With the next federal election in the foreseeable timeframe, is it time for industry and all other interested groups to start to very actively lobby for an Australian program to install ground stations to utilise Japanese MSAS/MTSAT satellites?
This could presumably partly utilise the ADS-B infrastructure and thus it would be cheaper than a de-novo system.
While I would very much like to see this happen, I think it's very unlikely.
The SBAS review in 2011 came to a clear conclusion that was something like "difficult to justify the costs" of around $150 - $200 million, and that's assuming we do the intelligent thing and piggyback on MSAS. There was already a fair bit of lobbying going on during the SBAS review. I don't see how more lobbying will change minds.
In the longer term, there is hope for an SBAS in Australia, though. There are a bunch of new satellite constellations running on multiple frequencies that are coming online (slowly) - namely GPS block III, galileo, glonass, compass and qzss. Supposedly, by using the multi-frequency + multi constellations, we can get the fault tolerance and accuracy benefits of SBAS without the need for a ground reference network (or possibly with a much smaller ground reference network). Unfortunately, this is still at the research stage, and it'd probably be 2020 or later before it will be in a useable form.
- S