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Is satellite navigation under threat?
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MikeB
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 9:51 pm    Post subject: Is satellite navigation under threat? Reply with quote

An article in the Sun Newspaper today throws a shadow over the future of satellite navigation:

Quote:
...
It also comes as US defence chiefs warn they would destroy a planned Euro-Chinese global navigation satellite called Galileo if it poses a military threat.

The report adds: "The EU will allow China to keep using its satelites in a conflict with America ... a danger that is prompting the US to consider how to shut down Galileo in an emergancy."

The EU wants China to help pay for the satelite as a rival to America's GPS.

Britain will lead a campaign today to bar Galileo being used for military purposes.

But China's People's Daily has already warned: "Galileo promises to be a reliable and accurate service for all users, both civil and military."


It could be that the Sun is having one of it's regular Euro bashing sessions, but there could be some truth in this. Hopefully we won't be going back to the days of degraded civilian GPS (known as Selective Availability SA).

As a bit of background China joined the Galilao on October the 9th this year in Brussels.

Resources:
Galileo web site
Galileo Joint Undertaking website
GJU Chinese sign-up Press release
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JohnGray
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 10:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mike

You might be pushing it a bit to call the Sun a newspaper!

From the NBBC there is this BBC story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4085651.stm about Galileo, but it makes no mention of EGNOS. Is that an entirely different system with different satellites? Wasn't EGNOS due to be available recently, but has been put back to April 2005 (roughly?).

Thanks

John Gray[/i]
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MikeB
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John,

Egnos and Galileo are two seperate projects from the European Space Agency.

Egnos is the easy one this is the European version of WAAS or SBAS which will enhance the GPS position data to about 3 metres, this is complementary to GPS. Egnos does nothing on its own.

On the other hand Galileo is a "replacement" for GPS. There are currently 2 different Sat Nav systems in use GPS (USA) and GLONASS (Russia). Galileo is a seperate system which is designed to be inter-operable with the other 2 systems.

Lets just hope that politics dont get in the way of progress.
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DavidW
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I believe the US Government have talked about the decision to turn off selective availability on the Standard Positioning Service in 2000 as irrevocable. The Americans have the ability to degrade or disable SPS on a regional basis if there is a military need to do this, and feel this is sufficient. Unfortunately I can't remember where to find the definitive quotes from the time the May 2000 order was issued, but this quote on the FAA site should be taken as fairly definitive.

As aviation is moving to using GPS with SBAS as a safety of life critical system (for example, for GPS guided precision approach), there's really no way that SA could return. My understanding is that there will soon be charts for precision GPS approach that don't rely on existing navaids such as VOR/DME.


I think the rest is probably posturing, though I hadn't kept up with the Chinese getting involved in Galileo. The US and EU had, so far as I saw, buried the hatchet over Galileo and agreed to work together. There were some compromises - the EU had to accept certain things would be done the Navstar way rather than the way they were intending to go.

There's been some political posturing over the higher levels of Galileo service. There is likely to be a commercial Galileo service that's better than the free service available on subscription, but like GPS, the highest accuracy signals that have potential military applications will be encrypted anyway and unavailable to other than authorised military and a very limited set of civilian users (such as the emergency services).



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DavidW
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 10:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My understanding is that it's likely that we will eventually see combined Navstar (GPS) and Galileo receivers. To talk about Galileo as a replacement for Navstar is probably misleading - and I was pleased to see Mike's inverted commas. Obviously, it's going to be a fair few years until we see what is actually launched.

Glonass seems to have stagnated somewhat - there isn't worldwide coverage, and because of that there doesn't seem much interest in Glonass receivers. I believe Glonass only aims to cover the former USSR, though I really don't know that much about it. Certainly there's fewer active Glonass satellites than Navstar satellites.



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MikeB
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 11:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How about that for a timely article. I have just been watching the ITV news at 10 and they had an item about Galileo and the controversy it has started.

They are claiming Global coverage of 30 satelites with a sub 2 metre accuracy. The first sat will be launched sometime next year.

A UK minister was questioning the cost 2 Billion sterling, whilst a US security specialist was saying that the US were developing jamming devices to selectivly block the signal in local areas.

If you have ITV digital then you can access the interactive side and get more detail on the Galileo project now.
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DavidW
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 11:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There's a BBC News Online article here, which indicates that once the EU had agreed go to with certain Navstar like technical details, the American concerns about selective tactical jamming disappeared.

BBC News Online wrote:
The Pentagon was concerned frequency clashes could have prevented American commanders from degrading navigation data in the theatre of war to all but their own forces, as is possible at present.

But Washington and Brussels signed an agreement in June to adopt compatible operating standards.

Let's hope that all is rosy in the garden of international co-operation over these systems!



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Skippy
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think a fair bit of this is posturing on the part of the Americans. They are pretty much saying why do you want one of your own, just use our one! To people like us it's a useful gadget, but if it stopped working then we could still live without it - it would be a nuisance but not the end of the world.

The problem is that there are many applications where satelite based positioning systems have proven themselves to be extremely useful. We are fast approaching the day where we wake up and realise that GPS has become critical to the normal operations of people's day to day lives.

At the moment the American Military is in control of all this. That scares the hell out of me.

Imagine a train signalling, aircraft/ship navigation system based on GPS. It is certainly feasible and already in use to a limited extent, but would you be able to implement such a system based on a service operated by the US Military? The answer is a resounding NO. When it comes to the crunch, the US Military will act in the best interests of the US. If that means degrading the GPS service to the rest of the world, then so be it.

The European Space Agency is right to go ahead with Galileo. It will take 5 years to get the thing deployed, imagine what the world will be like in 5 years time. Every car will have a GPS fitted for road charging, navigation, traffic congestion avoidance etc.

And how long before every mobile phone has GPS built-in?
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Shaky
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

JohnGray wrote:
Mike

You might be pushing it a bit to call the Sun a newspaper!


Tickled me...haha :P
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longwori
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 4:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I read about this a month or two ago. I cant remember where - either the BBC or Space.Com I guess.

It just mentioned that a US military official had leaked details of a report that was looking at how they could destroy the European GPS capabilities in an emergency. I think its probably naive to think that countries outside of the US dont have similar plans to take out the US GPS system if the need arises.
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mcwarre
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 12, 2004 11:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You all seem to have missed a vital point about Gallileo. People will have to pay to use it (either via a license fee when selling the product or via some sort of subscription). Good old EU competative trading then................
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mcwarre
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 12, 2004 11:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

longwori wrote:
I think its probably naive to think that countries outside of the US dont have similar plans to take out the US GPS system if the need arises.


Fair point; but who has the ability to do this? Russia? Bankrupt! China? Not at the moment. France? (We should all stick together and take them out). Bin Laden? MMmmmmm.......

So a non-starter really then! :P :P
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 12, 2004 11:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mcwarre wrote:
You all seem to have missed a vital point about Gallileo. People will have to pay to use it (either via a license fee when selling the product or via some sort of subscription). Good old EU competative trading then................


I was under the impression that there would be several levels of service and that the most basic service level, similar to that offered by the existing American system would be free.

The difference with Gallileo is that there would be an option to pay for a guaranteed service which could be used for applications where safety of life would be at risk if it failed. The American system does not offer this level of service.

As for building a GPS jammer, this is fairly trivial - instructions and schematics are easily available on the net. Indeed the Iraqis were using GPS jammers to defeat the guidance systems during the bombing of Baghdad.
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GingerLizard
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 11:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

As I understand it, localised jamming rather than service degradation is the current approach to protecting sensitive locations from targeting via GPS.

There seems to be very little information available about this at present (unsurprisingly as it's a key military technology) - however if the jamming technology was more widely available, would we see it being used to confuse GPS based speed camera warning devices?

If anyone has come across public sources of information about GPS jamming, could they post a link please?

The original GPS design concept made jamming extremely difficult (it uses a long correaltion sequence to detect a signal below the noise floor) - so from a technical perspective I'm curious how this has been acheived - I guess you coud build a device to pick up the currently visible satellites and broadcast spoof satellite signals that only differed in data content- any techno whizz's care to specualte?
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 9:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hello and Welcome

GingerLizard wrote:
If anyone has come across public sources of information about GPS jamming, could they post a link please?


http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=60&a=13
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