Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours

An anonymous reader writes "In an unprecedented total disruption of a fully operational GNSS constellation, all satellites in the Russian GLONASS broadcast corrupt information for 11 hours, from just past midnight until noon Russian time (UTC+4), on April 2 (or 5 p.m. on April 1 to 4 a.m. April 2, U.S. Eastern time). This rendered the system completely unusable to all worldwide GLONASS receivers."

Comments

How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[ZorinLynx]

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

I've noticed much increased performance since I upgraded to a phone that uses both systems, especially in cities with a lot of tall buildings like NYC and Chicago.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Guppy]

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

To promote their system, Russia decided to make new smartphones without GLONASS support illegal in their country -- so major manufacturers added that capability to all their phones (since there is almost no additional cost to each unit, once the capability is designed into the chipset). Not sure about CDMA chipset, since there is no major CDMA networking in Russia.

Would be nice if we got Galileo GNSS and Beidou support too, but I'm not expecting it to happen unless they pull a similar stunt with their markets (well, China might).

   

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[AmiMoJo]

It seems to depend where you are. I find that in the far east GPS is often less accurate that GLONASS. My understanding is that it is due to them using different approximations of the shape of the earth (it isn't quite round, more of an ellipsoid). In fact you get this with some mapping applications too because the map data is based on, say, the Japanese approximation that is well suited to their country but the GPS receiver is using the US approximation (WGS85 or something?)

I bet if you are stood in Moscow GLONASS is better. I find it is definitely more accurate in Japan, although Japan is supposed to be launching its own GPS supplementary satellites to improve the situation in the next few years.

Down? Or encrypted?

[Anonymous Coward]

The system shutting down while still broadcasting "gibberish" seems awfully inconvenient. Sure they just didn't switch to encrypted transmissions?

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[meadowsoft]

It is called selective availability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability#Selective_availability My undergraduate thesis involved how to couple intertial senors using a Kalman filter to compensate for SA in GPS signals. Two years after my project concluded, the US disabled SA in GPS. I doubt that this recent "outage" was related to similar SA in GLONASS. Rather, perhaps it was indeed an encrypted transmission, or was based on a second independent synchronization signal only available to military assets used to put the scrambled transmissions back in the right order.

I don't miss them.

[ackthpt]

I used them along with the US GPS satellites, until a couple months back, but found I was having some serious accuracy issues. Disabling them resolved the issue and I haven't used them since. GPSr unit: Garmin Oregon 600

Re:Warning Shot

[ackthpt]

Careful when you shoot across bows. World Wars are easy to start, not always so easy to finish the way you want them to.

I doubt the US would do it, if we did want to disable it for any reason, such as missile guidance, we wouldn't tip our hand so casually.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[CeasedCaring]

Actually, it was last weeks NCIS:LA "Zero Days", which aired 3/25/14, and involved the NCIS techies corrupting GLONASS to divert a missile aimed at San Francisco. See TVRage

So much speculation...

[Flytrap]

So much speculation from people who do not appear to have even read the article.

FTA: “Bad ephemerides were uploaded to satellites. Those bad ephemerides became active at 1:00 am Moscow time... a GLONASS fix could not take effect until each satellite in turn passed back over control stations in the Northern Hemisphere to be reset, thus taking nearly 12 hours.”

The article concludes that the outage was probably due to a human error which "...could conceivably occur with GPS, Galileo, or BeiDou" and advises consumers not to rely on only one system.

My [completely uninformed and speculative] guess is that the Russians probably rushed a software update to meet some military deadline and it backfired on them - now Putin's troops amassed along the Ukrainian boarder may have to do without whatever feature they were trying to quickly enable.

Ingress

[tbuddy]

My heart goes out to the Russian Resistance team for their downtime.

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

"hit there targets". Their, their, their, THEIR! Basic kingergarten-level knowledge. Damn idiocracy. 10 years from now, everyone will spell "right" as "rite" and posts complaining about it will get downvoted. Mark my words. (after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately", and can't tell the difference between "doing good" and "doing well")

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[rvw]

Just sayin'.

Or Russian Wodka. It would give them a good excuse to take over Ukraine by accident - sorry wrong turn!

Re:Warning Shot

[geekoid]

It was. The chain of event that follow the assassination were a pretty rapid and unlikely chain of events to have happened without that assassination.

If you are curious, reading the account of what was happening the day the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated is a comedy of errors.

It's also highly unlikely the WWII would have happened without WWI, since there would not have been the poverty and economic status Hitler used to gain power.

Re:Warning Shot

[schnell]

If you dont think this is intentional then you are nuts

Of course it's intentional but not for the reason you think. The reason that Detroit, Trenton and (at least previously) DC were/are cesspools is because of the evil force known as democracy. The residents of those cities and states voted for crap politicians who drove their respective areas into the ground economically. Nobody from outside imposed Marion Barry or Kwame Kilpatrick onto their cities, and nobody had to nefariously conspire to make them suck, they did that perfectly well on their own. Externalities can hurt a city or state, but to get it into Detroit territory you have to actively keep making it worse on your own - and the residents of those areas have nobody but their own votes to thank for it.

Seriously... not EVERYTHING is a gubmint conspiracy. Sometimes it's just stupid people electing terrible leaders, and that's the downside of democracy that comes along with all the other good stuff. Ask the people of Venezuela how electing people who promise free goodies works out in the long run.