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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.
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.
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.
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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