Navigation With Indian Constellation, abbreviated as NavIC, is India’s own navigation satellite system developed by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It is claimed to provide accurate location positioning to users in India and neighbouring regions.
Qualcomm recently launched new chipsets that come with support for NavIC, which includes Snapdragon 720G, Snapdragon 662, and the Snapdragon 460. These chipsets come with support for dual-frequency — L1 (1.58 GHz) and L5 (1.17 GHz) — Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).
Since NavIC works on L5 band S-band (2.5 GHz), these chips are designed to automatically support the NavIC standard out-of-the-box. Additionally, Snapdragon 865 and 765 also have the NavIC tracking unit, but it has not been enabled yet.
If this is all confusing for you but you want to simply check if your smartphone has NavIC support or not, then follow this step-by-step guide.
Check NavIC support on your smartphone
- Install GSPTest or GNSSTest applications on your Android smartphone. You can install either of them of both of them to be sure about the support for NavIC.
- Once you open the installed app, tap on “Start Test”
- The app will now start detecting all the navigation satellite available
- If the app shows Indian satellites, it means your phone has NavIC support
This seems to be the easies way to detect support for the NavIC on your smartphone. Currently, very limited set to smartphones come with support for this new navigation feature but as the devices keep launching with the newly released chipsets, more and more devices are expected to NavIC support on their smartphones.
If you want to know more about NavIC, its benefits, and how it works, head to our ‘Everything you need to know about NavIC’ article by clicking here.
