EGNOS services tender issued by GSA

The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has published a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union inviting operators to bid for the provision of EGNOS services over the 2014-2021 period. The contract involves operating, maintaining and upgrading the EGNOS system infrastructure, and ensuring the continuous and safe provision of the three services offered by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).

EGNOS improves the accuracy of GPS over Europe, bringing great enhancements to certain safety and traffic management applications. Citizens can profit from better personal GPS navigation provided that they use an EGNOS-enabled receiver (as most of the recent models do).

The EGNOS system works using 34 ranging and integrity monitoring stations (RIMS) that receive signals from the US GPS satellites. Four mission control centers handle data processing and differential corrections counting and six navigation land earth stations manage accuracy and reliability data for sending to the three geostationary satellite transponders for relay to end-user devices.

The new EGNOS service provision contract is planned to be awarded in 2013 and is aimed at guaranteeing the provision of EGNOS services for eight years starting on January 1, 2014, without service interruption. The future EGNOS operator will become certified for provision of the EGNOS services according to the Single European Sky (SES) regulation. The requests to participate shall be transmitted to the GSA by July 16 and the deadline for submission of initial tenders is expected to be in November 2012.

The GSA is carrying out this procurement on behalf of the European Commission and is expected to become responsible for the management of EGNOS from 2014.

The EU Official journal notice can be accessed here 

All the documentation related to this call for tender can be found on the GSA procurement link here

21 June 2012