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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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The base reason is that US wants the ability to turn off civilain GPS when they want to. If Europe puts up a system that US doesn't have control over than turning off GPS becomes useless and they lose )what they believe to be) a tactical advantage.
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?
Kudos to them for reaching an agreement. :)
Bah. The entire spat was the US (my government) bitching about wanting control high resolution signals for military use and being able to shut down or jam the normal public signals.
The US failed to stop the EU from putting up their own system, but did get the EU to "compromize" by redesigning the system the way the US wanted - to be a clone of the US design. That way the US and EU can either agree and both shut off the public signal or the non-encrypted public singnal can be unilaterally JAMMED.
It was never about preventing interference or improving features of the public signal. Why the hell would you need to pressure the EU to "compromise" about improving the the system?
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