[time-nuts] Galileo satellites to have passive hydrogen masers!

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Galileo satellites to have passive hydrogen masers!
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 03:54:28 +0000
Message-ID: <1179.1179633268 at critter.freebsd.dk>

Jason and Poul-Henning,

> In message <000001c79a91$a9d7b510$1c02a8c0 at Inspiron>, "Jason Rabel" writes:
> 
> >It's about a week old, but still interesting if you didn't come across the
> >article yet (like me)...
> >
> >The Galileo satellites will have a pair of passive hydrogen masers and a
> >pair of rubidium clocks in them...

This has been known for a while. Check the PTTI archives.

> >Ooo la la... ;)
> >
> >http://www.gpsdaily.com/reports/Hyper_Accurate_Clocks___The_Beating_Heart_Of
> >_Galileo_999.html
> 
> ... provided somebody wants to foot the bill for Galileo in the first
> place.  The "the users will be queueing up to pay for half of the
> cost through fees" model has just collapsed, and the EU will now
> have to decide if they want to sink tax money into this particular
> white whale.

This particular part of the Galileo project have been a paper castle. They have
not considered the fall of prices for GPS recievers and if their license is
say 1 EUR that would all of a sudden be an expensive component. 1 EUR will be
multilied by alot of factors before it hits the customer. That includes the
manufactuer and retailers add-ons for "added value". We have already seen that
for EGNOS/WAAS for instance.

I think they must scrap the whole license thing and release it for free, since
otherwise the license will be a threshold. They just didn't adapt the buissness
model that was there and the only thing they did was fool themselfs. They
didn't loose anything, they never had it in the first place.

Cheers,
Magnus