver and Sarantel antenna exemplify our vision of location awareness, anywhere, anytime."

http://www.sarantel.com

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