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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [arrl.org] bug on April 6^th 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, [...]

Original Submission