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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

Relevant this week:

- GPS costs around $2B/yr to continue operating

- Most of this comes from the defense budget

- This year, because of shenanigans, the NDAA has _not_ yet been passed b/c there are significant and controversial amendments in the House version

- We're careening towards a government shutdown

I'm not saying this _will_ happen, or _should_ happen ... but if GPS went off with the rest of the government, would Congress reach a resolution faster?

https://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/

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> but if GPS went off with the rest of the government, would Congress reach a resolution faster?

Oh hell yes. GPS is the basis of trillions of dollars of business globally. Just look at sea shipping and aviation alone. Would a lack of GPS ground every commercial plane? Maybe.. maybe not... but it certainly would be a huge disruption.

The first time it happens everyone would just drive hard to making sure all "GPS" systems were actually multi-system GNSS systems. Which is already true of most consumer phones, but I imagine there are still plenty of GPS-Only stuff out there. After the first GPS shutdown and the time for retrofit, everyone would have support for Galileo etc... and the Europeans would be standing there going "SEE!!!! I told you we can't trust the Americans!". And they'd be right.

Transportation is the backbone of global economy.

Planes, ships, cars, trucks, food delivery - it would be a humongous impact.

GPS is pure magic from the perspective of someone a few centuries ago.

it wouldn't just disrupt planes, it would crash planes if this were not even planned as a contingency. as a senior operations manager for a global logistics company, I was actually not even aware of this being a possibility until TIL here

> it wouldn't just disrupt planes, it would crash planes if this were not even planned as a contingency.

It would not. Aircraft have other navigation systems they can use instead, such as inertial reference and ground-based VOR navigation. And where there's radar coverage, they can be vectored by controllers.

This probably couldn't be used to keep up with the volume of air traffic today, but it would be enough to get existing flights down safely.

For landing, ILS is still very common, and doesn't require GPS either. An aircraft planning to land at an airport without ILS will have no trouble finding a nearby diversion airport that does have it.

Even as more ground-based navigation beacons are decommissioned, retaining enough for such an emergency remains an active consideration.

To my knowledge planes don't use the gps for very much, and AFAIK they use the barometric altimeter for maintaining their flight level. A controllable, plane that can maintain altitude is difficult to crash. The GPS stuff is mostly supplemental and is relatively new.

And pilots can land with a visual approach and still have ILS.

You would still have ADSB with your altitude, and I beleive heading and airspeed.

Because of the existing requirement to be spotting traffic and being over 1000ft away from other planes, they should be fine.

ATC should still have radar vectoring for their airspace.

I assume planes use more then just GPS, and use galileo and the other networks like consumer GPS do.

GPS is used a lot to figure where planes are but I think they are still not allowed to rely in it as it's not considered reliable enough by the regulators. At least not for things like altitude settings and instrument landings.

For light aircraft getting lost in the old days one hack used to be to fly low till you came to a motorway and read the signs. I imagine most such pilots these days would pull out their phone and open the maps app. Commercial flights of course have more high tech stuff like radio beacons.

I'm pretty sure all GPS receivers now are multisystem. So GLONASS and Baidu will continue to serve you

The 2018 shutdown did not appear to affect GPS. Is this looming shut down different in some way?

There's a recent article I read (NPR, I think?) where Mick Mulvaney was interviewed about that shutdown. He made the point (and spun it to make him look especially noble, of course) that the effects of a shutdown are largely decided by the Office of Management and Budget. They can choose to soften the blow, or they can make it hurt.

He argued that in 2013 under Obama, the OMB really turned the screws and hired contractors to fence off even national monuments which were otherwise unmanned anyway. Complete with signs announcing why they were fenced off. They wanted the public to feel the pain and associate it with Republicans (which seems to work, historically the GOP gets the majority of blame for shutdowns).

I think it's unlikely anybody is going to turn off GPS because the gov't "shutdown". I think the larger risk is that they will stop paying air traffic controllers, while expecting them to come to work anyway. That'll work for a while, but eventually some of those controllers may opt to stay home.

Republicans don't get blamed for the government shutdowns because of signs or fences by national monuments. They get blamed because they are at fault, whether that's trying to cut the increasingly popular ACA purely out of spite to Obama in 2013, or party infighting like this year or 2018.

The "blame" is exactly what Republican Party wants, to keep up their kayfabe marketing of "fiscal responsibility". Put interest rates around 7% for the next several decades, end the inflationary treadmill, let the everything bubble deflate, let the Wall Street debt/financialization cancer recede - and then it would make sense to talk about fiscal responsibility as a real thing. Until then any peanuts thrown to the plebs by the Democrats are really just mitigating the economic damage from the trough of overwhelming corporate welfare.

TIL:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

There are a couple of german words which made it into mainstream english like angst, zeitgeist, abseil. Based on your comment I would suggest a new one: brandrede. Look it up, afaik there is no english equivalent.

From a quick look the literal translation is "fire speech" which doesn't seem that hard to understand. So it would seem the significance is its place as a cultural touchstone, and cultures can certainly differ.

As to your larger point, pointing out errors in the social consensus is intrinsically inflammatory, as it upsets most everyone's neat little boxes they conceptually pigeonhole things into. That's unfortunate, but I don't think I said anything unnecessarily inflammatory - rather just tying together concepts each claimed by the red and blue tribes that they mostly use to talk past each other.

I'm sure there are _some_ discretionary choices made but ... what does a shutdown that doesn't hurt look like? At some level, the government is huge and expensive, and society is adapted to it continuing to operate. If we had a no-pain way to not spend all that money, we should do it. But I'm guessing that putting up some fences around a few monuments is pretty cheap (it's not like they put up a fence around the whole grand canyon or something) relative to the funds that are being stopped.

I think the political showmanship here is that it's easy to have an above-the-fold image of a "closed due to shutdown" sign in front of the Lincoln memorial that's immediately comprehensible, but there's not a great pic to show more substantive but dry government work that doesn't happen or gets delayed. It's hard to visually instantly convey "you're still paying all your taxes but you're getting a whole lot less government right now."

If everyone's turn-by-turn navigation stopped working, there would be riots in the streets (if they could figure out how to get there).

If you want to bring attention to the everyday person, turning off GPS would definitely get their immediate attention.

Don't a lot of modern systems combine GPS with GLONASS and Galileo?

Pretty much every smartphone younger than four years.

Also most receivers for super economically important things like a avionics or marine navigation, but shutting off WAAS specifically (augmented accuracy data for GPS broadcasted using a much smaller set of satellites) would affect air traffic that need it to land in low visibility at an increasing number of airports.

Though, to the OP's point about GPS, WAAS is operated by the FAA, so it isn't clear to me whether not passing the defense authorization would affect it in the near term.

If they stop paying the ATC controllers, there won't be any planes needing to land. So no problem! /s

I don't actually expect GPS to be impacted in the coming week, but I think the big difference is that in the last partial shutdown, DoD funding had already been separately approved in September [2,3], and the shutdown started months later [1]. This cycle, b/c the NDAA has _not_ been passed, the DoD will be meaningfully impacted [4]:

- service members will not be paid

- some post and base services, commissaries and medical procedures may be stopped

Note that legislation has been proposed but not adopted to make sure that military personnel are paid even during a government shutdown. Note also that key military promotions/confirmations have been blocked for months in the Senate. It really seems like Congress does is not currently taking the military and national security seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_State...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5895

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6157

[4] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/27/1201956915/government-shutdow...

> Note also that key military promotions/confirmations have been blocked for months in the Senate.

One man in the Senate is responsible for this one.

Non-essential civil service (a substantial part of DOD operations) will not be working come Monday (unless an agreement is reached by then) unless they are on multi-year funds. Program offices and large portions of logistics are largely staffed by civil service at this point so this could have huge impacts on military readiness.

> One man in the Senate is responsible for this one.

One man bears special responsibility, but as the recent confirmation of 3 top appointments shows, there are mechanisms that could be brought to bear. My (limited) understanding is that Senate holds can be ended with a cloture vote, so any 60 Senators could agree to move the nominations to consideration.

No, it's not.

GPS is far from the only GNSS now. This whole shutdown business justifies our EU decision to develop GALILEO despite the cost and the Americans not being too happy about it.

EU Galileo, RU GLONASS, and CN BeiDou constellations all continue to operate but GPS receivers are not allowed to receive their broadcasts within the United States for political reasons only.

Signals from Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou (and other semi-regional navigation satellite constellations) can be received in the US. Any decent GNSS receiver you can purchase in the US will be able to receive all 4 major global constellations. I know this cause I work with them everyday.

Even the typical “premium” cellphone will receive all 4. (I know some Android manufacturers disable the used of BeiDou, but they can still receive it.) The iPhone 15 Pro’s tech specs mention “Precision dual-frequency GPS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC)”.

Yea. Even if not officially approved by the FCC etc, the signals are still being broadcast. So there may be interference, but the signals are there and often receivable.

The problem is really just that while premiums consumer devices support basically all GNSS providers, that's not true of a lot of devices. There is a lot of cheap/old/specialized systems out there that are still GPS only.

In the case of a GPS shutdown, I'm not worried about my iPhone 15. However, what is currently in place and certified for flight in a 30 year old 757? Have they gotten around to generic GNSS support or is it just GPS? I honestly don't know and would rather we didn't have to find out the hard way.

The "interference" is actually how GNSS systems work and it makes things better.

> Any decent GNSS receiver you can purchase in the US will be able to receive all 4 major global constellations. I know this cause I work with them everyday.

All common handset devices used in CONUS (every iphone, android phone, etc) will ignore BeiDou signals. Would love if someone hacked the GNSS firmware to make it usable, but haven't seen it happen yet. If you travel outside the CONUS geofence these signals will show on the device, but FCC has some mandate requesting a block, so it's blocked.

>All common handset devices used in CONUS (every iphone, android phone, etc) will ignore BeiDou signals.

This is correct for smartphones and the likes (all handsets??), though not entirely correct for all GNSS receivers. For example, I regularly use receivers with uBlox F9P chipsets with BeiDou enabled from factory [0].

>Would love if someone hacked the GNSS firmware to make it usable, but haven't seen it happen yet.

If we ask the Broadcom or Qualcomm engineers nicely, they might tell us how to unblock them for their smartphone chipsets in the US. I might’ve seen it before :)

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ardusimple/AS-RTK...

Plus, some receivers can work with signals coming from different cobstellations, e.g. one GPs, one GLoNAS and one Galileo, in order to provide a proper position.

It will receive them, but it won't use them without FCC approval. (Or isn't supposed to.)

https://www.gps.gov/spectrum/foreign/

I think technically they should only receive for Galileo in the US - unless any of the others have also received exceptions from the FCC.

While in other countries, presumably your phone turns on the additional sources.

Not sure about “technically” or what the legal situation is. In practice, I know consumer smartphones in the US use a combination of all 4 constellations for positioning. If you have Android, you can easily verify this using various apps. If you're on the west coast (California Bay Area, at least), you can even receive unreliable signals from one or two Japanese QZSS satellites, which are supposed to be regional over the Asia-Oceania region. You can even see a few SBAS satellites (mainly used in aviation.)

My - few years old, mid-range - Android phone shows that it is using 5 of the 6 GLONASS satellites in view as part of its fix. (In California, USA.)

Edit: Using GPS Test: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chartcross...

Have an American model Android phone. Used it in Mexico, the US and Ireland. In all places it used GLONASS, GPS and Galileo equally (assuming equal satellite visibility, of course).

It's been legal to use Galileo signals in the US for several years now. https://www.gps.gov/spectrum/foreign/

I never could find where the US authorization was for GLONASS signals. I imagine it was included in some kind of bilateral treaty between US and Russia. The program to authorize later constellations (which Galileo went through) was not in place yet. It's like everything they issued since then ignores that we were using those signals since the 2000's.

I'm currently in a basement in the US, and my cheap phone GPS has acquired 6 US, 4 Russian and 4 European satellites in view.

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