SVN30 next IIA bird to be put on the bench ?

From the prolonged period SVN30 has been offline and the upcoming
launch of IIF SV2, it looks like USAF is planning to retire SVN30. Is
there redundancy issues on SVN30 that perhaps wouldn't exist on PRN3
(SVN33) or PRN24 (SVN24) ? The last two birds could be replaced with a
much better improvement to PDOPs than SVN30 which is fairly well
positioned.

Any reason why they couldn't just reuse PRN1 instead ? SVN35 has been
put to the bench before. It looks like a useable bird, but barely so.

Regards,

Marcelo Pacheco

We can only guess what the system operators are doing.

In the B Plane:

I'm thinking SVN35 was reactivated on PRN01 only to test it. Then it
will be turned off and returned to residual status.
If SVN30 is broken then SVN35 can be set healthy and be repositioned
to replace it.


In the D Plane:

The weakest satellite is SVN24 (PRN24) that consistently exhibits a
large satellite (URE) error. It was moved as part of the 24+3
constellation improvements so I'm guessing GPS IIF-2 will directly
replace it.

--- CHAS