The EPN (or EUREF Permanent Network) is a voluntary organization of several European agencies and universities that pool resources and permanent GNSS station data to generate precise GNSS products. The EPN has been created under the umbrella of the International Association Geodesy and more precisely by its sub-commission EUREF.
The EPN does not manufacture or sell any equipment. It also does not endorse equipment (although the EPN has functional requirements for the GNSS equipment at EPN stations specified in the Guidelines for EPN stations and Operational Centres).
GNSS stands for Global Navigation Satellite System. Currently operating GNSS's are the American GPS, the Russian GLONASS, the European Galileo, the Chinese BEIDOU, and Japanese QZSS.
This is provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory.
This is provided by the GLONASS centre.
This is provided by the European GNSS Service Centre.
An extensive number of papers related to the EPN is available from the EPN CB.
Each participating organization voluntarily brings its own funding according to its own mission.
These organizations tend to be public or government institutions or other research organizations.
Consequently, the EPN requires redundancy and multi-year commitments to ensure reliability.
To help EPN agencies justify funding requests, we request that users include a citation when using
EPN data or products in a publication. We suggest:
Bruyninx C., H. Habrich, W. Sõhne, A. Kenyeres, G. Stangl, C. Võlksen, 2012, Enhancement of the EUREF Permanent Network Services and Products, "Geodesy for Planet Earth", IAG Symposia Series, Vol 136, pp. 27-35, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-20338-1_4
The International GNSS Service (IGS)
is a voluntary federation of worldwide agencies that pool
resources and permanent GNSS station data to generate precise GNSS products.
In general, you can think of the IGS as the highest-precision international civilian GNSS community (source: IGS CB).
The EPN is a dense regional network GNSS network that operates following IGS standards. In addition, the IGS considers
the EPN as a related network and IGS works closely with the agencies operating the EPN.
Typically, the IGS designates a subset of the regional EPN stations as IGS stations. The choice of which stations should
also be IGS stations is motivated by their benefit to the IGS
products,
according to location and instrumentation.
Next to this, the EPN uses IGS products (such as the
IGS precise satellite orbits
for the generation of the EPN products).