U.S. May Reduce Non-Military GPS Accuracy

ward99 writes "The U.S. government may be degrading GPS satellite signals, to cripple Iraqi forces' ability to use those systems during the war. This could potentially reduce accuracy from ~3 meters to over ~100 meters. Users depending on GPS systems may want to do sanity checks on any data returned by those systems during the war. The U.S. will do this by increasing the inaccuracies on the civilian C/A code, turning back on S/A (Selective Availability), by having the satellites deliberately and randomly return inaccurate information on where they are. S/A degrades GPS accuracy to only 100 meters 95 percent of the time and 300 meters the other 5 percent of the time. This will not effect the military P code."

Comments

Gelileo

[matt4077]

Can't wait for the european system to be up and working. Nothing better than a little competition. And hopefully the us and europe will never be at war at the same time.

Indeed

[goldcd]

A friend of mine is heavily involved in the EU satellite program (building them). Not only are we going to be getting non-US global positioning, we're also getting some other very clever satellites loaded with all sorts of clever gizmos which we're not allowed to talk about without our families being abducted in the middle of the night. Will help us spot the little errors that sometimes arise from US satellite intelligence e.g. "Oh look, we can see several hundred thousand Iraqi troops on your [Saudi Arabia] border - can we base our troops there to protect your oil fields population?

insightful?

[Transient0]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the parent paraphrase as: "If it's useful, and it's not ours, we have the right to blow it up."?

Since when does that sort of dangerous self-righteous neo-patriotic paranoia qualify as insightful?

This may be marked as flamebait, but it's worth the chance, I have Karma to burn anyway.