[time-nuts] Coalition to Save GPS

[Mahlon Haunschild]

Jim, some of those questions are easy to answer:

(1) In the FCC the decisions in this case were (and are) made by lawyers 
and politicians, which the engineers work for.  Lightsquared knew about 
the frequency allocation loophole (lawyers) and they knew that if they 
could take advantage of it fast and broadly enough (politics), they 
could win.  They almost did.

(2) Depends on the signal scheme.  You're thinking it'll be like current 
cell phone technology, which it doesn't have to be.  They probably don't 
even know themselves yet how they're going to do it, but they certainly 
have the resources to do it.

(3) If they get their license rest assured that GPS as we know it will 
disintegrate, along with every user of it (civilian and military).  Rest 
assured that a LOT of effort is being spent fighting this.

The really unfortunate part is that the effort to fight the Lightsquared 
service is being wasted on a frequency allocation/service combo decision 
that never should have been considered.  The engineers fighting this 
fight have better things to do with their time than argue with lawyers 
and politicians.

regards,

Mahlon - K4OQ
------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:09:53 +1100
From: Jim Palfreyman <jim77742 at gmail.com>
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
	<time-nuts at febo.com>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Coalition to Save GPS
Message-ID:
	<AANLkTikObyn52hAfdHv6Efi4_XnhU=eckg=Pqwnj2kLP at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I find this quite strange. I have three questions:

1) Why would your FCC allow such a thing?

2) For this company to have high bandwidth they're going to need a
precision time source at each transmitter. Will it be gps???  :-)

3) Wouldn't the most used GPS devices in the US be smartphones (iPhone
etc)? Tell those users that location services won't work any more and
wait for a reaction.

Jim