GPS Rolls Over With Little Fuss

Although global positioning systems in close to 100,000 cars in Japan reportedly shut down as programmers reset the clocks on older GPS satellites, major suppliers of tracking systems for trucks in the U.S. reported no problems.

Zero hour occurred at midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Aug. 22, when 24 satellites, launched into space by the Department of Defense before 1995, reached their data storage limit of 1,024 weeks. At that moment, the satellites were expected to either revert to references based on the sun and Earth positions Jan. 6, 1980, or stop working altogether (8-9, p. 1).

The rollover “was as smooth as we had hoped it would be,” said Quartermaster 2nd Class Ben Ghiglieri with U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center in Alexandria, Va. “We had a few reports of inaccurate dates or temporary loss of tracking.”

Sailors have become dependent on GPS, and trucking is rapidly expanding its use of the cluster of satellites to pinpoint locations of equipment.

Ghiglieri said the Coast Guard got calls from 30 mostly civilian maritime users. Often, the individual problems were fixed by resetting the units.

According to the Reuters news agency, some automobile navigation systems in Japan went blank, while others just froze up. Systems did not resume working and had to be repaired, according to published reports.

For American trucks, the problem did not seem widespread. Magellan Corp., of Santa Clara, Calif., and Trimble Navigation, of Sunnyvale Calif., both manufacturers of GPS systems for trucks, issued statements indicating that no problems occurred.

For the full story, see the August 30 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.