GPS signal interference

A restructured LightSquared after bankruptcy became Ligado. LightSquared was previously (in 2012) denied use of the spectrum adjacent to the GPS bands.
Mark

The issue here is not transmission on the GPS band itself, but relatively nearby. So the question of harm quite properly encompasses the degree to which the receivers in question failed to reject adjacent signal. That is a genuine concern, but the colorful language about "making GPS unreliable for everybody" is a pretty bad misstatement of the problem.

Not everyone will be able to see the link to the Washington Post, since it is a pay site.

Some of the new 5G cellular towers operate at a radio frequency adjacent to that of our GPS system.

(That's right - the Garmin uses radio to work! Lets hear from the hams!)

The problem is that the new 5G cellular signals are 2 billion times more powerful than GPS signals. That is because the GPS satellites do not have a strong signal from space, and travel a long distance, while the stronger 5G cellular signals are powered from earth and are located nearby all our GPSs. The degree of selectivity in our GPS receivers doesn't help when the interfering signal is so strong.

This was approved by the FCC when its top officials did not have the technical knowledge to make such an important decision. They acted in favor of business and against the good of the public. After all the 5G equipment has already been installed, we will then discover the practical impact of the problem.

dobs108

My Garmin suffers from interference when being used specific places within the car. It will frequently and consistently lose the GPS signal if placed below the rear view mirror. Works perfectly when placed in other locations.

Usually RF people refer to a problem as interference when it is caused by another signal than the desired signal. It seems unlikely that is your difficulty. The GPS signal is very high frequency, and the excess signal strength margin is little, so it will not pass through even extremely thin metal. Thus the only ways into your car (unless you have a convertible top down) are through the windows. Futher, a reflected signal bounced off the other side of the car is not good, so it is direct path to satellite view through a window that works best. There is a good reason many of us place our GPS out on the dashboard.

In the early days, when there were fewer GPS satellites up there, and my Magellan could only even try to track four of them at once, it was quite common for me to lose tracking for minutes at a time, as motion of the car and the satellites placed a previously usable satellite to a useless position, and the receiver sifted through the other satellites trying to find one it could add back into the tracked group.

There are about twice as many active satellites up there now as there were then, and modern consumer GPS units keep their fingers on up to a dozen or so at a time, so losing sight of just one is usually a non-event.

But yes, you can easily find places in your car where the receiver can't possibly see enough satellites to work. (the trunk, for example).

Completely unrelated, but the site did block the text.

I use ublock origin as my as blocker plugin in firefox (available for chrome/opera too). There's an option to block javascript.

https://i.imgur.com/Nc4ReMA.png (see red X).

Works well without incognito. This plugin works great to block all ads in youtube videos as well.