To Peter Mundy, my apologies you are quite right of course. Our posts must have crossed.
I’ve been out today… I normally do let some level of off topic and political stuff to stay in place. Galileo is a tricky topic because it seems to be a wholly political thing, with no technical merit that I can see. I asked some questions on potential technical topics but nobody seems to have answers, other than politics.
It is possible that somebody out there thinks that the US might use GPS as a bargaining card in trade “talks”, and with Brussels potentially shafting the UK from the other end, the UK cannot be caught without a positioning system. It just seems incredibly unlikely. Trump has nowhere near the power. But the UK proposal for its own GPS is also a good “this threat won’t harm us” negotiating position with Mr Barnier who was the first to come up with the “Galileo threat”.
I wrote this before: when Galileo was started, the accuracy was to be a lot better than Navstar. That was based on the presumption that the USA will never upgrade, which was dumb, and proved to be wrong. The two are pretty much identical.
Technically EGNOS cannot be denied to the UK. There is no encryption. Also that would screw anyone based in the EU flying into the UK, which would be dumb. Then you get dual frequency GPS which will make WAAS/EGNOS redundant in the long term.
There are two “justifications” for projects like this: political vanity and cronyism on one side, and long term strategic considerations.
Part of truly long term thinking is to not assume very much will remain the same, and hence some capability which can, for the time being, easily and more effectively obtained from other countries might not be available inf the future. Or something which is manifestly unnecessary today may be necessary again two or three decades down the line.
From that point of view, the creation of Airbus, the Ariane rocketry, Galileo, the UK Trident nuclear arms are all part of the philosophy that one day the US might not be an ally, that the peace we have enjoyed in the last few decades might not last, and hence we need to keep capabilities alive which make no economic sense.
It is difficult to say what percentage of Galileo is which of the two, and whether the poloticians believed the economic nonsense like pricing they spouted, it is likely to be both.
Peter wrote:
There was a proposal in the earlier days of Galileo to make the encrypted Galileo signal mandatory for instrument approaches, and sell the decryption keys.
That is indeed a rather hair-brain idea. I wonder what the originator was smoking. Sell them to whom? For the idea to work on instrument approaches, the keys would need to be implemented in the on-board GPS units …. read: Garmin, etc. Or was the idea thought to be a way to create a European GPS avionics company with a monopoly and exclude the US suppliers? That would certainly do a good job of excluding non-EU aircraft from Europe, eh? Ha!
The white elephant called Galileo is having a "little problem*. Actually it seems to have totally collapsed.
From here
Update on the availability of some Galileo Initial Services
Galileo, the EU’s satellite navigation system, is currently affected by a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure. The incident has led to a temporary interruption of the Galileo initial navigation and timing services, with the exception of the Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR) service. The SAR service – used for locating and helping people in distress situations for example at sea or mountains – is unaffected and remains operational.
Galileo provides ‘initial services’ since December 2016. During this initial “pilot” phase preceding the ‘full operational services’ phase, Galileo signals are used in combination with other satellite navigation systems, which allows for the detection of technical issues before the system becomes fully operational.
Experts are working to restore the situation as soon as possible. An Anomaly Review Board has been immediately set up to analyse the exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.
It’s a good job that the use of EGNOS (LPV approaches etc) is not tied to Galileo as was originally planned.
Apparently it is down since July 11 
Peter wrote:
can be shut down and just about nobody notices.
That may be because Galileo is still in test…
Airborne_Again wrote:
That may be because Galileo is still in test…
Or the very principle of getting a “multi-constellation” fix, where you use the satellites you have in view, without regard to whether they are GPS, Beidou, Glonass or Galileo? As long as you get enough satellites, one or several constellations can be down, you don’t notice unless you look closely. E.g. right now, my pocket computer gets good signal from six Glonass satellites. If GPS were to go down, I would still get a fix. Unless I went into my GNSS statistics app, I wouldn’t know that GPS was down. If I were to step into a plane, I would notice, since our GNSS navigators use only GPS.
