But presumably we still have GLONASS? Or was part of the deal between Putin and Trump to turn that off when the USA wanted?
Isn’t the whole point of it to be independent from the US GPS?
Only if one believes that it is OK for the USA to get a shower of GPS guided missiles and for Europe to just sit there and laugh at it 
I know this is not you Denopa but I know there are plenty of people in Europe who would enjoy that scenario, unrealistic as it may be.
But presumably we still have GLONASS? Or was part of the deal between Putin and Trump to turn that off when the USA wanted?
That’s a really good Q. I am sure Putin (who is mostly an unsentimental realist) would co-operate if say N Korea started doing something really serious. But equally the USA has the capability to jam the whole lot, and probably to shoot down the satellites which are relatively close.
You’re right Peter, compared to most Frenchmen, I’m positively a US of A fanboy. (probably compared to most people outside the US, actually).
There was an interesting special report in last week’s The Economist on the future of war. It included info on China and Russia A2/AD capabilities, meaning what they have at their disposal to prevent the US from doing to them what they did to Irak during Gulf Wars I and II. This seems to include the capacity to destroy satellites, both early warning anti ballistic missiles and GPS ones.
(Sources mostly internet)
The issue was that the Galileo signal was originally to be on a band that the US couldn’t jam without jamming their own military signals.
Different bands were picked, and Galileo also has an encrypted signal.
Shotting satellites has been done by the US / China. Russia has tested such system. General anti ballistic missile systems (Arrow III, Israel / Aster (europe0 are also believed that capacity.
In case of a big war between powers, a lot of missiles are likely to be fired into space. Jamming is more for assymetric war, where a small power / organization uses civilian signals.
I agree that the US taking on Russia or China is a total no-go, and planning for it is just fiction. Nobody wants that to happen anyway. But N. Korea? We just don’t know… but it may come to that one day, and the capability needs to be there.
It was always completely unrealistic of the self proclaimed European intellectuals (in Brussels, especially) to think they could launch their own GPS constellation, and with a clear plan to keep it going for anybody to use freely who wants to bomb the USA. When Bush stated that the US will shoot down the Galileo satellites if necessary, he was just stating the completely blindingly obvious.
The outcome of Galileo is that we will end up with more satellites for the receiver to make use of (except that probably the vast majority of GPS receivers in use today and for many years cannot receive anything but the US system) but we would not kid ourselves that more satellites means the chances of a total shutdown or widespread spoofing (in case of say N Korea doing something big) is reduced. The whole lot will become useless in a coordinated manner. So Europe will have spent a load of money for basically nothing other than a grand political “we are independent of the USA and MacDonalds and Monsanto and all the other fashionable evils” gesture. The 100,000 jobs created in Europe mentioned on the original Galileo website was pure bollox; that dates back to their plan to sell decryption keys to airlines I am not against great engineering projects (most of them are fun) so long as one appreciates that in this case we get basically, ahem, nothing much we didn’t have before.
And, for GA, the chances of us getting a DME/DME box is same as before: zero. There is no market for it. Also I doubt you would pick up 2 or 3 DMEs anyway, in most of Europe, at low GA levels like < 2000ft. The bottom fell out of the “backup” market as soon as GPS arrived. Same for FOG INS boxes; the present 10k-20k product would cost 100k if aviation-certified, and even at 10k virtually nobody would buy it. The people who would have 10-20k to spend would want it to work with their panel mount avionics in a transparent manner, so you would need it to come with a “local GPS” emulator so that you flick a switch and your GPS antennae are now picking up a (weak) local signal which is INS-generated. Actually one could do it, illegally like most good things, with an RF relay in the GPS antenna cable…
I think (but could be wrong) one of the cases could be that the Galileo encrypted signal (which I imagine will (it’s still probably too early) be used by the european military) would still be up even if the civilian signal is jammed, where otherwise only the US encrypted signal would (not) be available to them.
Yes; the encrypted signals could, one assumes, remain. I don’t know how secure the key distribution is. N Korea is sure to have spies all over the place…
But wasn’t there some way to make use of the encrypted signals, which somebody discovered in recent years? I vaguely recall reading something.
There would be other ways of getting reasonable position data, over land, anyway….
Cell tower triangulation. Limited in Altitude in the obtuse UK, but works well in most countries. Good to a few hundred metres and up to the countries’ policy (at least 10,000’ in US and NZ). Cell tower location data at least in part is readily available.
or
Wifi mapping of the type allegedly collected by Google’s fleet of vans. Would work with good positional accuracy up to maximum vertical wifi detectability range, maybe 2000’?
or
What about smart meters? The database of those will inevitably leak out of the supremely competent utilities who are promoting them. Don’t know how often they radiate, but one I’ve played with goes every 5 min.
All potentially a lot cheaper than INS for light aircraft.
Russia and China are doing more than planning for it, they’re equipped for it. Strongly recommend reading that report, it was an eye opener for me; China is already able to interdict large chunk of the sea (out to Taiwan and Japan) to US fleets.
Peter wrote:
The outcome of Galileo is that we will end up with more satellites for the receiver to make use of (except that probably the vast majority of GPS receivers in use today and for many years cannot receive anything but the US system)
The vast majority of GNSS receivers in use today can receive GPS, GLONASS and Galileo. (The Russians forced the issue with GLONASS by slapping a stiff import tarriff on any GNSS capable product that didn’t support GLONASS). All Apple devices from the iPhone 6 Plus and onwards receive all three, and most recent Android devices can use all three systems. As for certified IFR aviation boxes, you’re probably right.
