Final design for common signal

The United States and the European Union have announced plans to jointly adopt and provide an improved design for their Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals.

These signals will be implemented on the Galileo Open Service and the GPS IIIA new civil signal.

Building on the cooperative agreement on GPS and Galileo signed between the two parties in June 2004, a joint working group overcame technical challenges to design interoperable civil signals that will also protect common security interests.

The resulting GPS L1C signal and Galileo L1F signal have been optimised to use a multiplexed binary offset carrier (MBOC) waveform. Future receivers using the MBOC signal should be able to track the GPS and/or Galileo signals with higher accuracy in challenging environments that include multipath, noise and interference.

The agreement to jointly use MBOC on these interoperable civil signals demonstrates US and EU cooperation to ensure GPS and Galileo are compatible and interoperable at the user level.

Future users will enjoy the benefits of multiple GNSS constellations providing greater signal availability and coverage around the world.