Slashdot Mirror
Galileo Navigation System Gets Go-Ahead From EU Parliament
An anonymous reader writes "Plans to start up the EU's first global satellite navigation system (GNSS) built under civilian control, entirely independent of other navigation systems and yet interoperable with them, were approved by MEPs on Wednesday. Both parts of this global system — Galileo and EGNOS — will offer citizens a European alternative to America's GPS or Russia's Glonass signals. The Galileo system could be used in areas such as road safety, fee collection, traffic and parking management, fleet management, emergency call, goods tracking and tracing, online booking, safety of shipping, digital tachographs, animal transport, agricultural planning and environmental protection to drive growth and make citizens' lives easier."
Road tax per kilometer driven. By having a tracking device in every car. This has already been discussed in Dutch parliament, and so far has been rejected, but it probably won't be forever; I know people who are actually in favor of such draconian surveillance.
Of course, a decade after that it will be used to collect speeding fines on all roads. Which makes sense from a government point of view, but would be a practical nightmare.
You assume that European's view America as a friend who will always let them use GPS?
Of course friends don't spy on friends or apply pressure to force diplomatic aircraft out of the sky, etc, etc.
There's other reasons.
Like spending European money on European technology projects & creating European jobs - even if they seem unnecessary.
That's a winner for me (speaking as a European).
Depend too much on the technology of another power and you end up belonging to that power entirely.
Because we don't trust the Americans, basically. They have a tendency to temporarily switch off GPS in areas of conflict and only share the encrypted military signal with allies that are fighting with them (not neutrals, etc.).
This tends to fuck up shipping in the areas around it, and lots of other problems.
Additionally, the accuracy of Galileo is better. That's a plus point in itself. More satellites in the sky - on whatever system - means more correlation, means better signal in cities and valleys. It doesn't matter what standard, so long as the receiver can decode them and correlate their information. I lose signal every time I go into London, because the high-rises block it. And driving around London's one-way systems when you're not familiar with them? That's the one time you WANT a GPS device to work properly. It's worth it for that alone.
Additionally, the Russians AND the Chinese are doing the same. So Asia and Europe have their own systems. Big deal. Maybe it's because we just don't want to rely on the Americans to hold to their promises. And maybe it's because - for our own military needs - we do not want to be dependent on even an ally. Imagine telling the American people that GPS only works for as long as they stay friends with France. See how much uproar there is, even if they are allies at the moment.
It's leverage over Europe, that we don't need, and that the Americans have exercised in the Middle East. GPS, the commercial / public signal, was switched off and jammed because it might help set up attacks. So entire nations had fucked up GPS because the US thought someone was going to bomb somewhere. That's not a commercially-viable technology to navigate a ship or a plane by. And reason enough to build a replacement that has a bit more "local" control over it, but harms nobody.
If there Americans felt strongly enough to disable non-US Military use of their GPS system in an area, I would be extremely surprised if they would leave rival systems functional. Jamming GPS would be trivial for them.
Maybe we do not want to be dependent on something so important that is not under our control?
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Just so the Americans can jam Galileo whenever they want with no impact on their own system.
And the converse is true. Seems fair to me.
Jamming GPS is actually quite difficult at least at a distance. The signals are low-power but very directional and if someone ignores satellites at low sky angles especially in the direction of hostile forces then singals from the other satellites in the constellation should be uncorrupted.
Local jamming of GPS is easier to carry out. If there is only a few km or so between the receivers and the jammers then they can be swamped or subverted, fed corrupt data to make them inaccurate. General jamming isn't going to work unless aircraft fly over the area to be jammed and that puts them at risk of being shot down in a conflict. They also need to stay on station for extended periods and as yet drones can't carry the amount of equipment and generating capacity to do a good job in such circumstances.
$200? Nope. And you have to within range of a base station that transmits the differential signal. And they aren't cheap.
Most of the error (enough to turn meters into mm) in GPS is identical for a few km, so a base station is placed statically, spends some serious time with a high quality antenna getting its true location and then transmits the error to a compatible receiver. Base stations and GPS receivers with radios are not cheap. ($2000- $20000).
It's not quite the easy solution AC makes it out to be above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Kinematic