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GPS accuracy not ‘nearly perfect’

July 10, 2017  - By
Image: GPS World

When someone utters the words “I’m nearly perfect,” get on your toes. Such self-appraisal usually masks something. It could be insecurity, denial, ignorance or simply fear. At the very least, some level of illusion, if not delusion, is involved.

With that precept in mind, let’s examine a June 16 press release from the U.S. Air Force, under the headline “New reports confirm near-perfect performance record for civil GPS service.”

The press release actually says, “The U.S. Air Force released two technical reports demonstrating that the Global Positioning System (GPS) continues to deliver exceptional performance to civilian users around the world….The 2014 and 2015 performance reports confirm that the GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) satisfied nearly all measurable performance commitments documented in the GPS SPS Performance Standard.”

Fair enough. Those are demonstrable facts. Nowhere does the release — other than in its headline — employ the words “perfect” or “near-perfect.”

The problem is, as current events repeatedly show, people remember only the headline. That may be all that they read or register in the first place.

Affixing the label “near-perfect” to GPS is “potentially dangerous,” points out Dana Goward of the Resilient PNT Foundation, “because it could exacerbate the public’s growing over-reliance on, and often blind faith in, GPS. Even if GPS did always perform perfectly, all kinds of things can happen to signals after they leave the satellites and before they get to receivers. Personal privacy devices, other jammers, spoofers, solar activity, other electromagnetic interference, even the local geography can significantly degrade or disable a receiver’s performance. That’s why in the GPS System Performance Standard the Air Force specifically says its responsibility ends once signals are in space.”

Perfection might exist in space, but it doesn’t down here.

Even in space, accidents sure will happen. The Air Force release documents GPS performance for 2014 and 2015. This conveniently draws up short of January 2016, when several GPS satellites broadcast a timing error that triggered equipment faults and failures globally for nearly 12 hours. Thus demonstrating something far from perfection.

Issuing a statement in the manner done on June 16 perpetuates a dangerous myth, keeps users in the dark about the actual state of affairs, cultivates a What-Me-Worry? approach to positioning, navigation and timing, and abets the lack of political will and understanding of GNSS vulnerabilities.

We have expanded the focus of this magazine to cover other technologies relevant and applicable to the field precisely because GPS, and by extension GNSS, great though they may be, are not perfect. Not even nearly.

About the Author: Alan Cameron

Alan Cameron is the former editor-at-large of GPS World magazine.