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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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to add more layers of foil to your hats folks!
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
If people can get very accurate readings with Galileo anyway, where's the problem with supplying GPS at the same level of accuracy?
I can easily see products that incorporate both systems and pull coordinates from both at the same time - any GPS types here want to theorize on what hypothetical dual system devices can do for spatial accuracy in the field without having to do the whole fixed station - correct back at the lab stuff to get sub-meter resolutions?
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.
Seriously, I can understand Europe not wanting to be at the mercy of the US's whims for something that can become very important. But this is going to be a subscription service, and I can't imagine too many people are going to be willing to pay for something they already get free. Sure, they may have a slightly better accuracy, but I do not see that GPS is bad enough to be worth paying for slightly better service.
aQazaQa
My Despair, Inc. calendar indicates that today is an auspicious anniversary date for Galileo:
"Galileo recants absurd theory about the Earth revolving around the sun. (June 22, 1633)"
I guess the Vatican used it influence to get Galileo to revolve around the Earth!
Galileo used frequencies which were interleaved with the US military use of gps, meaning that the US couldn't jam galileo without jamming gps for their military at the same time. The US was adamant that this was unacceptable, that they wouldn't be able to disable galileo whenever they wanted, so the EU backed down, and promised to use frequencies which are more easily jammed.
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?
"highly competitive satellite positioning market"
who else is in the market? dont you need at least two players actually in the market to call it a competitive one?
My impression from the article is that they want Galileo to interoperate with GPS. Does anyone know if this means that Galileo will work with existing GPS devices and that there will basically just be 60 GPS satelites in orbit? Or is it a completely seperate system that will require devices that support both? I'm hoping on the former.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
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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I wonder how much this decision was spurred by the fact that, after yesterday's launch, the world's governments know
that if they don't provide GPS someone else will?
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While far from having detailed knowledge of GPS, I understand that it estimates position based on the delays of clock signals from the satellites. The more data available for the calculation, the better the estimate. Inaccuracy in the timing signals results in worse estimates. I believe that the degraded civilian GPS accuracy exists because satellites provide a less accurate time to civilian GPS receivers. A combined receiver using signals from both systems would yield higher accuracy, and a receiver can appropriately weight the different systems according to their known accuracy to calculate a better position estimate.
Basically, it is not a matter of switching. For the best performance, use all available sources of information simultaneously.
More satellites = more information = better GPS
One part of the article almost gets it right,
Unfortunately, it looks like the EU caved in, so it will not be safe to assume that Galileo will be operational for the safety critical applications which it is designed for, such as air traffic control.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
We discussed RF tags, GPS, optical, ultrasonic. We discussed sensor costs ($50.00-100.00 per sensor seemed reasonable) and size (they need to be small and rugged). We discussed limiting the environment that the system would be used in to come up with a cheaper system. The system also couldn't interfere with other people outside the volume, nor did we want outside interference to be a problem. Non line-of-sight is also a priority (thus ruling out optical systems).
Thinking about it, GPS seems like the only real option - but it seems to have its own set of issues: speed is an issue (update rates aren't that fast - the more samples-per-second, the better), accuracy for civilian use is poor, and it may not work in the indoors environment we are envisioning the system being used in (which is part of the application).
It does have a pro side: Garmin makes small and cheap matchbook-sized OEM components which can send a serial stream to a microcontroller or PC via a serial port.
Can a differential GPS signal be put in the area to increase the accuracy just for the volume being measured?
Is there another solution? Because of the line-of-sight requirement, optical tracking solutions, while cheap and allowing for high-speed, large volume scanning - are not sufficient for our application.
Something else I have thought about, similar to RF tag location (which seems to have dodgy accuracy and speed), is using radio (active FM) sensors, and low-power FM transmitters placed in the four corners of the upper portion of the volume - and measuring gain to compute intersection spheres to get the position (but I doubt it would be accurate).
Can anybody tell me if such a system as needed, or technology, or white papers, etc - are available for such a system? I only need X/Y/Z coordinates, yaw/pitch/roll attitude measurements are not really needed.
It seems like large volume position tracking (with fast sampling, great accuracy, and multitudes of sensors) is something that either doesn't exist - or that would satisfy a major market. GPS seems like the only possibility - am I missing something?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon