this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
426 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59123 readers
4956 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fucking serves them right, the aviation industry have been buying GPS devices for decades that bleed outside and don't explicitly filter down to their spectrum. There was a satellite internet startup in the US that went through the whole process, bought its spectrum and was ready to launch, then the aviation industry complained and had them shut down because their devices were all shit and "it would be too difficult to change everyone's equipment".
Do you have something I can read about this? It's a little vague, so hard for me to search, and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Thanks
Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with "L": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/
Although this article doesn't cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn't adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn't anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.
Thanks I'll give it a read.
Edited my last comment, I don't think that article goes into much detail. It only really covers the objections by GPS device manufacturers against LightSquared, not the technical aspect ie poor filtering by cheap GPS devices.
This article covers LightSquared's claims of poor filtering by GPS devices: https://www.networkworld.com/article/696602/wireless-lightsquared-says-gps-makers-ignored-filtering-rules.html
This article also covers some of it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/lightsquared-blew-it-and-heres-why/
TL;DR GPS devices cut corners, however because they were established and so endemic across the industry, there was no practical way to fix them all and LightSquared was sent down the toilet.