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U.S. May Reduce Non-Military GPS Accuracy

Posted by timothy on from the geocaching-will-be-more-challenging dept.

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."

4 of 654 comments (clear)

  1. What about planes?? by borgdows · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Civilian planes use GPS, don't they?
    What about other critical systems like police, ambulance, fire brigades and so on??

  2. Thats one reason why europe should build own GPS by Neuronerd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are plans for building a similar system to GPS in Europe so that we are not too much depending on the american empire. The following page nicely explains the concept. More is available here . This is technically very interesting and should open up new possibilities for navigation. Furthermore being constructed jointly by many partners and nations we can be reasonably sure that it can not be compromised by one weak leader.

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  3. Re:This was *exactly* why we here in Europe... by Amroarer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Even if it was, it would still remain under the control of the Russian military, just as GPS is under the control of the Pentagon.

    The whole point (well, one of the major ones, anyway) of Galileo was to create a network which wouldn't be under military control, and so could be relied upon not to be switched off at inconvenient moments.

  4. Re:it *is* our stuff by LazySlacker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Isn't that a bit like saying. It isn't your car - the money used to buy it was given to you by your employer.

    I rather like to idea of getting a bunch of people together - going round to military HQ and saying - "can we have our bomb back?"