Written by Mr. Rick Hamilton, GPS Information Analysis Team Lead, Navigation Center

Recently, the commanding officer and a navigation specialist from the Coast Guard Navigation Center completed a reciprocal visit to the newly built European Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service Center (GSC) in Madrid, Spain en route to a Department of State led U.S./European Union Bilateral GNSS working group meeting. The EU is building Galileo, a Global Navigation Satellite System similar to the U.S. GPS, and their GSC has looked at NAVCEN as a model service center for civil GNSS. The bilateral talks are allowing and encouraging full cooperation between the two service centers and NAVCEN is sharing its 30 years of experience in representing civil users in the U.S. GPS program.

The two service centers discussed their roles and respective responsibilities to support civil users of GPS and Galileo, along with how they can continue to improve the sharing of relevant navigation information. The European GSC shared the results of their first Galileo User Assembly, which is modeled after the U.S. Civil GPS Service Interface Committee, managed by NAVCEN in coordination with U.S. Department of Transportation.

As cooperation increases between the GPS and Galileo services, transparency between the civil parts of these programs is paramount for adequately developing standardization to benefit the world’s users of GNSS signals. Sharing methods and ideas for messaging and public notifications for events related to the satellite constellations is helping Europe’s GSC establish themselves as the GNSS service center for the European continent. Conversely, NAVCEN is gaining the benefit of new ideas in public representation to improve services for the world’s ever-changing civil GPS user community.

This blog is not a replacement or substitute for the formal posting of regulations and updates or existing processes for receiving formal feedback of the same. Links provided on this blog will direct the reader to official source documents, such as the Federal Register, Homeport and the Code of Federal Regulations. These documents remain the official source for regulatory information published by the Coast Guard.