The value of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) to American society and surveyors of has rarely been more significant than now in the effort to thwart the corporate greed of LightSquared as it seeks FCC blessing to construct a lucrative communication network that jeopardizes the valuable GPS system.
Read this article and be ready to e-mail the FCC, write your representative and senators. If you are a surveyor, mapper, cartographer or interested one, learn about and join one of the ACSM member organizations like National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) today. Help save the GPS!
Eric Gakstatte wrote a great article for GPS World on May 17, 2011 titled “LightSquared: It’s Worse the You Think” that is worth your attention. (Read his article here.) He fears surveyors and others may be getting tired of hearing about LightSquared but should be alarmed. Why? The GPS receivers that would likely be affected the most aren’t military, automobile, aviation, mobile phones, etc. The GPS receivers that would be affected the most are the high-precision GPS receivers!
This means surveying, engineering, construction, bridge/dam/structure/seismic monitoring, GIS, precision agriculture, mining, utilities/telecom, transportation, environmental, disaster management, and all sorts of machine control across a vast number of industries. With 40,000 transmitters across the U.S. targeted at metropolitan areas with high-density population.OPUS, CORS RTK networks, WAAS, OmniSTAR, StarFire, individual high-precision base stations are, all of them, in jeopardy.
The high-precision GPS user will just be collateral damage. The military has national security. The aviation has safety-of-life. The auto navigation is high-profile. The high-precision user is the most technically difficult seems insignificant. In other words, the high-precision user will simply be told to “deal with it.”
Comments
3 responses to “LightSquared to GPS “Deal with it!””
GPS avionics also require high precision. Safety of life certification is a very difficult process. Anyone interested can examine the Lightsquared test progress reports for some understanding about how this equipment class is being tested.
When this equipment fails Lightsquared’s network buildout will grind to a halt until the problems are solved. They have already ‘tap danced’ around a delay.
Only intervention from the highest level of government can scrap the almost totally GPS dependent FAA NextGen airspace initiative.
Whatever occurs solving the air navigation problem will also benefit all classes of high precision GPS equipments.
— Charlie
Thank you for your comment, Charlie. You are correct, of course. Any mitigation of the practically certain interference by the proposed project will be beneficial.
The major point of the story in citing Air navigation was to indicate the vital importance of high visibility and sympathy when it comes to persuading officialdom.
I believe one of the most overlooked sources of problems is not those caused directly by the system itself. Spurious emissions by receivers using the system will almost certainly serve to jam the very sensitive high precision equipment, which must often be so sensitive in order to be so precise. Precisions of sub-metre or less will almost always be more than sufficient to protect safety of life in an aircraft while high precision GPS implies centimetre or even sub-centimetre precision.
By example we are all familiar with the speech by the flight attendants warning air passengers to turn off electronic devices. It is such devices whose innocent use can cause terrible results, not ONLY the direct interference by the primary system.
Thanks again, Charlie. Hope to see you back again often.
TonyC
Some good news!
Disruption of GPS positioning and navigation signals used for aviation and other applications within U.S. territory will be unavoidable if startup firm LightSquared is permitted to deploy a hybrid satellite-terrestrial broadband network as currently planned, a pair of technical reports released June 9 concluded.
Follow this link for more:
http://www.spacenews.com/satellite_telecom/110610-lightsquared-risk-gps.html
TonyC