Article on AP Breaking news

www.tampabayonline.net/news/news102m.htm

-- Sharon (sking@drought-ridden.com), May 12, 1999

Answers

See here for similar story/different source. Not much new here.

-- regular (zzz@z.z), May 12, 1999.

The "problem" was never a problem. It was known and planned for long ago.

http://pollux.com/defenseweb/1996/oct96/rollovr!.htm

Basically, for the almanac, the receiver is programmed to look at the last date it used prior to encountering the rollover and start counting forward from there rather than going back to its original baseline date. This same solution has been built into most, but not necessarily all, of the GPS receivers used by the military and being sold to civilians.

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"In the early 1980s, a lot of people probably weren't concerned about 1999 and so some receivers may have gone out that did not take the rollover into account, so if those are still in service, they may have to be reprogramed by the user

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"GPS receivers were very expensive in the early '80s, so there probably aren't very many of those units out there (with or without rollover compensation)."

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"It really got started with the year 2000 issue and then we resurrected looking at the GPS millennium problem," noted Lt. Col. Don Latterman, chief GPS engineer at Los Angeles Air Force Base, which has primary responsibility for the Air Force GPS role. "In 1993, we went back and put a major engineering note in ICD-GPS-200 -- our interface control document that specifies our GPS signal specs with the commercial world -- for all those folks in the commercial world designing for commercial GPS receivers."

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"There are a lot of other military and civil producers out there now, but if they designed in accordance with the ICD to handle the rollover, they should have no problems."

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-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), May 13, 1999.