EGNOS initial operations user support now available

EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, is Europe’s first step in satellite navigation, paving the way for Galileo.
 
The EGNOS operations user support website (accessible from ‘Related links’ at the right of this page) is operated by the EGNOS mission operations support facility located in Torrejon, Spain.
 
The website provides information regarding the Signal-in-Space broadcasting plans, which is updated on a weekly basis, and details of outages and expected recovery times – including a notification service for registered users. EGNOS navigation performance data, Signal-in-Space format issues and EGNOS configuration information are also available. Answers to general questions are online along with an EGNOS operations helpdesk service.
 
The operations helpdesk will also answer EGNOS users’ requests concerning system operations. Questions can be submitted to the helpdesk via the operations user web site or directly by e-mail to egnos-operations-support@essp.be.

Access to EGNOS system operation information will be beneficial for both satellite navigation professionals and private users, improving the visibility of the signal broadcast schedule, supporting the planning of trials and test activities and reporting the latest system performance data. For more than six months the EGNOS Signal-in-Space has been stabilised with an average availability above 95% and, for example in March 2007, the availability was well above 99%.
 
This important step in facilitating the use of EGNOS is being undertaken in the frame of the Initial Operations Phase which ESA has contracted to the European Satellite Service Provider (ESSP), a company jointly owned by the major European civil aviation agencies: AENA (Spain), DFS (Germany), DSNA (France), ENAV (Italy), NATS (United Kingdom), NAV (Portugal) and Skyguide (Switzerland).
 
EGNOS is a joint programme of ESA, the European Commission and Eurocontrol. It is made up of a network of more than forty elements all over Europe that collect, record, correct and improve data from the US Global Positioning System (GPS). The modified signals are then relayed via geostationary satellites to user's terminals, offering a positional accuracy of better than two metres, compared with 15 to 20 metres for GPS alone. In addition, EGNOS gives a guarantee of quality for these signals that GPS, a military system, does not provide.