The EU’s European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) is one of its earliest space components.
EGNOS significantly improves the accuracy of satellite navigation services in Europe and warns users when any signal is disrupted or having technical issues. It’s used regularly in aviation, construction, agriculture, mapping, and more. Today, more than 98% of European tractors are equipped with EGNOS receivers!
EGNOS services also play a crucial role when human safety is at risk and in areas with degraded signal performance, especially in the air or at sea. It has become an important aid to pilots and ship crews attempting to land or dock safely, particularly under challenging weather conditions or at airports not equipped with fixed Instrument landing equipment. Today, EGNOS-based landing procedures are in place in close to 600 airports in Europe and serve about 1 000 runways.
EGNOS is also widely used to serve landing pads for helicopters at places like hospitals.
EGNOS is a system of transponders installed on three geostationary satellites, combined with a ground network of 38 ranging and integrity monitoring stations, six uplink stations, and four mission control centres (one active, one back-up, and two for redundancy).
The ground stations receive the signals from the GPS navigation system and calculate differential corrections and integrity messages. These messages are broadcast back to users across Europe via the geostationary satellites. As a result, users gain:
- improved positioning information
- highly accurate time synchronisation
- reliable information on the integrity of the positioning information
EGNOS services
EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS) provides ground-based access to EGNOS data through the Internet in near real-time. With a controlled access system, EDAS allows users to connect to a variety of services which provide raw GPS, GLONASS, and EGNOS data, plus EGNOS augmentation messages.
EGNOS Open Service (OS) provides free and accessible use of EGNOS services to any user equipped with a GPS/SBAS-compatible receiver.
The EGNOS Safety of Life (SoL) assisted service for Maritime Users (ESMAS) is the first Satellite-based Augmentation System (SBAS) service tailored to maritime users.
The EGNOS Safety of Life (SoL) Service improves the accuracy and reliability of GPS, and soon, Galileo, and provides timely alerts when navigation performance degrades.