LightSquared Disrupts 75% of GPS Connections In Government Test

Freddybear writes with this quote from BusinessWeek: "Philip Falcone's proposed LightSquared Inc. wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of global-positioning system receivers examined in a U.S. government test, according to a draft summary of results. ... The tests worked off an 'extraordinarily conservative' threshold and didn't show the devices' performance was affected, [LightSquared exec Martin Harriman said]. 'If we're affecting the performance of the device — my goodness, we'd like to be sure that doesn't happen,' Harriman said. The laboratory testing was performed for the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Systems Engineering Forum, an executive branch body that helps advise policy makers on issues around GPS. It found that 69 of 92, or 75 percent, of receivers tested 'experienced harmful interference' at the equivalent of 100 meters (109 yards) from a LightSquared base station."

Comments

You don't understand how this works do you.

[SuperKendall]

Solyndria (another company propped up by the white house despite many reports saying the company was not financial viable) was given a ton of money, which the founders (also heavy donors to the Democratic party) got a lot of, then the company went bankrupt but they left with a few million dollar paychecks.

It doesn't matter if the company folds. Just that Philip Falcone makes money in the process, which he will.

Re:You don't understand how this works do you.

[Elbereth]

The strange thing is that he's got a userid number around mine, which says that he's been here at least ten years. How can you go use a website for over ten years, without picking up that the moderation system is capricious, random, and certainly grounded in groupthink -- but corrupt? "Corrupt" is one of the few negative terms I wouldn't use to describe Slashdot's moderation system. One of the few actual advantages that it does have is that it's not corrupt. Even if Apple or Microsoft started paying people to mod up comments that praised them, there'd be outraged people downmodding those comments just as quickly.

I think people attach too much significance to karma and moderation, anyways. It's pathetically easy to game the system (just pander to whatever the prevailing groupthink is on a subject... or brazenly challenge the prevailing groupthink and say, "I'll probably get modded down for this, but..."). When I first started on Slashdot, I was an unrepentant karma whore, just to see how high I could get my karma. Then they hid the number, which killed that game. I've never had a (Score 5: Troll) comment, though, and I've always wanted one of those. Maybe some day... a boy can dream.

Re:Farm GPS, airplanes, and who owns the bandwidth

[dbc]

It's very unlikely to be lightspeed signal bleeding over out of their channel. That is reasonably easy to control, and it would show up in 100% of tested receivers. More likely, this is "adjacent channel interference". It is much harder to get a receiver to reject signals in adjacent channels. It takes a difficult/expensive to construct filter. If you go back to the old days of television, you'll note that you don't find adjacent channels allocated in major markets, for instance, because in the early days it was essentially impossible to build a receiver that could reject a strong signal on an adjacent channel. So here we have a case of a receiver looking for a very weak signal, and on an adjacent channel there is a strong local transmitter that you are trying to reject. I'm no surprised that there are issues. Also, because GPS has up till now not had strong nearby, adjacent signals to reject, it could actually be that the first mixer is getting overloaded, so the damage is done before you even get to the first IF filter.

Worse than BPL

[n1ywb]

This is the worst idea yet. Worse than broadband over power lines, worse than that idea about using gas pipes. I thought the whole point to discontinuing analog TV service and freeing up that bandwidth was to provided wide area Internet. *facepalm*

Re:This is being whitewashed from the white house

[fnj]

The bureaucracy has a certain very real independence from the government. That can be a problem when the administration is trying to accomplish worthwhile things, but it can also serve as a check on corruption in the government, even if in turn corruption in the bureacracy is a huge problem in itself. Wheels within wheels.

It's a sad commentary when good things come from parts of the system working at cross purposes, but it works.

Re:This is being whitewashed from the white house

[The Askylist]

My reading was that the GPS receivers were picking up the 1552-1559 MHz signal due to being made with cheap parts. That would correlate quite well with the finding that only 3/4 of the receivers were affected - if Light Squared were transmitting out of their assigned band, you'd expect 100% of the receivers to suffer interference.

Re:Farm GPS, airplanes, and who owns the bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Read more of those issues, or read Inside GNSS: this does indeed impact Galileo and it impacts anything within 600 miles of US borders, which means it impacts intercontinental aviation.

In a letter filed yesterday (July 19, 2011), Heinz Zourek, director-general for enterprise and industry, wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that if LightSquared is allowed to begin broadcasting in the band, “What are now neighbour MSS [mobile satellite service space-to-Earth] transmissions at similar receive powers to RNSS [radionavigation satellite service such as GPS and Galileo] would in future be many orders of magnitude higher and with the potential to severely disrupt reception of RNSS signals.”

He cited analysis — including ESA studies —carried out in Europe that showed interference effects to Galileo equipment would occur from 100 meters to almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), “depending on the type of receiver being used.”

Emphasis mine. Source: "EC Official Adds Galileo, EGNOS Worries to FCC’s LightSquared-GPS Deliberations,"Inside GNSS, July 20, 2011. That's right, July. The Europeans knew this was going to interfere with GPS/Galileo for aviation back in July. They had tested it, and they had numbers showing how far the interference would spread.

I'll leave it to the tin-foil crowd to speculate on why the FCC is only getting around to publishing its findings now. I'd suggest, though, that what they come up with might not be so paranoid after all in this case. Those who want to dig through some glaring evidence of bipartisan corruption will find it without looking too hard into this story, because the shady deals were conducted practically in the open on this one, from the SkyTerra days on through the past week. The Republicans are already working overtime on trying to assemble a timeline of Falcone's dealings with Obama: if the Democrats were smart, they'd have a team doing the same to show Republican connections, because they are there too (SkyTerra got permission for this back in the Bush era).

The fact that this story is dying in the back pages while Lindsey Lohan's Playboy spread and the circus clowns that have hijacked the Republican nomination get near-orgasmic coverage is a sad comment on how useless journalism has become.

The problem is, who else makes this link?

[SuperKendall]

Then you'll need to get your information somewhere besides hotair.com.

I knew someone would get all huffy about that.

See, here is the issue. I would love to link to a more "reputable" source than HotAir, because some predjudiced people cannot look beyond a name at facts. But that leads us to a HUGE problem:

There isn't another source, even though there SHOULD be.

The facts of the matter are very clear are they not? The interference with the GPS, proven. The donations of Philip Falcone to the Democratic Party, well documented and public.

And yet WHO in the "reputable" media made this very easy and very pertinent connection for us? Is that not in fact the very role it is vital for the media to play, as watchdog for just this kind of ultra-slimy influence peddling? This is the easiest story in the world to find evidence to show to us all, and yet only Hot Air and other "fringe" media bothers to make the simplest of connection.

The real problem is that the "reputable" media is utterly lost to partisan concerns, death afraid that "their side" may lose something. I truly respect the role the media plays in shining light on the doings of politicians everywhere, and welcome weeding out corruption. But you cannot weed only looking at half the garden.

So until the point when the "real" media decides to start acting like JOURNALISTS again, I'm afraid you'll have to suffice with information from reputable sources linked together by media you obviously despise - because no-one else is doing that job. I would argue you should probably look at the facts of the matter rather than who is pointing them out; I can discern truth both on HotAir and on HuffingtonPost as required. If you were smart you would seek to do the same rather than get lost in the echo chamber.

Re:This is being whitewashed from the white house

[Megane]

It's not that they're using "cheap parts". It's that the signal from those little solar-powered tin cans whizzing around in the sky is so weak that adding a notch filter to increase selectivity would significantly affect the ability to receive the signal at all. And they want to drop this elephant right next to it.

But hey, they paid their donations to the Party, right?