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Europe Building Their Own GPS
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."
(To stop all US comments about why we Europeans don't need this)
GPS is a military-run programme; its signals can be degraded or switched off. Yes, the service is free, but its continuity and quality come with no guarantees
Galileo will be a civil system. It will be run by a private consortium and will offer guaranteed levels of service
(from the article)
it's in my head
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
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?
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?
I think that this is a good move by the Europeans. The USA (who controls GPS) can shut it down whenever they please.
The European counterpart is governed by an independant organization, so no government can shut it down without notice.
By the way, this isn't a pure European project, other countries such as China, Israel, Marocco and Saudi-Arabia joined the program too, others may join later.
They should bundle on of those GPS gizmos with the backpacking and tour guides. C'mon, it's only 0.496 KM to the Eiffel Tower!
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
The United States is going to perceive this as a military move. Or, at least, extreme reactionary war-hawk conservatives will. (i.e. the sorts of people who label all of Europe as Socialist or call Europeans "EUroweenies").
Ahh, a cloud chock-full of silver linings...
Seriously, would the US want to rely on a navigation service controlled by France, with the express ability to shut it off at any time for any reason they want? Why expect Europe to accept such a situation?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Not only is this a dupe, but I think it is one several times over and also several years old. BTW, if the EU wants to spend billions on a duplicate navigation system, all for the good. I will have a more accurate and more redundant nav system paid for by SOMEONE ELSE for once. Thanks!
I can see why governments would like the idea of more accurate GPS; vechicle navigation.
Knowing a location to plus-or-minus-10-meters might be fine for a guided missile, but for navigation it's pretty lousy; it couldn't tell which side of the road you were on, let alone whether you were in the right lane. With centimeter-level accuracy, though, you could practically make a car drive itself.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I haven't seen any other kind of billion in use in Europe for many years.
Pining for the fjords
Doesn't anyone else see why this would be useful to the Police when they're passively monitoring EVERY VEHICLE?
1 59244&tid=158&tid=219 if you don't remember!!
See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15/2
I wonder if its worth building a GPS Spoofer like the one on http://gps.hackaday.com/entry/1234000843061178/
DugUK
Ofcourse, now the US has the control to disallow access in a warlike state with any country depending on the GPS tech for warfare or anything really. Which gives them ultimate control.
The US always has been nervous with anyone being able to dominate them or to get from under their control, even if such a move of the EU wouldn't be directly motivated by military purposes (the EU has been going away from an offensive army a long time ago and formed towards defensive and humanistic purposes), but maybe more by independance from US's powers. It's a pure dominating position the US strives to embody it seems. If it'd be looked like that (a military move) the US really should start to do some self-reflecting.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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 %]
They did not get a "kill switch". What did happen was that the operating frequency was moved further apart from a common US military band so that the US could jam the signal (locally) without inadvertantly jamming their own military communications.
I guess that means you have not been in (central) Europe at all.
Milliard (or the equivalent in the language used) is almost exclusively used for 10^9 and billion for 10^12.
The US demanded, and got, a kill switch for it
I applaud them. They could have went to the United Nations and demanded that the U.S. give them control over the US's GPS system. Instead they are building their own. Good for them.
and terrorists. What, exactly, could a terrorist do with GPS technology? They don't have access to cruise missiles or ICBMs. I can understand degrading GPS signals when facing a standing army equally equipped, but I just don't see how even marginally accurate GPS could help a terrorist.
If a terrorist wanted to find the locations of water facilities, nuclear power generating plants or other critical infrastructure they would need to find it by other means before GPS would be useful (if GPS would be useful at all).
About the only way GPS would help a terrorist is to save him the $5 locals want to charge for directions to Staples Center in Los Angeles when you're already across the street from it (don't ask).
Honestly, though. The only scenario that occurs to me where GPS might be critical to a terrorist attempt would be a proximity based bomb using GPS technology to identify the proximity to a target.
Anyone have other ideas (and keep your eyes peeled for Staples Center)?
There was no "kill switch" as you describe. The original design of Galileo had it operating in the exact same frequency range as GPS. This was an intentional (and arguably malicious) design decision that would have prevented the US from jamming Galileo without simultaneously jamming GPS. What was negotiated was for the European system's frequency to be moved slightly, such that the US or Europe could jam each others signals without interfering with their own.
As long as your starting assumption is that at some point a country might deem it necessary to degrade (note necessarily deny) full position fixing accruacy to a given region or theater of operations, this is actually a "play fair" agreement.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Given that a GPS guided smart-bomb is only as accurate as the GPS signal, do the folks in Paris, France, or {name your own favorite freedom-allied European municipality and country} really want to give another foreign and presumably malignant military power the ability to bomb down to one meter accuracy? Talk about the ultimate terror weapon "country X, give up ________ or our GPS guided weapon will hit elementary school Y", etc., etc.
Somehow I don't think that the free world --or even the non-free countries of the world, for that matter -- has much worry that the US military is going to ever do or be allowed to do something like that, do you?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Anyways never really got the hub bub about this system, the US discontinued the use of SA in 2000, because aviation has become utterly dependent on GPS (the current FAA plan includes only supplements to GPS when the current VOR system is decommissioned). Also our birds have many of the same capabilities, I believe we have 12 in orbit currently that are of the new spec, we just don't have different scales for pay use and such.
Thats exactly the change made that I meant when I referred to a 'kill switch'. During negotiations with the US it was determined and agreed that a change of frequency was required to allow the US to block Galileo without blocking GPS. This change was made specifically in response to US concerns. Tell me thats not a concession to a party unrelated to the project?
0 2126,00.html
You forget that GPS has had recent changes making it near impossible to jam military receivers, while Galileo does not have these modifications. Thus Galileo could be jammed totally while GPS remains usable to the military with compatable receivers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,11
In an effort to protect its valuable property, the satellite consortium has already started sending take-down notices to parties who are using workarounds to share high-precision location information.
One recipient of these notices was the Greenwich Observatory, which was recently forced to replace its narrow brass strip on the prime meridian with a 2m-wide piece of ragged carpet in order to keep freeloaders from pirating highly accurate coordinates.
Of course! Having 1cm accuracy is oodles better than 20m accuracy for tactical nukes. They're such precision instruments donchaknow.
I'll build my OWN GPS! With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the GPS and the blackjack...
This is a sig. Deal with it.
Not only does this allow the US to jam the Galileo frequencies without taking out GPS, it lets the EU jam GPS without taking out Galileo.
Galileo is still in development, and I suspect that those un-jammable modifications to GPS will find their way into Galileo's (currently technically superior) technology. The whole thing will prompt another arms race with more and more satellites of higher accuracy until the whole thing is an esentially unjammable mess.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
OK let me start by saying that the two parents are being a bit absolutist and silly. YES, an EU-controlled GPS rival is a strategic threat to the US. This doesn't mean that we need to jam it or destroy it. French nuclear weapons are a strategic threat as well, but we don't propose to destroy them, either. We're the strongest power, but not the only power, and the EU (quite rightly) is working to increase their power relative to ours.
Similarly, this isn't some ham-handed reaction to the current administration. European attempts to counter and triangulate against American power date back to, well, the beginnings of American power. Even during the Cold War, European interests occassionally clashed with American interests. France's withdrawal from the NATO command structure in 1966, the Suez crisis, German attempts at appeasement vs the USSR, the "European Approach" to terrorism pre-9/11, conflicts over flyover rights during the Libyan attack, approaches to mid-east peace.... any of these sound familiar? In the 80's, American and Italian soldiers had an armed standoff on a NATO base. We stuck together and papered over our differences because of a larger enemy, but things haven't always been roses.
Post-Cold War, things have changed a bit. In the past, a larger common enemy (the USSR) kept the US and EU mostly at common purposes. Lacking that, ties began to fray. The Clinton Administration didn't initiate any major new foreign policy changes other than good relations for their own sake (for which the EU nations extracted diplomatic and trade concessions). Even then, however, a long-term goal of the franco-german alliance was to assemble a counterbalance to the US.
What's developing isn't emnity; it's just the kind of wary maneuvering that friendly nations normally practice. So of course the EU is rolling their own GPS system. And of course we'll invent countermeasures. This isn't because we hate them, or they hate us, or either of us expects to ever fight. This is the normal hedging of bets and accretion of power that nations practice. The structural issues of power are far more important than disputes of the moment.
"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
It's really amazing how all this cold war rhetorics is dug up again (or has it never died?). Only Russia is no big threat atm so now it's China. I mean, what is it, is it paranoia or is it that US-Politics needs that big evil enemy to distract their people from the problems at home? It's a never ending story, China, Terrorists, evil Communists ... did anything change since McCarthy or do we need to relive all that crap because of 9/11?
Sure, 9/11 was a tragic event, but even more tragic is what was done to the american ideals of freedom and democracy in the name of the "war on terror".
Now what has all this to do with Galileo vs. GPS you may ask. Well, GPS is under US-military control. ATM they're acting like they could throw a fit of paranoia anytime and switch off all civil GPS functionality. Sory, but that's the picture the US government is sending out into the world: self centered control freaks with tunnelvision that might jump anytime for reasons only they know.
Now you wouldn't trust someone like that with a system your life depends on, but that's exactly what we need: GPS- (or Galileo-) guided navigation systems for planes and ships, fully automated systems relying on accurate GPS-coordinates for positioning, you name it. If it isn't lives depending on these systems it's at least big money.
And no, noone trusts the US to provide a reliable GPS service. They might switch off the system without prior warning because of some perceived terrorist threat (thereby doing more damage worldwide than any terrorist could), they might do it to damage european economy or threaten to do it in some kind of blackmail-scheme, who knows.
And that's why we need Galileo.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
This is really old news and extremely complex. The galileo/GPS compatibility was negotiated between the EU and the US State Department over a very long period. The EU deliberately picked an incompatible code to force concessions from the US before the EU consented and went with the better frequency.
This is a great example of technology driven politics.
--Keith
Trust?
Thinking forward, what happens when the US decides to do to their GPS what they're trying to do to the Internet, i.e. dictate all possible uses and laws, from music downloading to what you're allowed to say on Wikipedia? What if the US disapproves of a war that the EU takes part in (in the same way that some EU nations disapproved of the Iraq war)? Would the US demand that the war stop or else they'd turn off their GPS system?
Were the situation reversed, would the US pay the EU for such a contract? Not a chance in hell.
Secondly, if you're going to use GPS for it's primary purpose (military), you want redundancy, not a single point of failure for all allied nations. If you'd be willing to pay another country for it, you'd be better off putting that money into another identical system.
And yet again, why should EU companies that require GPS to perform their business be paying a GPS tax to America when they could be paying that tax to the EU instead?
The US (with help) is currently stretching itself attempting to control Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's after removing a dictator from power and so on and so forth. Invade and control Europe? Maybe in an alternate neoconservative fantasy version of Earth, but otherwise, completely unthinkably ridiculous.
GPS with an accuracy of 1cm.. sounds pleasant. Maybe I'll live to see the day when "computer, locate keys" actually gives a proper response.
But how much are we willing to pay for said alternative system? I believe the article said that it was going to cost $3-4bn. That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that when the US gets all flustered about a possible terrorist attack (or G-d forbid, another happens), my GPS gets bad accuracy or is turned off for a little while.
First, 3-4 billion is chump change when it comes to government spending, and particularly so when it comes to international consortia spending. The economic value far outweighs the cost, by orders of magnitude.
Second, while you may find it merely inconvinient to have your GPS stop working, try telling that to a pilot (or 300 passengers) on a plane that is landing on a GPS precisions approch with weather at minimums and terrain all around, when the government decides to get into a tizzy and "disable" their approach. WAAS is intended to counteract that, but the point remains: they are having to deploy another multi-billion dollar system to offset the deliberate design issues and unreliability of the first multi-billion dollar system.
The Europeans are spending the money once, and getting a better, more reliable system they, instead of we, control. It makes all the sense in the world, and will probably allow their planes to land in near zero-zero conditions (unlike GPS+WAAS), and certainly with more precision than GPS (1 cm accuracy!).
Finally, fuck the US if we don't like it. We have no business, and no right, to dictate to the rest of the world what technology they may, or may not, deploy. As for our "reserving the right" to shoot down their satelites, I'm sure they (and the Russians, and the Chinese) reserve the "right" to nuke us back into the stoneage if they feel sufficiently threatened. That so-called "right" (talk about orwellian doublespeak!) to destroy something or someone suddenly becomes a lot less appealing when one is on the receiving end, doesn't it?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Tell me thats not a concession to a party unrelated to the project? "
I know you Europeans have totally forgotten, but we're actually a non-inconsquential military ally of yours. It's called NATO. The US is hardly a third party to all of this.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
This is news? This project is at least 2 years old,
codenamed Galileo.
The nerds did not notice?
I'm really not sure where to start...
To begin with, the Galileo system is reputed to have better accuracy. Positional accuracy is, after all, the point of the whole system. So why wouldn't they do it. Furthermore, your reaction to them merely setting up a separate system not controlled by your own government seems to me to be good evidence that were the shoe on the other foot, you'd likely be extolling the virtues of a system not controlled by a foreign country with even more fervor.
As for unleashing our nuclear arsenal, I know you must be kidding. Mutually assured destruction, despite my admitted characterization of it as lunacy during the Cold War, works. France, Germany, England, Russia, etc. have nukes too my friend. All of that is, of course, an argument beyond the simple absurdity of your statement.
As for invading Europe, we can't even control a country with less land area than Texas. What makes you think we could successfully invade Europe and prevail?
And how would the U.S. shut down the internet? Cripple, sure. But I don't imagine there's a big red button in the White House that simply shuts down the internet. We may have developed the core of the internet; but I think that saying we control it is a bit ridiculous.
Finally, you can shake your finger and say "shame on you" all you like. We just did invade a country without provocation or necessity. I'm all for our presence in Afghanistan; but Iraq is a lark. It was the personal agenda of the President, misrepresented and sold to the larger public as a defense of our national security and freedom in general.
Really, take a pill. The Europeans are launching a satellite positioning network. It doesn't rate talk of nuclear war and ground invasions.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
The US vs Europe debate fails to notice that there exists an
operational alternative to the US GPS system. Russia has had a
working system for years. There are shipping chipsets that do both
GPS and GLONASS.
http://www.glonass-center.ru/
Europe should just slip the Russians a few Euro to keep it running
and get a contractual agreement on levels of service.
Refresh my memory, when did the US aquire the right to shoot down their sattelites?
The same time everyone else lost their ability to stop us.
If we think it's time to start shooting down europe's sattelites, we're hardly going to be concerned with what European nations consider what we have the 'right' to do.
Not that I think we'll have cause to shoot down any satellites any time in the forseeable future, but your post implied fantasies about 'international law' that just aren't so.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Oh man, I barely know where to start. How about here:
We could unleash our nuclear arsenal and flatten Europe.
Indeed you could. And 1 minute after your missiles left the grund. France, England and probably Russia would retaliate, flattening the USA with their nuclear arsenals.
We could withdraw all our trade and let Europe flounder on its own
I suppose you could but are you aware of the trade balance between the US and Europe? I suggest you look it up before embargoing.
We could even invade and take control of Europe
Oh dear. Considering that your entire army cant control two 3rd world countries with a total population of around 50 million, where the governments are your puppets, I seriously doubt you could "invade and control" 400+ million people with high tech weapons, well organized armies, and fully developed infrastructure.
While we could shut the internet off at any time
Indeed you could shut down your root servers. And the internet would probably stop working outside of national nets for all of 30 minutes before everone had repointed their DNS.
Whoa, wait just a minute. Any student of modern European history would find this statement incredibly ironic. Pot, kettle, black. Get over your self-superior European selves.
News Flash: Americans do NOT want to flatten Europe with nuclear weapons. The funny thing here is, the OP brought it up as an example of an absurd idea. You did an excellent job of demonstrating how to overreact and take things out of context. Bravo.
Here's a better reason: 1cm accuracy combined with guaranteed service quality will mean that the system is a lot more useful in many industries than GPS. I'm a pilot, so I'll use that example: while the grandparent's car's nav system isn't critical the instrument system used to perform zero-visibility landings on 800-passenger airliners is. DGPS with WAAS is already being used to perform non-precision instrument approaches, but the Selective Availability (currently disabled by the pentagon, but could be turned back on at any moment) and accuracy are what's holding it back from being adopted for Cat. IIIC instrument landings. A system with Galileo's proposed features would be way cheaper to install and operate than the ILS systems currently used, would be more accurate, and could even be used on the ground for taxiing in zero-zero conditions (a current major weakness for airliners).
If one uses one's imagination, one can also imagine 1cm Galileo signals taking car navigation systems to the point where they are completely autonomous for highway driving...
Oh dear. Considering that your entire army cant control two 3rd world countries with a total population of around 50 million, where the governments are your puppets, I seriously doubt you could "invade and control" 400+ million people with high tech weapons, well organized armies, and fully developed infrastructure.
But you see, you have Frace hence you have no hope for victory.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Greeks also took the evolution of their own language in hand. Homere's greek, while perfectly undestandable by Pericles citizens, is not Pericles' greek, the latter being much more rich in verbal forms as in vocabulary. Of course, I expect only people who would not say "It's Greek for me" to understand that :-D
Evolution of a language, whether a computer or natural one, should always be backwards-compatible for user-friendliness reasons. Because many other countries have already understood this, they grinded their own version of this institution. Oh, also we dropped the use of inches and feed a little more than 200 years ago. You might be interested... in some future; like all the rest of the planet, though with a little slowness, as usual ;-)
(Baladeur is a perfect word for french pronunciation, as well as informatique, télématique and logiciel. As far as I know, English has no word for informatique, as it seems to consider that data processing and computer science refer to very different disciplines; one of the reasons why Dassault's CATIA replaced Boeing's CADAM... including at Boeing!)
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Caveat: I'm an American, and a avowed capitalist.
Some points:
1. WAAS plus proper GPS equipment can be as good as Galileo, note that the article claims 10-35cms, not 1 cm accuracy. That's 6+ GPS satellites and WAAS levels of accuracy. Galileo satelites may start out better than GPS, but keep in mind that both constellations require (will require) constant replacement. GPS (and Galileo) will receive constant improvements, but higher accuracy is more a problem of physics (atmospheric interference) and computing power on your device (that 10 year old ARM chip in your handheld GPS can only do so much).
2. The U.S. government has sworn off Selective Avaliability. At the same time, the U.S. government has developed ability to do regional jaming of GPS. *shrug* This is a concern, but a marginal one; I doubt that they'll be turning off GPS signals over London, Paris, or New York anytime soon. Not without having grounded all the planes first.
Having said that:
Galileo is another "GPS-like" system that will be avaliable for FREE. The U.S. government will not have to spend a DIME on it, but we'll have TWICE as many positioning satellites avaliable for our use.
Uhh... Sweetness? Free-stuff? Be happy?
The real advantage will be dual-band receivers that are able to use the signals from both systems. In areas where you can only get 2-3 GPS satellites, you'll get 2-3 of each, which may (or may not) be enough to get you 10> or even 1> meter accuracy.
How, exactly, is this NOT in an American's interest?
And we don't have to pay for it?
Ummm... Groovey?
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth!
Redundant, complimentary systems that don't cost us anything more are a godsend. I'm thrilled that Europe is doing this, and everyone not in Europe should be thrilled as well.
The Europeans should be thrilled, but they are permitted a (very slight) grumble at the cost, similar to the grumbles we (Americans) made when the GPS system was developed. Europe is providing a service to the entire global by putting up this system.
Would people complain the same way if Europe (or the U.S.) developed a world-wide free WiFi system?
I think not.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell