G-RESCUE - Galileo-Enhanced Emergency Beacons for Next-Generation Search and Rescue

G-RESCUE's GNSS Core is a dual-frequency, multi-constellation receiver with native Galileo support, OSNMA-capable and designed with a clear evolution path toward Galileo HAS. Its central innovation is the exploitation of the Galileo Return Link Service (Type 3 RLS) to deliver, for the first time in mass-market 406 MHz beacons, subscription-free two-way communication — acknowledgment of distress signals, instructional feedback and status queries — directly between the beacon and rescue coordination centres. Combined with authenticated command reception for Remote Beacon Activation, this brings Galileo's positioning, integrity and secure messaging capabilities into everyday, safety-critical emergency alerting.

G-RESCUE will deliver a certifiable, interoperable family of next-generation Cospas-Sarsat beacons — ELT-S for aviation, EPIRB for maritime and PLB for land and civil-protection use — developed by EPM Electronics with Next, Geniel and Blue Lab. All three share a common modular hardware/software platform enhanced with Two-way Communication and, primarily for ELT-S, Remote Beacon Activation, plus Bluetooth-based smartphone diagnostics and a rugged, glove-compatible user interface. Validated up to TRL 6–7 through laboratory and real-world SAR scenario testing, the beacon family is designed for a short-to-mid-term route to CE marking and industrial-scale production, targeting aviation operators, maritime users and civil-protection/field professionals across Europe.

Challenge & technical solution

Current 406 MHz beacons offer no return channel and no remote-trigger capability, leaving rescue authorities blind to the status of a distress event and unable to act when the user is unresponsive. G-RESCUE addresses this by integrating the Galileo Return Link Service into the beacon architecture for secure, low-latency two-way messaging, combined with a Remote Beacon Activation module protected by command authentication and fail-safe logic.

Both functions run on a common platform with a dual-frequency, OSNMA-ready GNSS engine and a Bluetooth-connected, glove-compatible user interface, adaptable across aviation, maritime and land domains while meeting each sector's certification standards.