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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jwk who wrote (2583)	9/18/1998 10:44:00 AM
From: Bill Ounce	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9818

re: GPS 1024 week overflow (funny comment on submitted article) Y2K Friends, I got a real laugh out of this one... A millennium bug-style date problem could disrupt satellites that support the US Global Positioning System (GPS), writes Steve Ranger. [...] The system, owned by the US Department of Defense, consists of 21 satellites, each continually broadcasting its changing position and time. The concern is that older receivers will not recognise the correct date and will calculate the positions of the satellites incorrectly. caught Steve's error? Receivers are passive. The older receivers may get confused in August 1999 because they were not designed to account for the week code being reset every 1024 weeks. There is no way that a receiver could "disrupt satellites". It's like saying that a poorly designed TV set in a home can disrupt the main T.V. transmitting station! Reality is that this whole alleged 1024 week window "GPS situation" is mostly hype. It has a fairly limited scope. Even if everyone owning the old receivers got lost and died, how would that affect the big-world picture? Certainly not economic collapse... Y2K century-end problems have a much bigger potential impact. There is even the (perhaps remote) potential for Y2K problems in the GPS ground control facilities to bring down the GPS network. :-)