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Europe Building Their Own GPS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the now-to-find-the-needle-in-the-political-haystack dept.

An anonymous reader writes "BBC News is reporting that Europe is planning to build their own satellite-navigation network that will be backward and forward compatible. There's going to be 5 levels ranging from free (1m accuracy) to commercial (1cm accuracy)! Provision is also being made for a search and rescue mode where a signal can be sent to confirm that help is on the way. The system will supposedly even work with existing US network after upgrades to the network."

6 of 536 comments (clear)

  1. Someone wants to be the only kid with cool toys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After many years of trying to convince europe its unnecessary, the US still reserves the right to shoot the satellites down if it wants http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vie wArticle&code=20041026&articleId=557

  2. Security by parasonic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Reading the frelling article, I don't see what keeps anyone from hacking and getting the 'commercial-grade' service. What sort of blocks are there? Will this be like DirecTV which becomes very easily decodeable after a few years and millions of deployments, or will this be like some of the military satellite signals whose keys change every day?

  3. very old news by Phil246 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We've known about this for at least a year...
    do people not remember the bush administration threatening to use anti-satellite weapons unless europe gave the US the power to interfere with it, jam the satellites and/or switch them off or to a lower resolution mode for certain areas of the globe which they were fighting in?

  4. Anyone else worried about Vehicle Monitoring? by duguk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Doesn't anyone else see why this would be useful to the Police when they're passively monitoring EVERY VEHICLE?

    See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15/21 59244&tid=158&tid=219 if you don't remember!!

    I wonder if its worth building a GPS Spoofer like the one on http://gps.hackaday.com/entry/1234000843061178/

    DugUK

  5. Useful for Britain to Track its drivers per Mile by tezza · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Alistair Darling, the UK Transport Secretary has said that the future of driving is pay per mile.

    There has been a lot of comment about how to pull that off with the limitations of the current GPS.

    This new system will in my opinion be designed to have features to support this.

    Should haves:

    Double blind identification. Your receiver in your car will not be personally identifiable.
    Works better in cities with tall buildings
    Better accuracy
    European control.

    Nice to haves:

    Downloadable content:
    - Congestion alerts
    - Emergency Warnings a la radio interupt
    A government certified connection signal that must be displayed when they ARE tracking you.
    Triangulation compensation with terrestrial mobile masts. If we're gonna have big brother, why not make it accurate?

    My 2p.

    --
    [% slash_sig_val.text %]
  6. Re:please by nnnneedles · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "We could unleash our nuclear arsenal and flatten Europe."

    Well, your post (and others) actually makes it very clear that americans are still scary people and that we should build our own positioning system.

    --
    Will code a sig generator for food