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

Re:There is no evidence of the claim

[Ryan Amos]

Yes except the US Military owns the satellites and basically lets everyone else use them so they're not just a waste of space (pun intended.) Also worth noting is that they can do this locally, so basically the accurracy would probably only decrease (if it does at all) in the areas in and around Iraq. I doubt the US or western Europe will be affected at all.

More European Bullshit

[smack.addict]

This is just some yellow journalist trying to get support for the stupid Galileo concept. It has been widely reported that the government intends no such thing. The only impact of the war on GPS will be reduced availability in the theater of war.

Re:What about Gallileo (if it was operative)

[cyberkreiger]

Is it this map?

They don't like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

The Europeans won't do anything about it for a couple of reasons:

1) Europeans are uncomfortable committing funds to anything except social welfare programs.

2) Europeans are dreadfully uncomfortable with taking initiative and leading.

3) But most importantly, nobody in continental Europe really gives a crap except what's pleasurable this week.

How can a GPS system possible pass this muster?

We're sorry...

[the_real_tigga]

US-Army: We're terribly sorry, but unfortunately it has already been more than ten years since be bombed some brown people, so we will have to render our service unuseable for an unspecified amount of time.

Sorry, field-science, sorry, maritime travel and transportation, sorry you folks out there in the Sahara, Australian Outback or South-American rainforest. sorry Mercedes-Benz, sorry Motorola, sorry air-travel, you shouldn't be flying anyway during terror-level orange.

Re:This was *exactly* why we here in Europe...

[t0ny]

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.

Ya, we wouldnt want terrorists, suicide bombers, or hostile foreigners deprived of using "mapping software".