Rubbish typing to be honest, you are correct its a passive Hydrogen maser they use.

Two passive hydrogen masers with 10 -15 Allan deviation

And two Rubidium atomic clocks at 10 -12 Allan deviation.

They haven't had any problems with the Rubidium clocks, they haven't a clue what went wrong with the masers and they were all made by the same company. But the drop in Allan deviation when the second maser goes means its accuracy drops massively.

Like I said, old news...

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-07-euro...ms-clocks.html

Like I said they don't know what's wrong with the hydrogen masers. They are closely monitoring them and shut them down before they self destruct. Then wait a bit and start them up again. Hardly a secure stable system.

Still doesn't change the fact that most of the satellites which haven't been up that long are now relying on a backup mode to keep running.

It's going to take loads more cash to sort it all out. We shall see what happens I suspect loads of cash to save face will be the order of the day. I suspect they will have to replace all the satellites anyway to lock the UK out of the encrypted signal. It's not as if they can send a bloke with a usb stick to update the security keys.

Sorry but you are talking nonsense. Wishful thinking perhaps, but nonsense.

The failure mode of the masers has been identified. There is no possibility of the satellites having to be replaced!

The security is not hard wired in the satellites. That would be an elementary mistake. The encoding can be changed at any time by command from ground control, and the UK no longer has its control station.

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We shall see what happens....


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We can see now. It has happened.

its a hardware fault short circuiting in the Rh clocks which they can't do anything about without visiting the satellites. Its not actually seen as a big problem because those clocks are backup.

The H clocks its something to do with the onboard monitoring and stabilisation system they don't know what it is and the work round is to control them from the ground, if they start stepping out they shut them down and reboot letting the RH clocks take over.

The 6 sats at the beginning don't have any problems the first 3 are now dead and the 4-6 are limited life span plus first gen hardware and systems.

So out of the 22 sats up there we are down to 16. two of which are out of orbit so that's 14..... All of which have the Rh hardware fault and 6 of them are down to 1 H clock. I think there are 2 with nothing failed.

It was meant to cost 3 billion, its now over 7 billion. If they said they would need to replace all 30 sats at 80 million a pop that would be 2.4 billion just for the hardware. last launch cost I saw was 25 million per unit but I don't know if that's a 4 at a time job which they are going for or singularly. So that would be in the region of 3.5 billion more.

even if you presume the 14 ones that are up there just now in the correct orbits will continue to work that's still another 16 satellites they need at 105 million each including launch at 1.7 billion.

I have no doubt politically they will go slow release, keep what's up there working ish and then feed in the "good" news later about the replacement units.

We shall see what happens from the stands.

SpectraTime are part of the Orolia group.

So if the UK is booted out of the program we could have dodged a bullet.. :uhoh:

It will take a while to catch up with this...

Galileo status

Is there any rush?. From what I understand the main point of galileo is to introduce road pricing - well I'm in no hurry for that.

Why not?

• If you're not a petrolhead, then you should be in favour, as the petrolheads are going to pay more taxes.
• If you are a petrolhead, then you should be in favour, as the plebs will be priced off the road, reducing congestion for you.

Why not? - well the purpose of road pricing isn't to make my life any better or cheaper, just more expensive. Someone is going to have to pay for all these fancy satellites - so step forward the UK motorist. :ugh:

Don't forget tracking you everywhere you go. And increasing the cost of everything shipped by road. And encouraging trucks to take backroads instead of motorways to reduce the amount they're charged.

Edit: and don't forget that the only reason they need 'road pricing' is because of the CO2 madness, which means they're going to have to replace fuel tax soon because they're banning fossil fuels.

BTW, we have something like 20x as many road miles per person in this province as the UK does, yet we pay significantly less in taxes on fuel, sales, and income. And no-one's trying to track us everywhere to raise more.

Yes it is! - it will make it either better or cheaper.

Better if you choose to pay, as you'll have nice empty roads to drive along, not cluttered up with the plebs who can't afford to pay, so you won't get held up by congestion.

Cheaper if you choose not to pay, and either travel by some cheaper means or not travel at all.

You choice! - what's not to like? OK, if you choose better it might be more expensive, or if you choose cheaper it might be worse, but you do have the choice.

LOL - yeah :p

I cant think of anything the Government has introduced in the last 20 years that has made my motoring any cheaper or better. If it is not introducing 'improvements' like the M4 bus lane or those damn cycle tracks all over London, it is the way they keep changing the Road Tax system where somehow I always end up paying more.

So road charging is going to make my life better? - pull the other one.

it doesn't really matter what gives the position data be it this or GPS or any of the other global positioning systems.

I think you just have to accept that at some point they will be charging by the mile/km. When that will happen I have no clue.

For myself I do use public transport if I can but on earlies nothing is running at the time I need to move. And same when I get home from lates unless I am willing to cut into my 12 hour rest period by up to an hour waiting for a bus. If I am more than 40 mins late that's it for the night. UK I suspect its even worse than where I am, at least here they have an airport bus service that the first bus arrives 1 hour before the first morning departure and leaves 40 mins after the last arrival at night.

I have zero clue about early morning London Public transport. Would it be possible to get to work without unreasonable additional time being stolen from your life?

They will at some point try and recover the whole cost of the system to the user other wise its pretty pointless because they will have spent more on it that they will get back in taxes.

In some ways they have leaped frogged by technology as well as there is now several ways of getting similar resolution using conventional GPS. DGPS gets down to 10cm and SBAS gives 1 meter horizontal and 1.5 meters vertical. So it will all come down to cost of the high res signal. Those that need it already have DGPS. They are portable by one person and don't take long to setup, most of the time is waiting for the error to resolve down. But for some waiting half a day until the error resolves down for 10 cm will make the cost worth it.

Every bicycle you see is a car you're not seeing (yes, even the children - if they weren't cycling they'd be blagging lifts off their parents). Which gets less in your way?

Much better would be a thing you could call a "congestion charge", where you are "charged" for taking part in "congestion" - you would pay not for the mile but for the time you spent stopped (or moving very slowly) in traffic. This would address your concern about people who have to drive to work early in the morning when there is no public transport, and wouldn't charge people for driving on empty roads not causing any problems.

It would have to be somewhat sophisticated, eg if you deemed three cars waiting at a red light to be "free flowing" normal operation, but four cars waiting at a red light to be "congestion", but hey, it all means more work for programmers :ok:

Actually, you could just buy the data off Google - charge people per second spent anywhere that is coloured red or worse on Google Maps.

I don't have a problem with charging for road usage at peak times to be honest.

It wouldn't need to be number of cars at a set of lights and it would also have economic implications for bank holiday weekends which would destroy income in some areas and possibly would cause huge bills through no fault of the driver.

Just use KISS, set times with green amber and red charging periods in set areas. Areas with no pollution issues no charge and no time restrictions.

This whole thread was joke right?

No.
Because people are forever complaining that public services are inadequate, and making them better costs money.

Nothing at all preventing you paying more tax if you so wish. HMRC will take a cheque.

And I did, for some years, pay more tax than I could have got away with, having chosen not to indulge in the full range of NI fiddles available to the self employed. And whilst a councillor I reduced the costs on the public purse by mostly not claiming the expenses to which I was entitled (to some extent, it must be admitted, because I couldn't be arsed with the paperwork, rather than solely because the council needed the money more than I did).

People are complaining about the public services because they feel (or at least I do) that they are paying too much for the services they receive. Before Obama had his way with the health insurance I lived in USA for a while and I was paying 99$ a month for health insurance. While I was there I had the misfortune to require medical assistance, I received a 5 star service and I was very impressed with the whole thing. Now move forward few years and I am paying for the national insurance in UK a lot more than that for a service that is average at best. Where is the value for money?

Every month the government takes about 1/3 of my pay cheque before it even reaches my account. Add the council tax, VAT on everything I purchase plus various other taxes and well over half my money goes to the government in taxes each month. How is that justifiable and why would people want to pay even more is beyond me.

National Insurance predates the NHS by a few decades, and isn't primarily to fund the NHS.

As for value for money, then, in terms of cost per head of population the NHS isn't bad. I posted this link a while ago when the subject of the relative cost of health care in various countries came up in another discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ure_per_capita

TL;DR : Doesn't look to me as if the NHS is really that bad, it seems to be around average, at the 17th most expensive health care system in that list, and less than half the cost of health care in the USA, and even slightly less costly than health care in France.

Currently a load of tax is generated at the fuel pumps and is a consumption tax.

With a move away from hydrocarbons (which is a good thing) that cash has to be recovered somehow. Fuel receipts were just under 28 billion last year in the UK.

How to do that with something you can plug into a domestic supply.

Only way really is another consumption tax with some form of logging.

The varying the rate between location and time of day is just pure social engineering. Trying to stop school runs and trying to spread traffic load out.

But that really that was just an excuse for this project. It could have been done with any global positioning system. Military users that required the accuracy really only France and UK and now the UK is gone.

Precision industrial users, I think the business projection are way way over the mark. In its conception in 2004 then yes it would have been ground breaking. These days DGPS is readily available, cheap and easy to use.

Ignoring the arguments about if the sats that are up there which were meant to be good for 20 years plus will have to be replaced inside 20% of the planned lifetime. The fixed running costs are estaimated at 750 million per year which I suspect along with all the other predictions on cost will more than likely end up in the region of 1 billion. So 5 euros for each car in Europe per year with UK gone.

So personally I am glad we are well away from it, it has a stink about it and political is overriding technical and business cases.

Should UK get a system of its own? Gut feeling no. Do I think if it does go for it that it will be cheaper and more useful for what UK wants, then yes.
Tech has come along way since 2004 more options and we can use the falconX to get stuff up instead of Araine which the EU is politically and contractually tied into using.

And the point about the security, apparently the security stuff does need license to be handed over to the project. It is black box tech there are multilayers some are changeable form the ground some are hard coded. I presume there is also back door keys for a final resort to reclaim the network. 2004 china was still involved and no talk about countries leaving the EU. With the current state of play of paper work it is highly unlikely legal terms were created for such an event. So its a complete minefield and while there is UK produced tech in the system they will never be confident it is secure.

NI is just another tax on income, it's not hypothecated.

The reason it still exists (it should have been amalgamated into income tax decades ago) is so that governments can promise not to increase "tax" and then when they put up NI they claim that because the tax called "national insurance" doesn't have the word "tax" in its name then they haven't put up "tax".

And there is also the hidden part of NI which is the Employers contribution which they can also tinker with which has no link to the company making a profit.

I thought the reason it had not been amalgamated into Income Tax is that we still have a basic welfare system that is based on contributions, so to do away with NI you would have to totally revamp the entire welfare system of the UK.

There's a fair amount to sort out, yes. There has been some progress - the alignment of some thresholds so that income tax and NI bands now start at the same place is a deliberate part of the process - but at the current rate it's going to take several more decades.

You're just plain wrong on this....the UK NHS offers much better value for money than the US system patient outcomes are broadly the same between the systems and the UK spends far less (about 10% of GDP on healthcare, the USA about 17%) Put that in cash terms what the NHS is really good at is providing cost-efficient care. It spends $3,405 per person per annum, less than half America's outlay of $8,508.
For reference in 2005, before the Obama reforms 45 Million Americans under 65 lacked basic health insurance.

Anyhow we are way off topic. Maybe we need a sat-nav to get back...

you mean like the USA GPS has been transmitting a secondary unencrypted frequency since 2014 and phase 3 satellites will all be on line by 2020?

This means everyone can get atmospheric adjusted position fix down to 10 cm using a dual channel hand receiver for free?

I love it when people tell me I am wrong about something that I personally experienced. Let me give you more details about the experience and then you can tell me how wrong I am again.

Before Obama had his way with the health insurance (I don't know if his system is better or worse, I left USA before he made the changes) I was paying 99$ a month for a comprehensive health insurance, excluding dental insurance. On a Friday afternoon I went to see a doctor because I was experiencing some pain. He was unable to make an accurate diagnosis and sent me to the emergency room. When I arrived at the emergency room and gave them the note from the doctor they gave me some liquid to drink and shortly after I had an MRI scan. Not long after they told me that I need to have a surgery. I asked when they can do it and they said now. Next thing I know I was on the surgery table. Within less than 24 hours I got there, I had a diagnosis, surgery and was discharged from the hospital with a follow up check a week later. The hospital was like a 5 star hotel, clean, private room and bathroom and the staff very friendly and helpful. I never got any bills or anything.

Last month in UK I paid 397£ and my employer payed 524£ for national insurance. The only time I tried to book an appointment with a GP I was given a date which was a week and a half later and thankfully that ends my dealings with the NHS. However someone close to me fell off their bike and was scheduled for an MRI three months later!

How is the patient outcome pretty much the same between the two system? If I ever need medical assistance I know which system I rather took care of me.

As for the last part of your reply, besides my family I do not owe anybody health care or a living. I know it sounds harsh but that is the way I see things.

You're wrong because you seem to think that National Insurance pays for the NHS - it doesn't, as has been pointed out in previous posts. NI was originally brought in to pay for social welfare, not health care, and now isn't dedicated to paying for anything, although it does still determine state pension entitlement.

The hard facts, using the latest (2016) data, are that health care in the USA costs $9,892 per head, health care in the UK costs $4,192 per head. In other words, the US health care system costs twice as much per head as the UK system, and the US is the most expensive health care system in the world. The UK is the 17th most expensive out of the 35 countries from which data is available.