Trouble aboard latest Global Positioning System satellite

The U.S. military's newest Global Positioning System navigation
satellite is suffering from unusual signal distortions that will keep
it out of service for at least six months, the Air Force announced
Tuesday.

"The signal distortion was initially observed as an elevation-
dependent bias in ranging measurements from GPS monitor stations," the
Air Force said in a written statement from the Space and Missile
Systems Center.

See the whole story at spaceflightnow.com at

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0906/17gps2r20/

JT

kr5j wrote:


The Air Force has identified the cause of signal anomalies for PRN01
and will attempt to work around the problem. If they can do that
PRN01 might be set usable this fall.

http://www.insidegnss.com/node/1573

While I'm really happy that the military provides the GPS for our use,
the announcements they issue read like a bad joke about military
intelligence. I've read about a dozen reports now that "a signal
anomaly has been detected and they think they can correct it", but the
reports all stop there. If they really know what is going wrong why
isn't there a proper explanation in that press release?

-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht Android 1.5 (Cupcake) and Fedora-11

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Press releases are written by PR people without the technical expertise
to provide a proper explanation. I for one would prefer that the
engineers spend the time fixing the problem. Even educating a highly
skilled engineer on a part of a subsystem is time consuming, think about
what it would take educate a administrator or PR person. Why do we as
users need to know the details?

Clair

as

Granted for 99.9% of the users GPS is an appliance. That other 0.1%
who are industry oriented analysts or, maybe, just enthusiasts care a
lot about the details.

Eventually, an open technical explanation will be provided. I'm
interested in its details.

--- CHAS