ZNF insider “MethodicJon” caught Engadget’s coverage of potential GPS interruption and suggested we run a public service announcement. And so we are. From the FAA advisory to pilots:
The Department of Defense will conduct GPS tests on January 20th through February22nd, 2011. During testing, the GPS signal may be unreliable or unavailable.
As you can see from the image above, the potential footprint of GPS service disruption looks quite large. So I rang up the US Coast Guard Navigation Center to better understand how this testing might impact us here on the ground. If I understand correctly, which is not a given, testing could very well effect our GPS receivers or equipment. However, at altitudes in this region, the radius of impact is a much more modest 150 miles.
Testing during the month will not be continual or concurrent, but folks in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina may want to take their GPS guidance with a grain of salt… and possibly resort to some old school MapQuest printouts when visiting unfamiliar locales.
Thanks. I’m no where near that area, but I think GPS has become a modern “Utility” much like mobile phones, or Netflix Streaming :)
Agreed. And most folks rely on the technology without stopping to think how it works and who controls it. I’m actually surprised there haven’t been more outages and adjustments to publicly available positioning over the years.
I think I caught an early bit of this earlier this week when my GPS was showing me about 100ft+ off the road I was on and it stayed over there. It was like my entire GPS was just offset by 100+ feet.