GALILEO

InfoWorld has a brief article about a new Swiss chip that appears to provide increased sensitivity, as well as utilising sats from both the Navstar and the formative Galileo.

The u-blox 5 chip, which Switzerland's U-blox plans to unveil at the 3GSM World Congress event in Barcelona next month, uses two global navigation satellite services: GPS, which was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and Europe's Galileo, the vendor said Wednesday. The technology has a tracking sensitivity of -160 dBm, which enables indoor coverage. The abbreviation dBm represents the power ratio in decibels (dB) with respect to 1 milliwatt (mW).

The UK is going to make some more funding available for Galileo - around 31 million pounds! It sounds as though Galileo is being driven more and more by commercial interests though.

Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling said Galileo has real potential to develop "groundbreaking" technology leading to more accurate in-car navigation and new systems for the emergency services to locate missing or injured people.