GPS Scaremongering

[Jester1970]

Anyone seen the article in TGO magazine regarding GPS? According to the magazine article, the GPS satellites are coming to the end off their life and their replacements are behind schedule, with the magazine foreseeing a danger to GPS reliant hillwalkers.

You can read the magazine for free here: http://tesco.goreadgreen.com/

 

Any thoughts by those more in the know than myself (mine are on the TGO Forum).

[+The Forester]

Bolleaux!

 

Do you want a more technical explanation?

[+currykev]

Tesco can't even deliver a simple grocery order correctly.

Enough said!

[FourQ]

They can't smile either, and their staff knock your motorbike over!

I certainly don't trust them with my e-mail address.

[FourQ]

Damned refresh - double posted. Where's the delete on this forum?

Edited October 11, 2009 by FourQ

[+webscouter.]

Anyone seen the article in TGO magazine regarding GPS? According to the magazine article, the GPS satellites are coming to the end off their life and their replacements are behind schedule, with the magazine foreseeing a danger to GPS reliant hillwalkers.

You can read the magazine for free here: http://tesco.goreadgreen.com/

 

Any thoughts by those more in the know than myself (mine are on the TGO Forum).

 

Been discussed many times. The person in charge of the system has stated that this is not an issue. Since the system is used by the US military there is no way they are going to let it fail.

 

The fearmongers are assuming that when a satellite reaches the end of its' planned life it will fail. This has not been the case and the satellites are running well past their lifetime expectancy.

[+The Forester]

The vast majority of members of the US armed forces haven't got a clue how to navigate even when shown how to use a map and compass. Without GPS they are, quite literally, lost.

 

In the 1990 Desert Shield operation in Northern Saudi Arabia troops were getting lost all over the place and all of the time. Quite a few truck drivers actually drove into Iraq by mistake and had their loads confiscated. One bimbette managed to do that despite the roadway being clearly marked every hundred yards.

 

The DoD scoured the US, sequestering every civvie GPSr they could find and sent the units out to the Gulf to help the buffoons in uniform try to find their way around. Problem was that Selective Availability had just been switched on and the civvie units were showing positions which were typically out by 50 metres or so and occasionally out by up to a hundred metres.

 

US troops don't walk, they drive. They had collossal numbers of vehicles of all sizes and they started to use GPS to follow roads. Inevitably some of them started to believe what the GPS was telling them and they actually drove off the road to follow the GPS indications. Once they realised that they were no longer on the roadway they stopped believing the GPS and they tried to re-find the road randomly. Chaos ensued.

 

A message was sent back to the Pentagoons imploring them to switch off SA. They did so and the US forces were able to "navigate" again. SA wasn't switched on again until after the oilfields had been captured and the Kuwaiti dictatorship restored.

 

Things have got a lot worse for the US military since then. They are now totally hooked on having a couple of metres accuracy GPS 24/7. They simply cannot function without it. Very very few of them can navigate properly at all. Even their special forces are surprisingly poor at advanced land navigation and they flail around like stranded whales without GPS.

 

There is exactly ZERO prospect that the DoD will ever let NavStar GPS deteriorate to a level below full functionality, with on-orbit spares as backup, 24/365.