GPS technology pioneer Navsys celebrates 25 years of innovation

Twenty-five years after starting Navsys Corp. in the spare bedroom of her Woodmoor home, Alison Brown has grown the Monument-area company into a major developer of Global Positioning System technology that employs 35 and generated more than $6 million in revenue last year.

Although few are aware of Navsys, many have been touched by innovations it pioneered, including technology that enables cellphones to transmit location data to 911 operators and technology that allows military commanders to target bombs more precisely. The company, which licenses its technology to others for manufacturing, and is looking to double in size in the next five years, celebrated its 25th anniversary during a reception Thursday at its headquarters near Baptist Road.

“We have done amazing things in the past 25 years. It is all about getting the right people — creative minds — together and then finding a customer that recognizes that those people are doing things that the customer believed to be impossible,” Brown said. The cellphone location technology Navsys developed is slated to be part of a permanent exhibit on the history of satellite navigation at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., that is scheduled to open late next year.

Brown started Navsys after leaving Litton Industries in California when her husband got a teaching job at the Air Force Academy. Navsys didn’t stay in Brown’s spare bedroom long; the company moved into her basement as it expanded and was forced to move out of her house in the late 1980s when Woodmoor officials told her the area’s covenants barred her from operating a business out of her home. She moved Navsys into offices in a former museum near the Air Force Academy.

“Alison is a real visionary,” said Karen Barworth, hired as the first employee of Navsys and now the company’s vice president of finance and administration. “She is very focused and knew what she wanted.”

The company’s first contract was to build a translator to receive and relay the GPS signal from a ground station at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Navsys grew rapidly after the French conglomerate Dassault Group hired it to develop a GPS system for a missile test range on the west coast of France. Navsys later won contracts from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Japanese government to make the GPS system more reliable and accurate for civilian aviation, systems that are still in use today.

The cellphone technology was developed in partnership with the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Colorado State Patrol to win a grant from the Federal Highway Administration so that emergency dispatchers could determine the location of emergency calls from cellphones. The contract came not long after a Colorado Springs man died after suffering a heart attack during a church-league softball game and emergency crews had trouble finding him because they had sketchy information.

Navsys almost didn’t survive to its 25th anniversary. The company had used federal grants to develop technology using GPS to improve targeting of so-called “smart bombs” and had expanded staff to 50 employees in anticipation of a follow-up contract to the grants when Air Force officials instead awarded the contract and turned over the technology to Boeing. Brown laid off half of Navsys’ work force in 2007 and mortgaged everything she owned to generate $1.5 million in cash the company needed to survive.

“It was a blatant example of how Air Force Space Command didn’t follow (federal) rules designed to protect technology developed by small business. We appealed to the deputy undersecretary of defense, the Small Business Administration and (former U.S.) Sen. (Wayne) Allard and got the decision reversed, but it nearly put us out of business,” Brown said. The loan from First National Bank of Monument ended up helping Navsys survive the most recent recession and has been mostly repaid.

Navsys has resumed growing by developing GPS technology for civilian purposes, including use in police helicopters to keep cameras trained on suspects and to test telecommunications equipment, Brown said. The move into civilian markets has offset sagging revenue this year from military contracts that have been delayed as a result of the federal budget impasse in Congress.

Brown expects to double the size of Navsys, both in employees and revenue, by licensing technology it developed to incorporate location information into digital photos  and developing lightweight, inexpensive but secure GPS receivers for military personnel. She also wants to transition ownership of the company to an employee stock ownership plan that now owns about 4 percent of its stock.