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posted by chromas on Wednesday April 25 2018, @11:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the alternative-sats dept.

The UK may deploy its own constellation of navigation satellites due to being excluded from the European Union's Galileo project:

Britain is considering setting up a satellite navigation system to rival the European Union's Galileo project amid a row over attempts to restrict Britain's access to sensitive security information after Brexit, the Financial Times reported.

[...] "The UK's preference is to remain in Galileo as part of a strong security partnership with Europe. If Galileo no longer meets our security requirements and UK industry cannot compete on a fair basis, it is logical to look at alternatives," she said.

The European Commission has started to exclude Britain and its companies from sensitive future work on Galileo ahead of the country's exit from the EU in a year's time, a move which UK business minister Greg Clark said threatened security collaboration.

"We have made it clear we do not accept the Commission's position on Galileo, which could seriously damage mutually beneficial collaboration on security and defence matters," he said in an emailed statement.

Although basic Galileo services are supposedly free and open to everyone with no risk of being disabled or degraded, higher-precision capability is available only to paying commercial users.

Now we have GPS, Galileo, BeiDou/COMPASS, GLONASS, IRNSS/NAVIC, QZSS, and possibly a British satnav system in the future. Devices can use multiple systems to achieve greater precision. Check out this comparison of systems.

Also at BBC and The Independent.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @01:26AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @01:26AM (#671985)

    The UK may still have enough allies or colonies around the world to make this viable - put up towers. The prime user would be the Navy who travel globally. A problem would be the rather vast expanse of the Pacific - no place for towers. Vancouver, Auckland and.. er yes, not quite enough to triangulate on. Anyway, satellites are the "thing" and big money making them wants taxpayers money, so... there will be more space junk up there, soon.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:47AM (#672017)

    A problem would be the rather vast expanse of the Pacific - no place for towers.

    That's not really a problem for defense... For offense the UK tends to be the USA's faithful war corgi, so they can use GPS.

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday April 26 2018, @04:22AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday April 26 2018, @04:22AM (#672028)

    The prime user would be the Navy who travel globally.

    I thought I read (or saw on TV) somewhere that they're also using star-based navigation.

    A problem would be the rather vast expanse of the Pacific - no place for towers.

    For sure; I was only thinking of continental Europe. But again, you could use star navigation until you get back to land-based transmitters.

    ... there will be more space junk up there, soon.

    Quite agree.