Receiver Testing Facility

The tour began at ESA’s Receiver Testing Facility – historic location of the world’s very first Galileo positioning fix back in 2012 – equipped with a multitude of specialised satnav receivers for not only Galileo satellites but also the US GPS, Russian Glonass, Chinese Beidou, India’s NAVIC and Japanese QZSS systems, together with augmentation systems such as Europe’s own European Geostationary Navigation Service, EGNOS. The signals from all these systems can also be recorded to very high fidelity for subsequent investigation or reuse.

Lab simulation systems can recreate all these outputs in combination to test receiver systems across a huge range of scenarios, such as amid interference induced by a solar storm, or to see how receivers cope while flying, or even in orbit. Smartphone receivers can be assessed with simulated augmentation from cellular network stations, wifi mapping or inertial navigation, while simulating their user’s continuous motion. The flexibility the facility’s simulators offer also allows early testing of enhancements planned for next decade’s ‘Galileo Second Generation’ satellites.