Galileo navigation satellite system goes live

http://www.dw.com/en/galileo-navigation-satellite-system-goes-live/a-36422029

by vezycash • 10 years ago

411 160 10 years ago

olig152• 10 years ago

The high precision offered by Galileo was one of the reasons why the Pentagon rejected the system in the first place. There were fears that adversaries of NATO or of other allies could use it for military purposes. However, engineers have found a solution to that problem: should a serious crisis arise, the military can jam a certain part of the broadcasting spectrum. This would cut off civilian use, but still retain the functions that are reserved for allied military purposes.

This seems like quite a big issue; If any of the EU states go to war, then planes and other civilian things relying on Galileo would stop working? Would they fall back to GPS?

ghshephard3• 10 years ago

Any life safety system should definitely not be designed to rely on GPS/Galileo/Glonass - they are RF systems that can be jammed by anyone with any interest in doing so.

dom03• 10 years ago

Practically all life safety systems (boats, cars, climbing etc.) are based on radio.

arjie2• 10 years ago

What should they use instead for positioning?

kiallmacinnes• 10 years ago

Assuming, for example, commercial delivery drones were to use this, I can only imagine there would be some sort of notice of termination giving enough time to ground things.. Maybe that would put them out of service? If GPS 15m accuracy isn't enough, falling back won't help.

Here's hoping sanity prevails and there's no sudden cutoff leading to things falling from the sky.

greglindahl4• 10 years ago

Here's an example of prior notification and a disagreement about the effects of GPS jamming on popular model of small jet:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/08/embraer-gps-te...

greglindahl4• 10 years ago

It appears that most civilian receivers are going to use all of the various constellations at the same time.

Here's an article from 2014 talking about production chipsets that do GPS/Galileo/Glonass/BeiDou.

http://gpsworld.com/quad-constellation-receiver-gps-glonass-...

tuukkah• 10 years ago

This. The combination gives higher accuracy, faster fix, independence from a single political entity, and overall higher reliability by redundancy.

cbhl• 10 years ago

This is already an issue with GPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856131

dom03• 10 years ago

If any of the EU states go to war, then planes and other civilian things relying on Galileo would stop working?

That's the point of projects like these, working together and relying so much on each other that European countries waging war against each other simply stops making sense.

olig152• 10 years ago

But the same thing would happen if a non-eu country attacked a Galileo using country, right?

rzimmerman3• 10 years ago

The article was a little unclear. Originally Galileo was supposed to use the same frequency band as GPS which would prevent the US from jamming it without also affecting GPS.

jhayward6• 10 years ago

It still does on the primary civilian signal.

http://www.navipedia.net/index.php/GNSS_signal

wyager3• 10 years ago

It's obscene that the US has such control over foreign infrastructure installations in the name of "security". GPS accuracy limits and ITAR/COCOM GPS export restrictions are a farce anyway; even a third-world basement laboratory could construct a GPS receiver sufficiently fast and accurate for missile controls these days.

The only thing these laws accomplish is to inconvenience civilians. I know some people in the high-altitude balloon community who are frequently frustrated by scared manufacturers not wanting to run afoul or ITAR and restricting GPS units so they can't even be used for balloons. Who knows what sort of cool location-based technology we could have today if the US hadn't intentionally held back civilian GPS for decades.

Aloha• 10 years ago

I hate to point this out, but we (the americans) paid for it, why shouldn't we have control over it? If you don't like it, you're always welcome to build your own.

mahyarm• 10 years ago

Couldn't the other military jam the military GPS/Gallieo/etc bands too?

nine_k• 10 years ago

As long as they have their own constellation that stays unjammed.

krick2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure you got the point right. Originally Galileo was supposed to use frequencies very close to GPS. For technical reasons. But this would deprive USA from military advantage they have: they couldn't jam Galileo signals without jamming signals of their own system, GPS. (Maybe I should point out that GPS isn't something that "just works" for everyone: primitively speaking, USA can turn encryption on anytime, making these signals essentially useless for everyone but them.) It isn't about fairness or civilian convenience, it is about USA having an advantage in case of war. So, USA basically threatened to blow Galileo satellites up if EU goes with it. Unfortunately, they can, so EU backed off and changed the frequency spectrum of Galileo so that USA can retain their advantage. Yeah.

So, no, Galileo users aren't supposed to fall back to anything. That's the point.

aaronmdjones• 10 years ago

Most commercial planes (and certainly almost every civilian airliner?) have an inertial reference system that is backed up by GPS.

The inertial reference system is a physical unit that cannot be externally manipulated, but it has less accuracy. If the plane's flight management computer detects that the GPS significantly disagrees with the IRU, it will warn the pilots, and may automatically disable the GPS unit.

Planes can also obtain position data via 2 VOR radials, or a single VOR-DME radial, or such. There are many options.

To provide redundancy, there are usually 2 or 3 IRUs.

arjie2• 10 years ago

Chips that support multiple systems are fairly inexpensive. I picked a couple up on an indie gogo for $15 each. And it does GPS/Glonass/Beidou https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatib...

neals2• 10 years ago

I like living in Europe most of the time. And I'm sure if we could get over a lot of petty, cultural, differences, we could build more amazing things and innovate at a much faster speed then we have been so far.

Already__Taken2• 10 years ago

Couldn't you say that for just about anywhere?

neals2• 10 years ago

No. I don't think I'd like living just about anywhere, tbh.

sehr• 10 years ago

Could say that for everywhere, all at once!

endisukaj2• 10 years ago

Not many places/regions are as advanced and have as a high quality of life and high percentage of educated citizens as Europe, so no. At this moment in time, not really.

ajmurmann• 10 years ago

As a European living in the US I believe what is holding Europe back more than anything is the fragmentation. Companies like Google and Apple come out of the US because of the pro-business policies. However, I believe the gigantic, relatively homogenous market is by far the biggest advantage. If Europe spoke predominantly a single language and had largely the same regulations Europe could stand a much better chance. That's too often overlooked and the lack of a European Google or Apple is just blamed on socialism.

jessriedel2• 10 years ago

If market size is more important, we'd expect most European startups to come out of the largest countries, even after weighting by population, right? And if entrepreneurial culture or socialism was more important, we'd expect some metric for those to be correlated, right? Really curious as to whether this analysis has been done in an authoritative way.

RivieraKid2• 10 years ago

Yeah, I've long suspected the same, that the big market is a significant advantage. It's easier to grow in a big market, that's why the US has (seemingly) more big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, McDonalds.

remir2• 10 years ago

Don't worry, in face of the challenges that are ahead, we will be forced by circumstances to set aside our cultural differences to cooperate and find solutions.

Climate change, resources depletion, crops failing, famine, sea rising, environmental degradation, etc. These challenges are not for one nation only, but for the whole world.

It takes a crisis to wake you up from your illusions. It will be the same for humanity.

CamperBob22• 10 years ago

Don't worry, in face of the challenges that are ahead, we will be forced by circumstances to set aside our cultural differences to cooperate and find solutions.

If that happens, it will be the first time in the history of Planet Earth. Localized resource scarcity doesn't usually lead to peaceful cooperation. It leads to war.

rplnt• 10 years ago

Well nowadays it seems like EU is not going to survive as it is. Countries in the east seem to be more and more opposed to the idea of EU (some 1/4 - 1/3 of people IIRC). These are countries that most benefit from the EU, not only financially (funds and markets), but also need the external control to prevent the come-back of mafia, corruption, etc.

Russia is playing a huge role in this, modern information warfare. They want the people in countries that suffered for some 20 plus years last decade to again love the motherland. They play on nationalism (Slavs) mostly (thanks to refuge crisis, in which Russia is involved directly), and that most media are owned by the west (and thus lie), and only alternative media will tell you the truth. About Ukraine, about USA, about Syria, about everything. There are different levels for everyone to choose from, be it Jews being responsible for everything, or just plain Brussel Dictatorship.

This sounds like a wild conspiracy, but it's scary as fuck to see it. At first it seemed like a joke, or a way to make some money (like regular conspiracy websites would do), but I'm now convinced there are external motives and financing. And people are eating it up. Loving Russia and all. Country which is far worse off than any of the EU members.

azernik• 10 years ago

I'm not sure where you got the impression that the EU is less popular in the east; according to these [1] surveys, Poland is the only large EU country where EU approval ratings have held up lately, while Hungarians also have quite good feelings on the subject - despite their governments' very public disputes with the EU on the erosion of democracy in those countries. The correlation is weak, but they're also less into decentralisation than others. And Spain and Italy are also relatively pro-Eu; their populist movements have been left-wing and pro-EU.

It's rich Northwestern states (and, understandably, Greece) that have big problems on the popular level with the EU.

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/07/euroskepticism-beyond-br...

themihai2• 10 years ago

It's actually quite the opposite: the eastern states are the most supportive while the Western states(i.e. UK, Holland and few others) are more pessimistic. It's usually because the richer states subsidize the poorer ones. There is also a doze of populism and lack of EU cohesion.

nullnilvoid• 10 years ago

Europe is really late to the party. GPS has been here for a long time. China's Bei Dou has been operational for a few years and is entering the 3rd generation.

rzimmerman3• 10 years ago

The first GPS satellite was launched almost 40(!) years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_satellite_blocks#Block_I_s...)

AsyncAwait• 10 years ago

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS

jonknee• 10 years ago

Using GPS, private users can navigate with a precision of up to 15 meters (m). Galileo offers a precision of up to 4m for its fully open service.

http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

Real-world data from the FAA show their high-quality GPS SPS receivers attaining better than 2.168 meter horizontal accuracy, 95% of the time.

greglindahl4• 10 years ago

Another thing to note on the accuracy front is that the US is about to start launching the next GPS IIIA generation, which has higher resolution than the current generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIIA

Avernar3• 10 years ago

While the features of IIIA are nice, it will be a while until all the existing ones are replaced by IIIA.

The more immediate nice thing about the IIIA launches are that it adds more satellites that can transmit the L2 signal. Currently there are 18 healthy IIR-M and IIF satellites which can transmit L2. I believe you need about 24 minimum for full coverage.

Once we have full L2 and we get civilian dual band L1/L2 receivers it will get rid of one of the biggest sources of inaccuracy which is ionospheric delay. A dual band L1/L2 receiver will be able to measure ionospheric delay directly. This means the delay calculated will be for that specific point instead of the area covered by a WAAS ground station. Plus you won't need a direct view of the WAAS satellites.

dmurray• 10 years ago

It seems even better than that. My phone can tell me which side of a small road (2m accuracy) I am on 95% of the time. Maybe it uses a WiFi database and dead reckoning to improve on pure GPS.

greglindahl4• 10 years ago

Phones generally use the WiFi database (plus cell tower info) to bootstrap GPS startup, but that's not useful for fine positioning.

7952• 10 years ago

Receivers tend to be built with augmentation systems. This uses a network of ground stations that measure the variation in the GPS signal and transmit corrections over an additional satellite. This helps the device account for atmospheric interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

Your phone also probably augments with the Russian GLONASS

TickleSteve4• 10 years ago

GPS and location systems designed for driving will 'snap' to the correct side of the road.

They're aware of what they're being used for and optimise for that. Similarly, because driving is 2D solution instead of 3D, the altitude will be used derived from the map, not the signal.

Which is why GPS systems designed for driving are fundamentally not suitable for use in (say) planes which need a true 3D solution.

waterphone• 10 years ago

My dedicated Garmin GPS (no supplementary GLONASS) unit has 3 meter accuracy.

Avernar3• 10 years ago

As long as you have an unobstructed view of the equator. To get 2-4m accuracy with commercial GPS you must use WAAS. The sattelites that tansmit the WAAS signal are geostationary.

So if you have buildings, hills or mountains blocking your view you're back to 7-15m accuracy. It gets worse thr furer north you go as your angle to the WAAS sattelites gets closer to he ground.

Plus it's North America only. Not sure if Garmin units support EGNOS which is the system in Europe.

upofadown• 10 years ago

How long does the GPS receiver have to stay in the same place to attain that accuracy? What was the percentage for the numbers in the article?

It is easy to end up comparing apples to oranges with this sort of stuff.

jhayward6• 10 years ago

Survey grade receivers using differential GPS can achieve cm-level accuracy most of the time.

0xcoffee2• 10 years ago

Are GPS systems just plug and play, or does the software also have to be compatible. e.g. Could I just replace the GPS receiver in my car to one that supports Galileo (even though I don't think any are on the market yet)?

jsjohnst2• 10 years ago

No, they aren't usually.

IanCal2• 10 years ago

However there are some devices that are already capable of using Galileo. Recent Qualcomm chips and tomtom devices are I think.

rzimmerman3• 10 years ago

Galileo's actual value has always been murky. It's use case has changed a lot over the years. Originally it was meant to be a navigation system free of GPS's Selective Availability "feature" that diluted precision for civilian use. The Clinton administration effectively killed SA (http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/) in 2000. Galileo was sold as a higher precision civilian alternative that was going to be commercially viable and make money. A few years later the US made improvements to the GPS ephemerides and effectively increased precision of GPS, making the benefits less obvious. The new block of GPS satellites offers even better precision and a lot of the Galileo features (like multiple civilian frequencies). It's honestly quite hard to compete with a free alternative that the US government throws billions of dollars at. Still, GPS can't hit sub-meter accuracy any time soon, so there's a real potential use case emerging for autonomous cars and aircraft.

If you're excited and interested in Galileo it's really worth reading up on how GPS works and was built. The first satellite was launched almost forty years ago and it was operational in the 1980s. It's truly one of the coolest and most amazing things made by humans.

flyinglizard• 10 years ago

Having an alternative to GPS in mission critical systems is enough of a case to justify the existence of Galileo in the first place. Things like drones or self driving cars are not just about accuracy, but also reliability, and civilian GPS is not bulletproof (especially not in urban area). We're already seeing triple band GPS implementations with Galileo, GPS and GLONASS (the Russian alternative).

UnoriginalGuy• 10 years ago

While I agree with the principle in your point, does Galileo operate on a different enough set of frequencies to avoid interference that would knock out GPS?

digi_owl• 10 years ago

Depending on the device SoC, you may see 4 different constellations, as China has their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou_Navigation_Satellite_Sy...

avar4• 10 years ago

Selective Availability was replaced by regional denial capabilities with the GPS III satellites, i.e. instead of fuzzing the signal the US can now turn off GPS for entire countries[1].

It's strategically foolish for the major economies like the EU, Russia & China to depend on the US's goodwill in maintaining a system that drives a huge part of their economy, GPS is used pervasively for everything, and that's only increasing.

Trump wants NATO countries to pay their fair share, how long until he gets the idea that all countries around the world should pay a GPS licensing fee least GPS regional denial be turned on?

Those are the sort of reasons for why it makes sense to develop a GPS alternative, even if you're only aiming for feature parity, or even less than that.

1. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...

swatkat2• 10 years ago

>> It's strategically foolish for the major economies like the EU, Russia & China to depend on the US's goodwill in maintaining a system that drives a huge part of their economy, GPS is used pervasively for everything, and that's only increasing.

Exactly. For this same reason, India recently deployed its own satellite navigation system NAVIC[1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Regional_Navigation_Sat...

[2] http://www.isro.gov.in/irnss-programme

user837387• 10 years ago

>Trump wants NATO countries to pay their fair share, how long until he gets the idea that all countries around the world should pay a GPS licensing fee least GPS regional denial be turned on?<<

Now now, do not insert political commentary into this discussions. I got yelled at for doing that. [1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13197536

jhayward6• 10 years ago

I've never seen an authoritative reference for any area denial capability in block III. Can you provide one?

There is an enhanced footprint signal boost capability for the military but that's the opposite of what you describe.

themihai2• 10 years ago

Actually US can still jam Gallileo. US "asked" EU to patch it so that it can be controlled(turned off) by the US in case of war with Russia or China.

CalChris3• 10 years ago

Still, GPS can't hit sub-meter accuracy any time soon

GPS has had sub-millimeter survey grade accuracy for quite some time. However, these require post-processing which takes maybe a day, read that as not realtime.

WAAS+GPS currently gives 2-3 meters.

ComodoHacker2• 10 years ago

sub-millimeter survey grade accuracy

Could you provide some links to read? I just can't imagine how it's possible.

CamperBob22• 10 years ago

Galileo's actual value has always been murky.

Not even remotely. GNSS is far too important to be left up to one or two militaristic providers whose interests (to put it mildly) may not always coincide with your own.

If anything we need more systems up there.

int_19h• 10 years ago

And more satellites are good for everyone, at least so long as all these systems remain open for use. It means more accuracy, and some redundancy never hurts, either.

PunchTornado• 10 years ago

The benefits of Galileo are very clear for me as an EU taxpayer.

Don't rely on GPS because it is controlled by a single country and that country can shut it down whenever it likes.

No country is your friend forever, you only have to look at the Trump administration. It takes 1 election and everything can swing in the wrong direction.

6t6t6t6• 10 years ago

Completely agree.

GPS is so essential, that is becoming more and more a "single point of failure" for our civilization.

Without having any data, I have the intuition that the cost of deploying our own GPS system may be worth just as an "insurance".

nradov2• 10 years ago

Perhaps the Europeans are concerned that if the USA gets into a shooting war with China or Russia in a few decades, our GPS satellites will be the first casualties.

vegabook2• 10 years ago

and perhaps that is a legitimate concern for more than just Europeans, and that includes Americans, and perhaps it's not just about war, but about competition, trade, and fair global access to a technology not being beholden to a single administration (especially in the new age of "America first").

chiph• 10 years ago

There's no question that GPS satellites will be a high-value target in the next super-regional conflict. The system was a primary reason why Saddam was defeated (temporarily!) in Desert Storm. The Iraqis were used to getting lost in the trackless desert from their war with Iran, and assumed that the coalition forces would be just as lost. GPS allowed the famous "left hook" that cut the Republican Guard off.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-and-the-world...

vegabook2• 10 years ago

what is murky about 10x more precision?? Sounds like sour grapes. Sure GPS is amazing. Now there's something better. Just because it isn't American doesn't mean its value is questionable. Nothing is being taken away here. Choice is being added.

matthewmcg• 10 years ago

Is there a good, wide-ranging treatment of the history of GPS? Something like Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb but for electronic navigation?

ajross• 10 years ago

It's honestly quite hard to compete with a free alternative that the US government throws billions of dollars at.

Yes, but it's not a commercial venture. Surely there is equivalent value in having a satellite system that European governments throw billions of euros at, no?

guelo• 10 years ago

With the new Trump/Putin alliance NATO will be threatened. It makes sense for Europe to develop independent military infrastructure and to ramp up military spending.

lorenzhs• 10 years ago

Galileo is a civilian project, though. It has features that are limited to police, border security, military, etc but it's an EU project. The EU doesn't have an army (its member states do, but the EU doesn't).

kuschku4• 10 years ago

The EU does have a coast and border guard, though, which is a paneuropean military entity.

phkahler• 10 years ago

Where do they get off claiming Ariane 5 has a perfect record? It's explosion is one of the classic stories of software failure.

effie• 10 years ago

Indeed, I was surprised to read that too. Probably mistake on author's part.

mrb• 10 years ago

This 1996 failure was not a "production" flight but a "test" flight (the very first test flight in fact). I guess the article implicitly claims all "production" flights were flawless.

But that too would be an overstatement. There was a second (and last) failure in 2002 for the first test of the ECA configuration of Ariane 5. (ECA, Évolution Cryotechnique type A, is an improved Vulcain 2 first-stage engine with a longer nozzle with a more efficient flow cycle and denser propellant ratio.)

All ~75 launches since 2002 have been flawless.

nayuki• 10 years ago

The article contained a strange word "eparated". It took me a few seconds to realize it meant "separated". I tried Googling the word to check how good its spelling correction was - but instead it came back with no correction and real results about automobiles. It seems to have parsed the word as "EPA rated", alluding to fuel efficiency.

nazca• 10 years ago

Any guess when devices will start using Galileo? I'm thinking about dropping some coin in a Garmin Fish Finder & chartplotter for my boat. Currently sell models that use GPS & GLONASS.

IanCal2• 10 years ago

There are some already capable, but they'll need a firmware upgrade. Recent Qualcomm chips for phones do at least.

bradhe• 10 years ago

Now that there's a second player in this world, maybe we can standardize the hardware? Great the satellites are online...but how many devices have been manufactured with the requisite hardware?

Also wonder how many devices this network can support. I'm sure there is sufficient capacity but I'm just curious how the capacity is calculated!

alykhalid• 10 years ago

Galileo isn't second, its 4th or 5th in the market. Depending on how you read the table on this page [1].

Also wonder how many devices this network can support. I'm sure there is sufficient capacity but I'm just curious how the capacity is calculated!

Satellite navigation systems broadcast signals on a specific frequency. Anyone listening, should be able to pick up the signal. Therefore I assume infinite capacity.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation

cm21872• 10 years ago

Do we know when Galileo-compatible chips are expected to be deployed widely?

Galileo navigation satellite system goes live

Related Stories