Things Are Looking A Little Better Now
Isn’t it amazing how Dollars and/or Euros can “talk”? You’ll recall a number of articles, (samples here, here and here) past and recent I’ve penned about the somewhat ill-advised Galileo navigation system, a big candidate in my book for the Harvard Business School’s top choice in their “how not to build a business” series.
But some good sense, perhaps influenced by economic reality has forced a meeting of the minds, and the outcome will likely be very beneficial for the US, France, the rest of the European Union and the world at large:
Galileo satellites will link with GPS
A combined system will provide more accuracy for positioning systems
Tom Young, Computing 17 Jul 2007The US government and the European Union (EU) are expected to reach an agreement within a week to provide a service that will use both the US global positioning system (GPS) and the EU’s proposed Galileo satellite network.
EU and US satellites would send information on the same radio frequency, enabling receivers to take signals from both systems and combine the data.
‘The market probably will drive dual-use receivers. We think probably that single GPS-specific or Galileo-specific receivers will phase out in time,’ said Raymond Clore, a GPS-Galileo senior adviser from the US State Department.
The agreement would mean the service being provided by 60 satellites instead of 30, increasing coverage and reliability of the network…. Full article on GPS-Galileo “unity” here:
This makes a heck of a lot of sense, given the the EU seems bent on continuing their project … which, of course, is fine with me. The accuracy of any GPS or GPS-like system is influenced more than anything else by “satellite geometry”. To get any navigational fix, the receiver must “see” a minimum number of satellites. Typically this minimum is 4. The current GPS constellation assures that a receiver will almost always see 4 satellite’s minimum, world-wide.
But in addition to being “seen”, the usefulness of the data depends on the elevation of the satellites above the horizon, as “seen” by the receiver, and the different angles between the satellites and the user’s receiver. If all 4 satellites are low on the horizon, or they are all in a line then the navigational fix is going to be seriously degraded. In the trade this is known as the DOP (Dilution Of Precision) error. The more satellites that can be received, the greater the chance that a receiver at any given time or place will be able to “see” enough angular variety in the space vehicles in view to minimize the various forms of DOP error.
So my hat is off to the EU folks for seeing the light, so to speak, and to our US State department for getting down in the weeds and putting experts to work who can speak “GPS”. Whatever the final outcome of Galileo, cooperation between the countries and the satellite systems can’t help but make the world a better place.
As always, I welcome comments, compliments, disagreements or clarifications. You can leave a comment or email me direct at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me on 1-719-423-8872. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.