Daily Archives: October 18, 2019
More of It’s Like Y2K All Over Again . . .
Back in February I posted this article about the upcoming GPS Week Number Rollover Problem starting April 6, 2019. And then I kind of forget about it with the prepping for our European trip.
But now there’s been a date change.
Here’s what I wrote back in February:
It’s Like Y2K All Over Again , ,
Come April 6th, 2019, be careful where you drive. Or at least be careful where your GPS tells you to drive. Turns out that in a retro-Y2K twist, the date stamp in the GPS will reset, and it suddenly won’t know where it, and you, are. This is because they only programmed a 10bit register to store the week, So every 1024 weeks, or about 20 years, the date rolls back to zero.
This of course, is reminiscent of the whole Y2K fiasco where to save memory space (back in the days when it was really expensive) they stored the year as two digits, i.e., 1980 was ‘80’, 1999 was’99, and of course, 2000 was ‘00’.
WHOOPS!
Newer GPS implementations use a 13bit storage area, which should last until the sun goes red giant and engulfs the planet. Hopefully that’ll be long enough.
You can read more about it here:
Now, units produced since 2010 or so, should be using the new ICD-200/IS-GPS-200 specifications, and should be OK. I say ‘should’, because apparently some manufacturers have been somewhat lax in updating their software.
Saves a few bucks, don’t you know. So be careful out there.
But then today I got this email from Verizon.
Which says that the whole thing has been delayed until November 3rd. And now the problems extend to devices as recent as 2016.
Yikes!
As far as phones, luckily for Jan and I, only her Galaxy S5 is affected, and it’s just her phone here in the rig.
However, it looks like our Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 will also have a problem, disappointing since we often used it to display WAZE data on long trips.
You can click here to find out if your device(s) are on the GPS Naughty List.
Thought For The Day:
Now With More Cinnamon!
hgfh
