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EU and US Agree on Galileo
An anonymous reader writes "The EU and USA have reached an agreement over the Galileo satellite positioning system, ending several years of negotiations." We had some good Galileo information in a story last month.
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It's about time that the US give up on what was clearly becoming an impossible task: stopping the surge of demand for high accuracy civilian GPS. Kudos to them for reaching an agreement. :)
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
After ReadingTFA and looking at some of the past stuff on this issue, there is still not a clear reason (at least for me) to duplicate GPS. Why does Europe want to spend all that money? Couldn't they put up other sats with the money, like Internet, etc? Is it just a control thing i.e. the EU doesn't want to be at the mercy of the US on this (wouldn't blame them)?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
"We have reached completion of a GPS-Galileo cooperation agreement," a US State Department official told reporters, calling the deal a "landmark" accord that would reap "profound benefits" for both the United States and Europe in the highly competitive satellite positioning market.
Let me first say that it's nice to see the USA cooperating with Europe, but I have to wonder how much Blair's involvement in the Iraq war had to do with this agreement. Either way, it's nice to see the USA and other countries (like France) getting along.
- a common signal structure for so-called "open" services, and a suitable signal structure for the Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS).
This should be nice to see at work. I'd like to hear more about those open services, and what they will be exactly.
- a process allowing improvements, either jointly or individually, of the baseline signal structures in order to further improve performances.
Nice feature of the agreement. I think this will benefit all involved if nobody tries to improve their side into incompatibility.
- confirmation of inter-operable time and standards to facilitate the joint use of GPS and Galileo.
Does this mean they'll use the UNIX timestamp, with micro time enabled? Or is this something else entirely?
All in all, this almost appears like these governments are using the Open Source philosophy, or at least a small part of it. Hey, any step towards progress sounds great to me!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
As different systems evolve, maybe we will see more devices hit the civilian market and prices drop, which could mean a win-win for all consumers.
It's a win-win scenario because Galileo will greatly improve GPS accuracy and Galileo will benefit from the experience of the GPS system.
Too bad it took so long to reach an agreement and too bad the US never stopped to criticize a project that they are finally supporting.
Iraq: war to save the U
Europe and the USA acting together could do this world a hell of a lot of good. Shame things have been so negative of late.
What I'd really like to see is co-operation on reducing arms sales globally. The USA and Europe are currently the world's biggest arms merchants. And the mad thing is, we're selling them to countries that could easily turn around and bite us on the ass. Saudi Arabia for instance. If they turn against us - which isn't outside the realms of possibility at the moment - they will be able to put up one hell of a battle because we've been selling them advanced weaponary for decades. Madness.
This will be interesting because I think we will see dual band recievers. Often for one reason or another (interference most likely) GPS will give you incorrect position or non at all. However if you have a reciever that can switch over to galileo then this could greatly help all who use GPS. Just think of all the current applications currently using GPS. Shipping, personal aircraft, recreation, wardrivers! Suddenly WiGle will become a lot more accurate.
What could possibly go wrong?
Whats the US going to do? shoot them down? I don't think so, Europe could have done better than this rather than just give in sheepishly. Ive seen bush standing next to the queen he looks a kid standing next to the head-mistress, she could have come in there and said "i think we would quite like these frequencies" and then just walked out. One of the major points of galileo is that it is a system not to undermined by the us gps, it needs an equal footing to say "were here, you're not the only country in the world, get over it".
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You will need new equipment, and please note that Galileo differs from GPS in that it offers a 'for money' commercial high accuracy signal also. But don't get upset and just blame the Europeans because the US is also about to change the GPS system, adding a new second civilan signal to the L2 band where there was formerly only only a secure (p-code) signal and also adding the new L5 frequency. In short if you want to work with all the new signals available by the end of the decade then you will be buying new hardware.
Im not saying they shouldn't work together and build a better system. But alot of people said it was nice that for the USA to cooperate with Europe. I see it the other way around, its nice Europe cooperates with the USA. The USA has the system up and running already and Europe wants to piggy back un the USA GPS system. They need to use the same frequency so thats what I read. So if anything they got to work with the Americans.
Question?? The Americans and Europeans will be combining together into one system. But what happened to the Russian system? Why hasn't that gone commericial?