Galileo’s initial services rocky patch continues

The Galileo signal outage, ongoing since Thursday, July 11, has been attributed to a problem with the system’s ground infrastructure, according to an announcement by the European GNSS Agency (GSA). “Experts are working to restore the situation as soon as possible,” states the GSA. “An Anomaly Review Board has been immediately set up to analyze the exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.”

No update has appeared at this time as to when service will resume.

[Photo: Galileo’s Ground Mission Segment in the Fucino Control Centre in Italy oversees Galileo navigation services and satellite payload operations. Photo: Telespazio.]

The announcement points out that Galileo is currently in its initial services phase, wherein its signals are available for use in combination with other GNSS and do not provide a complete solution in and of themselves. This status is expressly designed to allow for “the detection of technical issues before the system becomes fully operational,” according to the GSA.

Indeed, experiments undertaken with Galileo-capable smartphones found that these devices excluded Galileo participation in their position solution. This is likely true of commercial receivers as well, which employ sophisticated signal checks as well as following system notice advisories, which have been issued in this case.

“For each constellation, there is a defined maximum age of ephemeris that is considered valid,” explained Sandy Kennedy, vice president, innovation at NovAtel. “Once an ephemeris is too old, our receiver will deem it invalid.  Measurements made to satellites without a valid ephemeris are not allowed to contribute to the PVT solution. We noticed the missing Galileo ephemeris within 3 hours of the broadcast stopping.  It wasn’t the NAGU that alerted us to the problem.”

The company posted a bulletin to its website on Friday afternoon, July 12, stating: “During this time [without ephemeris], NovAtel receivers will continue to track Galileo signals, but without a valid ephemeris, the signals are not included in the position solution. . . . Once the Galileo service returns to normal and transmits ephemeris information, NovAtel receivers will revert to normal operation.”

The experiments mentioned above were conducted by the Navigation Signal Analysis and Simulation (NavSAS) Group at Fondazione LINKS  (formerly the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella) and the Politecnico di Torino. In their account they state that, using a software receiver that tracked the Galileo signals in space (SISs), “the position solution computed using both the GPS and Galileo constellation is affected by errors on the order of 500 meters or even more.”

In a detailed technical analysis, the NavSAS Group found three other curious and unexpected aspects of the situation, all explored and illustrated at the Group’s posting.