UK plan to launch rival to EU sat-nav system.
 

UK plan to launch rival to EU sat-nav system.

I bet they wished that they had stuck with Blue Streak now! Still dashed unsporting of those foreign Johnnies saying we can't use their system after we leave the EU.
Any one want to start a book on how much it will cost, I reckon five billion tops is a bit optimistic. Still at least we can get the Kiwis to launch the satellites, keep it in the Common wealth and all that eh! :roll eyes:

Well all the expensive development is already done - the actual cost of shooting the hardware into space is at the cheaper end of the spectrum.

Not sure why we need our own though - what with GPS, GLONASS and Galileo i would have thought that there was plenty commercially available for anyone.

There'll be plenty of money available when we get our £350m per week back, sad thing is if it goes on a pointless UK GPS system it won't be going to the NHS - as if it ever was!!!

Fragmented sat/nav systems.
This would be a good global UN project. Standardize a system covering everyone. Might keep them from screwing up other things.

In which case I hope they've a bloody big teapot and an awful lot of digestive biscuits.*





*One of the engineers working on either Blue Streak or Black arrow was interviewed about the project, he said something on the lines of when the Americans had a problem they threw money at it until they trampled it to death. We on the other hand went off to have a think about it over a cup of tea and plate of digestive biscuits!

For several years I worked on a NATO Working Group, and something that always came up, without fail, was that there was a massive difference in expenditure on R&D between the US and the UK, yet the UK managed to get a heck of a lot more value out of every pound spent. The biggest problem is that the UK is bloody awful at turning ideas into reality. The most impressive country I've seen at doing that is New Zealand, that's a small country that really does punch way above its weight in some areas of technology development.

Galileo is now working extremely well. I use it every day. And the Chinese are busy launching more of their Beidou satellites.
We put a lot of effort, expertise and money into Galileo.
The basis access to Galileo is free, as it is with the others. Being outside the EU we will have to pay for its high precision services, but that would be still be vastly cheaper than building our own system that no-one else would pay to use.

My (Volvo) car satnav can obviously identify where it is and uses a DVD-loaded map to direct me - however it recently went 'off-grid' when I decided to drive directly between two locations rather than use the main roads.
I obviously missed a turning (I was on country roads with few signposts) but, instead of recalculating (as usual when I divert from the specified route) it just went dumb until I retraced my steps and regained the designated route.
I don't know whether this was a GPS communication failure or whether the roads weren't on the mapping system - it could have been that the roads were unadopted as they led to private properties (though not signposted at such - just country farms.
Does my satnav communicate with the US system or the European system?

Depending on the age of your car, it will certainly use the original GPS - the US system. It might also use the Russian Glonass. Unless it is very new it will probably not be able to use Galileo. Your receiver won't switch between systems, it will use any and all of those it was programmed for. Obviously when it comes to getting a good fix, more is better especially in urban canyons or in wooded areas where much of the sky is obscured.

Under the forthcoming EU regulations that mandate auto-location of vehicles in accident or emergency situations, car equipment must be able to get a fix from Galileo. So new cars will be fitted accordingly.

Please show us where it states that the £350m would all be used for the NHS.

I’m pretty certain no one actually said it would, just that it could. But it is increasingly obvious that it will not be.

Also I don’t think it actually exists.

How’s that?

Exactly, the bus, oft misquoted, only said "let's fund our NHS instead" of sending all that money to the EU, not let's spend it all on the NHS.

As to whether it existed or not depends on how set in stone you see the UK rebate. Take away the rebate, which the EU could do if they so decided, and the actual gross figure has been calculated as even higher, actually more than £360m a week.

I don't care which system mine uses, but it needs to look out the window more often. There are a number of roads which are clearly signposted as one speed limit, yet the digitial map in my car has a different, lower speed limit.

I was browsing through my dashcam footage recently and realised that every time i travel these roads the nice female voice says "you are over the speed limit" and I more often than not reply "not according to the council..."

Nothing whatever to do with the GNSS receiver. That only says what it thinks your geographical coordinates are.
The digital map in your car, that tries to fit those coordinates to the nearest road, will be out of date the moment it is installed. And so many councils are changing speed limits that you would be well advised to ignore any prompts from the car.

Can't trust the EU post-Brexit, and the US can switch their birds off at will more or less (war), so it makes sense.

In the case of war, I don't think the UK will be needing its own GNSS for very long.
And I don't think the EU would turn off Galileo just to spite the UK.

vapilot2004, Sallyann1234

What does not make sense is that the entire UK space industry is owned by EU companies, so a UK only alternative is really a non starter. Another BREXIT disaster in the making. And, Sallyann1234, the worrying bit of the post Brexit GPS is that the EU only allows access to the encrypted military bit to EU members.