In Jim Lord's February 1st Tip of the Week, he claims that the GPS will not cause any serious problems. The reason is that the GPS settings for roll over is calculated by weeks (like an odometer) in cars. Therefore they will be fine. Has anyone read this? What do you experts think? You can read this article at http:\\y2ktimebomb.com/Tip/Lord/lord9905.htm. I will appreciate any comments.

-- Anonymous, February 07, 1999

Answers

The GPS is OK, it's some? of the ground based receivers that may have difficulties if not upgraded.

-- Anonymous, February 07, 1999

Mark, Mr. Lord was saying that the GPS satellites themselves should be perfectly fine, "the GPS satellites are not about to fail because of the End of Week Rollover", but the problem lies with the ground receivers of the satellite output, "The Ground Segment, on the other hand, is neither Y2K compliant nor EOW compliant."

As far as I can determine from reading many articles about the GPS rollover, any problems boil down to a situation simpler, but similar to Year 2000 date problems:

GPS receivers need to be checked and upgraded/replaced to ensure proper functioning. Those upgrades/replacements are available and comparatively easy to do. Awareness of the rollover in August in high.

The assumption is that because awareness of the problem is high, the receivers have been, or will be, fixed in most circumstances. This assumption is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because we won't actually know if those upgrades actually *were* done en masse until the August rollover comes and goes with no major problems. There are also other methods (short wave radio time broadcasts) which could serve as a backup if failures do occur.

Mr Lord's bottom line was: "The bottom line on the GPS problem is that the military and most large commercial users should be fine but the small-time users need to be warned about the problem. Most at risk here are small commercial fishermen, trucking firms, independent shipping companies and all recreational users. Foreign flagged ships visiting U.S. ports would likely be another concern."

-- Anonymous, February 07, 1999

Garmin Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers of GPS units. They claim that currently units will have no problem, while their older units will simply have to be reset once. Here's the URL:

Garmin GPS Y2K FAQ

-- Anonymous, February 13, 1999

I will send $10 to anyone who can point me to an article or website that contains a discussion of an in-depth assessment done of the GPS (or any other) satellite embedded systems. I have been looking for months. All the information simply says: "there are no problems with satellites." A military site said about March of last year that an assessment had been done by Lockheed. Chip issues only really caught on at the beginning of last year. With the military only 51% done as of the 4th Quarter '98 OMB report, I have a hard time believing they completed a quality assessment of embedded systems in satellites last March. I have not been able to find any information on how the "assessment" was done, if it was. Perhaps it is possible. However, it would take alot of work that we have not heard about.

The delivery date on the replacement ground system software is September, 1999.

An electrical engineer for a phone company told me GPS is used to synchronize phone systems, and that the ground based systems for doing that have been removed. He said less expensive systems would get out of synch and begin to fail after 8 hours. More expensive systems would last a week.

So....$10 to the first 5 people who point me to this info. I'd sleep better at night.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 1999

Oh dear...

(If I had more money - I'd 'up' Mr. Gokey's offer an additional $100.)

-- Anonymous, February 18, 1999