The GPS bearing is today. Here's Why Devices Can Go Wacky – TechCrunch



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The time of the global positioning system time ends and another starts, event likely to affect your devices, any existing equipment or system dependent on the GPS for the time and date. 39; location.

Most clocks take their time from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). But the atomic clocks of the satellites are set to the GPS time. The synchronization signals you can get from GPS satellites are very accurate and available worldwide. They are therefore often used by systems as the main source of time and frequency accuracy.

When the global positioning system was implemented for the first time, the time and date function was defined by a 10-bit number. So, unlike the Gregorian calendar, which uses the year, month and date formats, the GPS date is a "week number" or WN. The WN is transmitted as a 10-bit field in the navigation messages and is extended or reset to zero every 1024 weeks.

Since then, the account has been incremented by one unit each week and broadcast as part of the GPS message.

The GPS week started on January 6, 1980 and became zero for the first time at midnight on August 21, 1999. At midnight on April 6, resetting the WN GPS could be a problem for existing systems and will affect the weather and location data. Utilities and cellular networks also use GP receivers to time and control certain functions. For example, the US power grid uses built-in GPS timestamps. The US Department of Energy says that "the GPS supports a wide variety of essential networking functions that allow separate components of the electrical system to work in unison."

It should be noted that the WN restart date may be different on some devices, depending on the date of firmware creation.

The bug, which some have described as the year 2000 of GPS, will cause problems for some GPS receivers, such as time reset and location data corruption. The WN GPS failover event could hurt the reliability of the UTC report, according to the US Department of Homeland Security. HDS said that a GPS device complying with the latest IS-GPS-200 standard and providing UTC time should not be affected. The agency also warned:

However, testing of some GPS devices revealed that not all implementations of the manufacturer are properly managing the WN failover of April 6, 2019. In addition, some implementations of manufacturers interpret the WN parameter with respect to a date other than January 5, 1980 These devices should not be affected by the WN failover of April 6, 2019, but could be similarly switched at a later date.

If you own a newer commercial device with updated software, that's fine. But double check and make sure the software is up to date.

The US Naval Observatory suggests contacting the manufacturer of your GPS receiver if you have been affected by the substitution of the GPS week number. Some manufacturers of GPS receivers can be found at GPS world website.

Efforts have been made to avoid this type of turnover problem – or at least to avoid that. The modernized GPS navigation message uses a 13-bit field that repeats every 8,192 weeks.

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