Your behavior appears to be a little unusual. Please verify that you are not a bot.


Trying to accommodate GPS interference? Enough already

June 1, 2018  - By

Eight years on, and the money generated by a hedge fund still seeks to destabilize the Global Positioning System and the billions of people who benefit from it, whether they create it, administer it, sell it or use it.

That accounts for just about everybody touched by telecommunications and the industrial network, including the brave individuals serving in the military.

For rewards to the few, the U.S. government is lobbied to levy hardship on the many. In the service of that lobbying, the truth is manipulated to suit the ends. Sound familiar?

See this article for facts and findings of years of detailed study of this matter, recounted in the recently released Department of Transportation’s Adjacent Band Compatibility (ABC) Assessment Final Report. That it appears almost a year after all the research and nearly all the analysis was completed suggests that powerful forces are at work, perhaps warring with each other, within the government. Let us hope that the guys and gals with the good hats on can prevail.

The matter now rests with the Federal Communications Commission, an appointed panel not subject to the electorate nor to Congress, whose decisions sometimes carry a scent of influence from hidden quarters. Note particularly the recent ruling against net neutrality, which most agree runs counter to public interest and correlative with private corporate interests.

As our news story states, the ability to use the mobile satellite services (MSS) band for terrestrial services is “limited.” The DOT ABC Assessment, using the 1-dB Interference Protection Criterion of a 1-dB drop in carrier-to-noise density ratio that’s accepted by everybody — specifically, every engineer — on Earth except Ligado Networks, demonstrates conclusively there is no chance the company could actually deploy a viable commercial terrestrial service in the MSS spectrum without disrupting or degrading vital GPS and GNSS services.

The U.S. government and the GPS industry have both expended far too much money and time trying to accommodate a force-fit of a non-compatible use into the bands adjacent to the radionavigation satellite service band, to the benefit of one commercial company’s bottom line.

It’s high time for this nonsense to stop. Nobody, least of all the government and the GNSS industry, owes Ligado anything.

About the Author: Alan Cameron

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