Air Force Says GPS System Rollover Successfu

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Air Force Says GPS System Rollover Successful

pdated 1:09 AM ET August 22, 1999WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Air Force officials said Saturday's rollover of the Global Positioning System (GPS) time clock was a success.

"As expected, the Global Positioning System satellite (system) and associated ground facilities have successfully gone through the end of week rollover and military and civilian GPS users worldwide can continue to depend on accurate information from the GPS satellites," said the Air Force Space Command in a statement.

The 1,024-week time clock in the satellite-based GPS system returned to zero almost 20 years after its deployment in January 1980. The GPS rollover was considered to be a small-scale rehearsal for what might happen when computer clocks worldwide reach the year 2000.

Designed for the military, the constellation of 27 satellites orbiting 11,000 miles above the earth plays an increasingly important role in civilian life.

GPS applications include airline operations, truck fleet tracking and computer maps in cars in addition to allowing boaters to find favorite

For their part, the U.S. Coast Guard has not yet received any distress calls from ships reporting problems with their GPS systems, said Commander Jim McPherson, a spokesman at the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters.

"It takes a while for those kinds of calls to work their way all the way here to headquarters...But if anything did happen, it doesn't appear to be anything major, or we would have heard something by now," he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard Wednesday urged boaters and other civilian GPS users to play it safe and make sure alternative navigation methods are available.

Private owners of GPS navigation systems produced by Sunnyvale, California-based Trimble Navigation Ltd. systems also reported their equipment performed as expected, said John Lovell, the company's director of quality, in an interview with Reuters.

The company has sold about one million GPS systems around the world, Lovell said.

"Everything went exactly as predicted. We're seeing no (extraordinary) events so far," he said, after receiving reports from company representatives in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United States and Britain.

Service interruptions of about an hour in length were expected in the company's newer systems, but the interruptions lasted about 15 seconds, according to Lovell.

The company's older models, those made before 1995, were interrupted for about 15 minutes, in-line with expectations, Lovell said.

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@tottacc.com), August 22, 1999

Answers

How do we know tha Air Force isn't lying?

-- Skeptical (cant@trust.anyone), August 22, 1999.

Irate Japanese Car Drivers Hit By GPS Bug

-- (G@P.S), August 22, 1999.

Mixed reports on Y2K-like test for global positioning system

-- (G@P.S), August 22, 1999.

General comment: Could Japan's obviously lagging efforts on GPS receiver remediation, although not a major problem, be consistent with Japan's general degree of Y2k remediation relative to the rest of the world?

To Skeptical: Major problems with GPS rollover would be way too big for the Air Force to hide.

-- Bill Byars (billbyars@softwaresmith.com), August 22, 1999.


EOW rollover was so simple and easy to fix that anyone having problems probably deservses them.

Best,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 22, 1999.



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