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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little worried that GPS is so vulnerable that these satellites could cause such disruption to be honest. This is satellite based, any country could be approving this plan and the impact on GPS would still be present since orbits go everywhere.

I guess I'd rather they just... not... I don't really even think the trade-off in increased seemingly real health risk is worth making the cell network even faster.

It's going to happen though, if there's no mitigation that makes GPS more invulnerable to interference it will inevitably fail when actually needed.

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Let me just point out that satellites don't necessarily orbit around the world. They can be geostationary, and in fact they usually are I think. That is why you will find most US GPS satellites over the US, most Russian satellites over Russia, etc.

Also, signal disruption is already very common as a necessary precaution at sensitive times and places. I think many military bases and other sensitive places, like the Kremlin, have signal interference so they are very imprecise to target with GPS-guided weapons.

GPS satellites are not on geostationary orbits[1]. And if you are using "GPS" as a common name, I still doubt you'll find any.

Geostationary orbits are very far away, what leads to horrible timing properties, and all in a single plane. They are almost useless for positioning.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Spac...

GNSS satellites (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou, etc) are not in geostationary orbits. Being in a geostationary orbit would put them in fixed "locations" in the sky, making them easily blocked by terrain and entirely unusable at high latitudes.

GPS satellites are in MEO, at ~20 km MSL. Other GNSS satellites use similar orbits.

(Just noticed a minor error: GNSS orbits are roughly 20k km, not 20 km!)

GPS wouldn't really work in a geostationary orbit (there'd be no way to tell if your latitude is North or South)

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