Galileo Navigation System Gets Go-Ahead From EU Parliament 178
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."
Re:To what end? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What it will be used for... (Score:3, Informative)
Considering it's been illegal as hell for decades to mess with the odometer, yeah. You're moving from regular fraud to tax fraud on a system built to be fraud-resistant. You can't even use a power drill to roll the numbers back now--and I've tried that on systems that let you, it takes eternity. To complicate the matter, even shit as old as 1980s has the numbers locked to the whole mechanical system controlling it; the stuff holding this together isn't bolted in, but rather cut and bent from a plate, so you'd have to make some very visible changes (cut or bend aluminum to deformation) to actually manually roll the numbers.
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:To what end? (Score:3, Informative)
The entire official claimed reason for galileo is better accuracy in europe.
Wrong.
The system will never have reliable or even usable coverage outside the EU unless they massively increased the planned size.
Wrong.
You need about 50 birds for global coverage
Wrong.
and the galileo system is planned for 6 birds.
Wrong.
Other than that, yeah.