h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not wanting to be overly reliant on a US military device, the EU is launching it's own satellite network called Galileo, which is reputed to be better than the US GPS system.
Trouble is, it will use the same spectrum of radio frequencies in use by today's wireless networking devices.

"Better" is a somehow tough term. What do you mean by "better"?

I have read that Galileo is planned, but I haven't had the opportunity to get some real juicy information about it.

From what I can gather, accuracy will be much improved, and there will be extra information available (for a small fee) from the satellites regarding the quality of the signal, etc - something only the US military has access to with the US GPS service. There was an article about it in last week's New Scientist magazine.

Sounds really interesting ...

On the other hand, GPS accuracy is really ok imho. Do we really want (or need) accuracy down to inches? That is something that might scare me if it gets into the wrong hands ...

Jeremy

The thing about GPS is it isn't really all that accurate - when you're moving (ie if you are a ship or an aeroplane) the resolution drops to several tens of metres, and there have been cases of accidents due to this. Galileo will hopefully address this, and will be backed up by land-based transmitters in places where reception is poor/accuracy is paramount.

The whole idea of Galileo is that anyone can use it - unfortunately that means terrorists too, but the highly accurate version does I believe require a two way conversation between satellite and GPS receiver, so you'd know who was using it, and like GPS it can be blocked/deliberately made inaccurate in times of war.

Otherwise the first thing the DoD would be about to do would be to 'terminate' the Galileo satellites in a case of crisis