In a recent article published by Geospatial World, the European GNSS Agency (GSA) discusses how the EGNOS Open Service and the EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS) help provide users with improved location performance.

Location plays an important role in many of our day-to-day activities. This figure shows the typical accuracy one can achieve with EGNOS.“Every day we need to locate various points, such as places, businesses, customers and resources,” says GSA Market Development Officer and article author Reinhard Blasi. “Maps are the means we use to place these points into a geographic context, and to create maps, these points need to be positioned.”

In Europe, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) helps locate these points with sub-meter accuracy in an easy, affordable and flexible way and in real time. It can also boost the data capture, which is usually the most time-consuming process in the development of a mapping or GIS application.

EGNOS was designed to improve GPS performance in Europe. “The EGNOS Open Service provides this improved performance to users of general-purpose applications,” says Blasi. “It is freely accessible through a GPS/SBAS compatible receiver within the area of coverage, and no specific authorisation is required.”

The EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS), on the other hand, is EGNOS’ internet-based service. It provides free-of-charge access to all the data generated and collected by the EGNOS infrastructure. EDAS gathers all the raw data coming from the GPS, GLONASS and EGNOS GEO satellites collected by all the receivers located at the EGNOS stations, which are mainly distributed over Europe and North Africa. Once the data is received, EDAS disseminates it over the internet in real time and through an FTP archive, resulting in the different services, depending on the protocol and format used and the type of information available to users.

“With EDAS, users equipped with compatible software applications and/or GNSS receivers and having access to the internet can obtain improved accuracy with respect to GPS standalone by implementing advanced positioning techniques,” says Blasi in the article.

This is an excerpt from the 1 September 2017 article entitled European SBAS: EGNOS offers free sub-metre accuracy in Europe published by Geospatial World. You can read the full article here.
 

Media note: This feature can be republished without charge provided the European GNSS Agency (GSA) is acknowledged as the source at the top or the bottom of the story. You must request permission before you use any of the photographs on the site. If you republish, we would be grateful if you could link back to the GSA website (http://www.gsa.europa.eu).