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:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.