This weekend (early Sunday morning where I live) the global positioning system (GPS) epoch will arrive for the second time these satellites went into orbit. Will this affect you and make Maps Navigation impossible? Well, it’s a bit unlikely really unless you’re GPS or phone is more than 10 years old in which case it might if it’s not been updated.
What does the epoch mean? Well essentially the clock in the GPS will roll back to zero because they’ve run out of bits to count with.
Old navigation devices will degrade or fail but your average mobile phone with GPS should be fine so don’t worry, sleep tight, your bed still be in (nearly) the same place when you wake up.
@PaulPavlinovich My phone is new so I’m in the safe zone. Good to know this unusual information. Thank you so much for assuring that my bed is not gonna move.
It is a bit like the Y2K concept @ErmesT . In that one many systems used only two digits to represent the year. Well dumb designers and programmers did anyway. Smart people used epoch time (time since 1st January 1970) to represent dates. Even epoch in older systems can cause issues. Old Unix epoch time was only 32 bits and ran out in 2012 (from memory) but those systems just extended the concept to 64 bits and dinosaurs will be back by the time that runs out. Satellite GPS used only 10 bits to count weeks. 10 bits is really odd when you think that most computer sizes are multiples of 8 bits but the issue is in the size of the message so bit stuffing to make the most of the available message length can be important leading to odd sizes like this one. Anyway, the epoch has passed for me and I did indeed wake up in the same place although it had moved quite a bit during the night as the earth orbits the sun at roughly 18,000 miles per hour :).
