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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Richard B. Langley
Date: 2019 Mar 28, 05:01 -0700
1) Even some modern GNSS receivers may fail if they don't have the latest firmware installed. Natural Resources Canada, for example, has been busy the past few weeks updating the firmware in some of the receivers of their continusouly operating reference network. The correct date and time is needed to compute the coordinates of the satellites. If done incorrectly, the receive will produce bogus positions. So, it's not just about displaying the correct date.
2) The firmware in some receivers has a coded reference date used to compute the correct date and time. If too far removed from the current date, the receiver will fail at some point, not necessarily at the epoch of the rollover. This is true of NovAtel receivers and the ones I have in my instrument on the CASSIOPE satellite will fail about three years from now.
3) I have been helping the journal Nature on an article about the rollover. We'll see if they think the event is important enough to publish it.
-- Richard Langley
