CTO’s Blog: BBC “drops the boom” on unre­li­able L1 GPS services…

The BBC says GPS is a problem

The BBC today pub­lished the most scathing review of the L1 (civil­ian) GPS ser­vices being relied on by Courts and other offi­cial agen­cies as reli­able and instru­ments which pro­vide unim­peach­able data — some­thing which is patently untrue and which is now out in the public.

The US GPS sys­tem is amaz­ing — and a very pow­er­ful system

US GPS sys­tem is amaz­ing — and a very pow­er­ful sys­tem as long as each process con­trolled by it has active human over­sight, and with­out that human over­sight the evi­dence pro­duced by any GPS L1 based sys­tem is fun­da­men­tally worthless. /

The US GPS Sys­tem is an amaz­ing tool for nav­i­ga­tion of sys­tems which all have human over­sight. It’s lousy for any­thing else since there is no way to prove it worked cor­rectly after the fact, and its impor­tant that audi­tors know this since many of them are cer­ti­fy­ing client’s data which as such is unprov­able in a Court of Law.

This is true from ship­board nav sys­tems, to home nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems, to offender track­ing bracelets, and finally to Bal­lis­tic Sen­sor Fused Muni­tions (BSFM) like the AT90 155mm GPS-​​Guided Self pro­pelled rocket rounds, i.e. the smart muni­tions used by most mil­i­tary in the world today. All of these key sys­tems work because there is some­one sit­ting there who can react if they fail…

Evi­dence must be prov­able or it’s worthless…

So how does this play into evi­dence col­lec­tion? It doesn’t and that is the prob­lem.   Evi­dence which is inten­tion­ally cre­ated (and that is the key con­cept here — the inten­tional cre­ation of evi­dence to prop­erly rep­re­sent some set or indi­vid­ual event) must be prov­able — and the costs of that proof are what will con­strain the util­ity value of the evi­dence model… so what is the L1 GPS Evi­dence Model? The answer is that there isn’t one because the L1 GPS sys­tem was designed long before any­one thought about dig­i­tal evidence.

That means peo­ple today who rely on GPS alone for their time source have a seri­ous evi­dence col­lec­tion and proof prob­lem. That data is directly tied to the per­son who is going to have to tes­tify that each mes­sage is proper espe­cially since no com­mer­cial GPS sys­tems today cap­ture the mes­sages from the birds as evi­dence of any­thing mean­ing that the only proof of any­thing they pro­vide is a report which is nei­ther authen­ti­cat­able or prov­able after the fact in most all instances.

Check the BBC story on how unre­li­able and untrustable L1 GPS sys­tems are and if you need a solu­tion for this prob­lem call Cer­tichron at 800−511−2301 or email us at SALES for help in solv­ing your GPS dilemma.