WAAS Coverage

The ground station portion of the WAAS system does not have any stations outside of the US so there would be no atmospheric correction that would be specifically for that region.

You should be able to track the satellite signals, probably better than in the US, but you'd be outside the coverage area for the corrections.

wiki actually gives a decent overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation
From Wikipedia. WAAS is geosynchronous to North America with land based station in NA. EGNOS is for Europe. There are a few other systems either in place or being developed.
For details on how various SBAS are implemented, please see the following articles:

The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), operated by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), operated by the European Space Agency.
The Multi-functional Satellite Augmentation System (MSAS) system, operated by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB).
The Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), proposed by Japan.
The GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) system being operatlonalized by India.[2][3]
The GLONASS System for Differential Correction and Monitoring (SDCM), proposed by Russia.
The Satellite Navigation Augmentation System (SNAS), proposed by China.
The Wide Area GPS Enhancement (WAGE), operated by the United States Department of Defense for use by military and authorized receivers.
The commercial StarFire navigation system, operated by John Deere.
The commercial Starfix DGPS System and OmniSTAR system, operated by Fugro.

The national "Instituto Augustin Codazzi" is the country's mapping agency. Most countries in Latin America specifically go there for education in the advanced surveying and mapping sciences. They probably have implemented a RTN correction service that you can get access to.

WAAS Can Help You In Columbia

If you have an Ashtech receiver that has the BLADE technology. This algorithm allows the receiver to use the WAAS broadcast signal as an almost stationary GPS satellite by calculating an L1 ranging value from the WAAS satellite along with your normal L1 ranging values. I note that other manufacturers also can output L1 and C1 values from SBAS satellites but I do not know the name of their technology. In addition WASS will be outputting an L5 signal in the future.

Paul in PA

Thank you for your input. If I understand correctly from these posts and other research I have done, the WAAS satellites may be "seen" but cannot be used for corrections. The SBAS proposed for South and Central America is not online yet (SACCSA) so there is no available SBAS for that area. The only option for real time correction is to purchase an augmentation package from Ashtech, Trimble, or similar. Does that sound right? Thanks!

Somewhat true. There are some receivers that extrapolate the ionospheric model beyond what the FAA publishes so you can use WAAS in Columbia. Granted, it won't be as accurate as in North America, but better than nothing and cheaper than buying commercial SBAS.

I believe Ashtech and Geneq both do this. The risk of this method that the ionosphere behaves significantly different in your area as compared to the iono model generated by WAAS. The good news is that the solar activity has been relatively benign during the current cycle.

You're correct in that no free public SBAS is going to happen in South America in the forseeable future.

> Thank you for your input. If I understand correctly from these posts and other research I have done, the WAAS satellites may be "seen" but cannot be used for corrections. The SBAS proposed for South and Central America is not online yet (SACCSA) so there is no available SBAS for that area. The only option for real time correction is to purchase an augmentation package from Ashtech, Trimble, or similar. Does that sound right? Thanks!

Thank you for your reply Eric. This is very helpful.