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posted by martyb on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-times-they-are-a-changin' dept.

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for amateur radio, has a reminder about older GPS receivers which may hit a wrap-around bug on April 6th this year.

The GPS network will encounter a small millennium bug of its own in April when the network's "week number" rolls back to zero. This known issue especially could affect those who use GPS to obtain accurate Coordinated Universal Time (i.e., UTC). In the GPS network, the number of the current week is encoded into the message the GPS receives using a 10-bit field. This allows for weeks ranging from zero to 1023. The current period began on August 1, 1999. On April 6, 2019, the week number rolls over to zero and starts counting back up to 1023.

This should not affect later-model GPS receivers that conform to IS-GPS-200 and provide UTC, [...]


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:55PM (#813506)

    The common patch was to add 1024 to the week number, since it wasn't going to happen again for another 20 years.

    Worse is this one:
    if week number manufacturing week { add 1024 to week }

    Or this one:
    while week number manufacturing week { add 1024 to week}

    I'm not kidding. Both have been used by major GPS vendors.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:58PM (#813507)

    Edited for >

    The common patch was to add 1024 to the week number, since it wasn't going to happen again for another 20 years.

    Worse is this one:
    if week number greater than manufacturing week { add 1024 to week }

    Or this one:
    while week number greater than manufacturing week { add 1024 to week}

    I'm not kidding. Both have been used by major GPS vendors.