April 6 - Hype? or a real threat to all things GPS...?

[scotslad]

Apologies if this has already been posted about and hopefully I've not been suckered by a pre-April fools prank, but there's apparently stories circulating online about an April 6 bug thats going to affect all sorts of GPS tech - a bit like the Y2K bug a few years ago.

According to ZDNet...

"A GPS Week Rollover happens because of the way the navigation signal works. The current week number is encoded into the signal message received from the satellites using a 10-bit field, and this allows for a week range from zero to 1023. The current period began back on 22 August 1999, and on 6 April 2019 the week number rolls over back to zero, where it will start counting back up to 1023.

While most modern GPS receivers shouldn't be affected by this (devices that conform to IS-GPS-200 and provides UTC will be fine), testing carried out by the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) showed that there is a possibility that some will interpret this rollover as the date shifting back to January 6, 1980, or possibly some other incorrect date."

More HERE - https://www.zdnet.com/article/some-g...after-april-6/

Anyone else heard about this?