Official Opening of the German Galileo Test and Development Environment GATE

On April 2, German Federal Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Development Peter Ramsauer will officially open the German Galileo test and development infrastructure GATE with the operator IFEN GmbH. The official opening will be carried out in the presence of the operator of GATE, IFEN GmbH, and guests.

GATE has now completed its signal upgrade phase, according to the latest version of the ESA Galileo Signal-In-Space (SIS) Interface Control Document (ICD) and the European GNSS Agency (GSA) Public Galileo Open Service (OS) ICD after successful final acceptance by the German Space Agency of the DLR at the end of November 2010.

The GATE test infrastructure is now capable of transmitting the Galileo OS, the Galileo Safety-of-Life (SoL) Service (functional), the Galileo Commercial Service (CS), and a Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS) dummy signal.

The GATE system upgrade has been further extended to also support user integrity testing. GATE is now capable of simulating simple feared events on system/satellite level, so that the GATE system will support GPS and GATE/Galileo dual constellation RAIM, individual user integrity test scenarios as well as test of receivers with different RAIM functionalities.

The next step will be the aspired certification of the GATE test infrastructure as an officially accredited open-air test infra- structure to perform the necessary tests needed for the certification process to certify Galileo SoL equipment.