Hemisphere GNSS

Hemisphere GNSS is a precision positioning company in Tempe, Arizona, and it is important to place it accurately: this is a commercial GNSS manufacturer serving agriculture, machine control and marine markets, not a defense supplier. It appears in a positioning and timing directory because of what it makes, not because of who it sells to.

The corporate history is convoluted. The business traces back through Hemisphere GPS, whose agricultural guidance side was renamed AgJunction, with the GNSS technology assets sold to Beijing UniStrong Science and Technology in 2013 and operated as Hemisphere GNSS from that point. In March 2023 CNH Industrial, the agricultural and construction machinery group, agreed to buy the company from UniStrong for around 175 million dollars, and closed the acquisition on 12 October 2023. Hemisphere has since been part of CNH's precision technology business while continuing to sell under its own brand. Anyone reading older material should be careful here, since Chinese ownership was a live issue for the company in the years before the CNH deal and is no longer the case.

The product range covers the full stack of a GNSS vendor. OEM boards go to manufacturers embedding positioning in their own equipment. Complete receivers, smart antennas and separate antennas serve field users directly. Rugged handheld and vehicle-mounted devices sit above those, and application software rounds it out. The technology brands are the more recognisable part of the catalogue: Crescent and Eclipse are the receiver technology generations, Vector is the dual-antenna heading line, Athena is the RTK positioning engine, and Atlas is the company's own global L-band correction service, which delivers subscription-based accuracy tiers without requiring a local base station or network. Outback Guidance is a wholly owned precision agriculture brand selling guidance and steering products directly to farmers.

Four markets are named on the company's own site. Agriculture is the largest, covering guidance, steering and machine control for farm equipment. Construction and mining covers machine control and guidance for earthmoving and site work. Marine covers heading and positioning for inland, nearshore and offshore vessels, which is the segment with the clearest crossover into government and patrol craft use. The OEM segment sells heading and positioning components into anything requiring high-precision satellite navigation, which in practice includes robotics, unmanned ground vehicles and survey instruments built by other manufacturers.

Dual-antenna GNSS heading is the technical area where Hemisphere has the strongest reputation, since deriving accurate heading from two antennas without a magnetic compass matters on slow-moving platforms and on vessels near steel structures. That capability, and the OEM board business built around it, is the reason the company shows up in positioning conversations well outside agriculture.

The company employs over 110 people, with product development sites in Hiawatha, Kansas, and in Calgary and Winnipeg in Canada, and it sells in more than 55 countries. It holds a substantial GNSS patent portfolio inherited through the Hemisphere GPS and CSI Wireless lineage.