Galileo Sends Its First Signals

VVrath writes "Galileo, the European answer to the US Military-owned GPS has sent it's first signals to ground stations in the UK and Belgium. The first satellite in the Galileo system, Giove-A was launched on December 28th 2005, and is set to be followed by a further 29 satellites by 2010. At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Galileo has a bunch of advantages over GPS, like being designed to work to a higher degree of acuracy and to work inside buildings and in built-up areas. Take a look at this article http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/article/articleDe tail.jsp?id=61295 for more information.

Mod article -1, flamebait

[vadim_t]

I would think the reason is completely obvious: It's a really bad idea to have your critical infrastructure depend on something external you can't control.

In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?

If you must ask why

[blindseer]

Galileo offers:

- Higher accuracy for commercial subscribers than offered by GPS.
- Non-military, muli-national control. No one country/entity can turn it off.
- Availability on Arctic and Antarctic waters. While not useful to most, apparently including the US military, it is useful for shipping and search and rescue for many European countries.
- Interoperability/compatibility with GPS. One can back up the other to offer higher availability and/or accuracy.

The only problem I can see is that they use the same frequencies. If some one jams one they are also jamming the other. Given the military capability of the countries funding both systems I can imagine such jamming will be very short lived.