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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.
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
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.
The "lockout" is already ended. During the first Gulf War, there was such a shortage of military GPS units that soldiers brought their own, and the military bought piles of civilian ones. At the same time, they turned off the intentional perterbatio of the signal, so that all the GPSes would work with the same degree of accuracy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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!
While I understand what you're trying to say, you're not entirely correct.
The "lockout" is known as selective availability (SA) and has been shut off since 1996 or so, not "at the same time" as the first Gulf War.
However, there is an extra band for military use only (someone else can get the exact details). There are also "survey grade" GPS devices that manage much greater accuracy than your $100 Garmin.
All GPSes don't work with the same degree of accuracy.
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?
No they can't "just put up other sats".
- The sats have to be daily checked and correted by people on earth, like giving to each sat the positions of others sats ( this information is transmitted to the GPS receiver, to know how much sats it should be able to "see" ). This need a common agreement and cooperation.
- Signals must not overlaps or corrupt other signals ( not as easy as it seems, the usable frequency window is quite narrow ).
- the EU Gallileo will be free for personal use. You must pay a fixed fee ( payed when you pruchase the receiver ) to use the US GPS
- USA can decide at ANY TIME to reduce the precision of the GPS signal delivered to cityzens in any zone ( by a ratio of 1 to 100 ) making it totally useless.
- GPS sats become older and older, their lifespan is limited and a few should be replaced ( 27 are needed to give a good global coverage, some of the ones in the sky are not fully functionnal anymore ). It would be a good time to change a few ( some don't even got a good ol' cesium atomic clock ).
- Galileo will provide more different levels of precision than GPS with different prices and secured and garanteed precisions for the most expensive ones.
I'm not web-surfing at work, I conduct a very broad technological survey.
It was more than that. The US was concerned that Galileo would interfere with the P-code portion of the GPS signal. It is one thing to claim that the decision was a cave allowing the US to 'jam' Galileo... quite a nother to point out that Galileo was designed to overlap channels with the US system, potentially interfering. How is this different than, say, another slashdot hot topic: the broadband over powerline controversy in that it interferes with HAM radio?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
"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?
Not quite right.
The "lockout" was known as selective availability which was used to intentionally make the civilian code, called C/A for coarse acquisition, less accurate than it could be.
But there is still P(Y), p for precision, code which is military only. The encryption keys for using this code are classified. P(Y) code is more accurate than C/A code because it is a much, much longer sequence before it repeats.
C/A code repeats every 1 ms. P(Y) code lasts 1 week (it doesn't repeat every week, but the difference is not important here). Therefore, the pseudorandom number sequence that the GPS receiver correlates against is much, much longer allowing for better accuracy.