ESA challenged its young graduate and national trainees to develop a smartphone app to perform satnav fixes using only Galileo satellites. Three teams developed apps in their spare time, presenting their results to a jury of experts from ESA, the GSA (European GNSS Agency) and Google.

The winning ‘Galfins Team’ put together the ‘GNSS Compare’ app that promises to turn a smartphone into a ‘research lab in your pocket’, to help researchers develop, test and compare new algorithms for position determination. This allows, for example, the comparison of position estimation quality when using different satnav constellations.

The teams received one Galileo-enabled smartphone each for testing. ESA’s Radio Navigation section supported the teams by supplying dedicated software modules, including ESA’s satellite measurement corrections and an online satellite data service developed with the support of Google.