This paper was first presented at a workshop arranged by the Netherlands Institute
of Navigation on 5 November 1999 at the Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands.
The development and introduction of GPS in the early Eighties has led to an exponential
growth in military and civilian applications. Worldwide, GPS is becoming a cornerstone in
applications of transport, (offshore) survey, (precision) agriculture, network timing, military
operations and many other applications. And yet, for a number of applications, GPS as sole-means or augmented – has some deficiencies, and its performance does not satisfy the user's
requirements. Some of these deficiencies will be discussed in this paper. A number of
maritime operations will be mentioned where (D)GPS as sole-means is considered by the
author as unsafe navigational practice. Development and implementation of integrated
navigation receivers using multiple navigation-signal sensors ((D)Galileo, (D)GPS, Eurofix,
DR) using receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) could solve the majority of the
deficiencies of these systems in their stand-alone state.