If you are involved in any way with products or services that utilise satellite positioning, navigation or timing, then you will have heard about Galileo, and I’m not talking about the Italian astronomer namesake! However, if you are confused about what Galileo is, why it’s important and how you can get yourself Galileo ready, then you have come to the right place!

Galileo is the European Union’s (EU) global navigation satellite system (GNSS). In December 2016 Galileo officially moved from testing phase to the declaration of Initial Services and is expected to reach Full Operational Capacity (FOC) by the end of 2020.

The latest LabSat 3 Wideband firmware is now available and provides more options for creating and copying LabSat recordings. With a greater choice of data transfer and storage solutions, LabSat is now equipped to manage the increased demand for longer and continuous testing requirements, and time saving efficiencies within test programmes.

The main features of this firmware include support for Samsung Evo 860 4TB SSD’s, Samsung 7.68TB SSD’s and Synology NAS connectivity.

In addition, to further improve data transfer speeds we are including a free licence for Paragon Software Linux File System for Windows, together with a USB3 to SATA cable.

The latest update to our SatGen GNSS simulation software for PC now incorporates Galileo RF simulation.

Designed to create a GNSS RF I&Q or IF data file based on a user-generated trajectory file, the updated software can now accurately simulate the European Galileo GNSS satellite constellation alongside existing GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou RF signal generation.

Following the recent week-long outage of Europe's GNSS constellation, Galileo, LabSat are able to offer three one hour long files recorded during the period for test purposes.

The event on July 11 at 01.00 hrs UTC, a result of a 'technical incident' within the ground-based infrastructure caused a temporary interruption to the globally available Galileo navigation and timing service with the exception of Galileo's SAR (Search & Rescue) offering.