“In practice it depends on your surroundings, with worst performance in built-up areas and urban canyons where part of the sky is obscured. The localisation error can climb up to 10 m or even higher – still enough to put you in the right street, but only just. That’s because, if you take a smartphone apart, you find its satnav function relies on a single antenna, smaller than a mini-sim card.

“With the Advanced Multi-Frequency Low-Cost, High Gain GNSS Antennas for next generation of Mass-Market Devices, AMELIE, project, we increased the number of satnav antennas, with one on each side of the circuit board – carefully placed to avoid the phone buttons and speaker – then combined their inputs using an array approach usually employed for satellite antennas. We targeted enhanced performance in geo-localisation, signal gain and phase, suitable for next-generation devices.”