An update from Marc Cheves, American Surveyor Magazine

As is always the case when big money is involved, LightSquared has ramped up its efforts to force its broadband initiative down the throats of the precise community. Taking out full-page advertisements in newspapers across the country, it is taking its case directly to the American people. And because the public only sees GPS as something for cars, the precise community’s reliance on GPS and the enormous benefit to the U.S. economy is not being considered.

LightSquared continues to beat the "poaching" drum by saying that GPS receivers have been designed to take advantage of signals that stray out of the defined GPS spectrum band. My research has revealed that all signals from satellites stray out of their assigned bands. Because the signals from space are weak, this helps the ground devices work. Again, because LightSquared is attempting to take spectrum that was established for space-based transmissions and turn it into terrestrial-based transmissions, the ground-based transmissions will be billions of times stronger than that from satellites.

Continue Reading