THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The European Union is upgrading a ground control center for its GPS satellite constellation as concerns over jamming of the vital signals by Russia run high.
Europe operates its own constellation of global positioning satellites called Galileo. Made up of 27 operational satellites in medium-earth orbit, the system provides positioning accuracy down to 20 centimeters horizontally and proudly boasts of being “the world’s most precise GNSS program.”
The Galileo system provides additional redundancy and independence from American GPS and Russian GLONASS satellites while being the only Global Navigation Satellite System, or GNSS, under civilian — rather than military — control.
For the system’s newest upgrade, the Spanish company GMV has been tapped to enhance the satellite constellation’s Galileo Reference Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands, in a contract worth up to €27.5 million, or $30 million USD.
Acting as one of the cornerstones of the service, this facility keeps track of the quality of signals while also functioning as the European Monitoring and Analysis Centre in a joint UN project that includes other global navigation systems like GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou.
The upgrades will allow the Dutch facility to monitor vital parameters in real time. This will strengthen the center’s ability to succeed in one of its core tasks, investigating service degradations.
“With the current version, the monitoring function is done in post-processing,” GMV told Defense News in an email. This means a delay in detecting service issues. The upgrade will reduce the time needed to issue such warnings to Galileo users once problems are detected.
The tech facelift also comes with the implementation of a signal authentication service, emergency warning satellite service for public disaster alerts and enhanced search and rescue capabilities, along with strengthened cybersecurity, GMV’s press release said.
All the upgrades, collectively referred to as “V2,” should be ready by 2026 while not disrupting the Galileo Reference Centre’s operation in the meantime.
GPS signal jamming has become a significant concern in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Especially along the frontline and in the Baltic, interruption of signals is causing inaccurate position readings, which pose problems and safety risks to civilian flights and military applications alike.
Multiple countries, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and parts of Germany, have experienced GPS disruptions which are often traced back to Russian transmitters.
In one of the worst episodes of satellite navigation interference ever, a 63-hour-long attack on GPS signals occurred in March 2024, affecting more than 1,600 passenger planes.
Spoofing, too, has become more widespread. As opposed to jamming, where the weak satellite-based signals are overpowered by noise from ground-based transmitters, spoofing imitates the legitimate data stream to mislead the receiver into thinking it’s somewhere where it, in fact, isn’t.
The signal authentication service that comes as part of the Galileo Reference Centre upgrade package addresses this issue by helping users distinguish between legitimate and spoofed signals.
Aside from the new work announced in the Netherlands, a global upgrade of Galileo’s entire ground segment is currently underway, with key sites in Belgium, the Indian Ocean and Norway already having been upgraded and 11 more sites slated for 2025. Alongside the ground element, GMV has also been awarded a six-year framework contract worth €35 million ($38.2 million) to upgrade the European GNSS Service Centre infrastructure.
The space component is receiving upgrades, too, with two satellites launching in September 2024 and six more to follow this and next year. The new arrivals promise to strengthen the robustness and increase the performance of the constellation.
A wholly new second generation of Galileo satellites is also proceeding through the pipeline, with the system moving from the design to the validation phase.
Linus Höller is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He covers international security and military developments across the continent. Linus holds a degree in journalism, political science and international studies, and is currently pursuing a master’s in nonproliferation and terrorism studies.
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