GPSlug

That's certainly something that should be considered a bug that Garmin needs to address. It should timeout on a geo that doesn't yield any usable messages. Does it even start searching again if you block the antenna in that direction? I can't get my Legend to give up on 35 and 47, and I don't really want to do a factory reset to see what it does with 36.

I logged data off of 123 last night. It was broadcasting from about 4:40pm to 8:54am MST. And I see it's started again just a little bit ago. The data was nothing but message 42 filled with alternating 1's and 0's, essentially just junk. The WAAS almanac is only broadcast by the WAAS satellites. So if you haven't tracked one for a while, a GPSr might think it's saved one is too old and do the full search. It also will usually give up on the ones it knows about if they're blocked. If it can't find them after some period of time, it has to assume they're gone or will be continue to be blocked indefinitely. At that point it has to search for unknown satellites, possibly from a different system (like EGNOS) that it wouldn't know about from the WAAS almanac. That's assuming Garmin saves the WAAS almanac at all. Edit: Oops. Bob got in there while I was typing. So Garmin might be giving up on the known sats a little coservatively. Either way, it should be timing out on 123 when it doesn't get any usable data for a while. I'm going to hook up my Legend to see what it does.

Check the port settings on the Legend in Setup/System?

Oh, yeah! That's how they were going to do dual coverage. I do remember hearing at one point about moving the old Inmarsats as well, but that might have been before project delays. If the lease is up soon, they might not want to any more. Especially if they want to migrate to L5 for aviation.

The old ones will stay for now and be replaced eventually. The FAA wants dual satellite coverage for the entire service area so there's a backup if one goes down.

There was one launched in September and one in October. One of them is 123, but I don't know which. I could find out if you really care. They are two completely different satellites that have the WAAS payload on them, so they might have completely different test schedules.

"several months" Well, it is the FAA. They're going to make darn sure it's perfect before planes start using it. I think there is a chance it will be usable but operating in "test mode" somewhat earlier, which non-aviation GPSr's can use like they did before 2003.

The SV (satellite or space vehicle) number is not what you see on a GPS. It's the PRN which in this case for SV36 is 06 Navstar GPS Constellation Status I'm not sure what would be using PRN 36. It may be one of the new WAAS geos launched last year. Edit to add: Pseudo Random Noise (PRN) Code space vehicle Number (SVN) Note that your GPSr will never know what the SVN is. It's not in the broadcast and there's no reason it needs it.

The new WAAS geo with PRN 123 (36) has been broadcasting a test signal off and on since sometime last week. It's not in the the WAAS almanac (sent only by the WAAS satellites) yet, so your GPSr would only lock on if it happened to be searching 36 at the right time. I haven't confirmed whether or not it's sent any decodable data, but it's certainly not set healthy yet and so won't be used for anything by your GPSr even if it locks on for a while.

Was your offer good for your future caches too? Hey, everyone, there's a FTF up for grabs here!

Now if they could just ignore the ° symbols when I cut and paste coordinates into the waypoint properties.

Make sure you don't confuse commercial civilian users and consumer civilian users. Commercial civilian receivers have been using the second frequency (L2) for a long time. There are some tricks needed to track that military signal which makes the quality not as good. But it's been very useful in the commercial domain. It will be a few years before there are enough L2C (the new civilian signal) capable satellites are up to justify the added expense of the second frequency in consumer units.