GPS Operation Threatened Again!
Current Ligado and GPS Conflict (May 2020)
As before in May 2012, Phillip Falcone is again leading a corporate attempt to infringe on the GPS L-band operation. Once associated with Lightsquared, he now heads Ligado which is again backed by an FCC approval in an attempt to expand upon its 40 MHz of spectrum within a band of 1500-1700 MHz L-band spectrum jeopardizing the operation of one million GPS receivers in use in the commercial and defense domains. This time, Ligado is working to deliver 5G using its Sky Terra 1 satellite with total disregard for the risk imposed on existing commercial and defense systems.
As a member of the 1980's IBM FSD team that developed the GPS Ground Station and did so in such a way as to deliver very high accuracy that met and exceeded all expectations, I feel a great sense of distress that the intended benefits of this effort are now in jeopardy.
In addition, I am dismayed that the means to interfere with GPS operations are now so widely known that a bad actor may replicate the Ligado interference as a means to disable GPS somewhere and sometime in the future when it really matters. As before, I again hope that the operators of GPS will now shore up this vulnerability in such a way that GPS can be the secure operation intended.