Galileo

The ESA is continuing to build their GPS competitor, Galileo. It should be fully on line in two to three years.

I don't know whether it will be an "open" system that can be added to our GPS gizmos for greater coverage and accuracy, or whether licensing fees will keep it a subscriber service. In theory, it would make our GPSs much more responsive and useful (but would we have to call them Galileos instead?)

Cheers,

I'm not sure either, but I've read about open source algorithms being developed to calculate your position using the Galileo network so I have to think that, yes, we should be able to take advantage of that system.

If I recall correctly, the developers were able to obtain an accuracy of about a couple centimeters with a device that will cost as little as a few hundred bucks (or less). This is pretty impressive because it brings to cost to get that accuracy down by several thousands of bucks, and that should greatly reduce the cost to get a land survey done.

Between our GPS and Russia's GLONASS plus over time some improvement in GPS hardware, it's already pretty easy and fast to lock on to plenty of satellites. If we end up with three GPS satellite systems and hardware/software that talks to all of them ... wow.

It seems like many (most?) newer smartphones can use the GLONASS satellites; my new one definitely does, though you might have to go into system settings to (for whatever reason) tell it that you want to use those satellites too.