You may not have noticed it, but last Friday we experienced the first serious geomagnetic storm in this solar cycle (Solar Cycle 24), which began in 2009. Not all types of solar activity (sun spots, solar flares, solar burst, and solar radiation) affect GPS receiver operations. Geomagnetic storms are the ones that can cause problems for GPS receivers if those storms are powerful enough.
Maybe we got played. But we put up a good fight. We really had no option to do anything but fight. So we did, and we’re still fighting the LightSquared attack on the GPS signal. It’s not over yet, not by a long shot. Suspicions now creep in that the attack may have been a feint, that the company never really intended to do what it threatened: broadcast a very powerful signal from ground towers, on a frequency immediately adjacent to the GPS signal. LightSquared had its eye on another prize instead.
Once again, developments in the news outpaced print technology’s ability to keep up in the LightSquared saga. Shortly after the July issue went to press on June 27, the TWG final report appeared on June 30. Thus you readers, who received the magazine circa July 15, held old news in your hands. Likely this will occur again.
Thousands of man hours and millions of dollars later, we finally have the 975-page GPS Technical Working Group (TWG) report, confirming what five minutes of back-of-the-envelope calculation predicted. Hooray for our side, good job GPS Industry Council; we’ve won the war and the foe is vanquished, never to brighten our skies again. Well, maybe. LightSquared is now bypassing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and submitting technical papers directly to the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Working Party that handles mobile satellite services (MSS) and radio determination satellite service (RDSS spectrum) and orbits (ITU-R WP 4C).
Okay, folks, this is where the rubber meets the road. The FCC LightSquared public comment period ends this Saturday. If you use GPS, it would be very wise to submit your comments today. Don’t expect the FCC to make a rational decision. LightSquared has an amazing amount of political influence, and you can see that in the support they receive from state legislators, mayors, chiefs of police, etc. In this article, I’ll show you how to submit your comments to the FCC in just five minutes. I’ll also show comments I’m submitting to the FCC.
The head of the European Commission’s Enterprise and Industry agency has expressed strong official concern about the Lightsquared terrestrial signal. Analysis in Europe shows that transmissions from LightSquared base-stations have considerable potential to cause harmful interference to Galileo receivers.
To solve the LightSquared versus GPS controversy, Javad Ashjaee, president and CEO of JAVAD GNSS, has appealed directly to President Obama to discontinue the encryption of P-code, the restricted military GPS signal. His comments came in the context of the LightSquared/GPS interference imbroglio, as part of his solution to the conflict over spectrum. “This policy is not helping national security. It is hurting both precision users and the broadband project. We need more broadband, for global, fast, and inexpensive real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS.”
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