AEA Joins ‘Coalition to Save Our GPS’

The Aircraft Electronics Association, along with representatives of a wide variety of industries and companies, has joined the “Coalition to Save Our GPS” to resolve a serious threat to the reliability and viability of the Global Positioning System — a national utility upon which millions of Americans rely every day.

To safeguard GPS, the Coalition seeks a number of remedies from the Federal Communications Commission, which recently granted a waiver to a company called LightSquared that allows them to repurpose the satellite spectrum immediately neighboring that of the GPS. LightSquared has been granted a conditional waiver by the FCC to build 40,000 ground stations in the U.S. that could cause widespread interference to GPS signals — endangering a national utility which millions of Americans rely on every day.

LightSquared plans to transmit ground-based radio signals that would be one billion or more times more powerful as received on Earth than GPS’s low-powered satellite-based signals, potentially causing severe interference impacting millions of GPS receivers — including those used by the federal agencies, state and local governments, first responders, airlines, mariners, civil engineering, construction and surveying, agriculture and everyday consumers in their cars and on handheld devices.

For more information, or to join the coalition, visit online at: www.saveourgps.com. To voice your concerns about GPS interference, submit your comments directly to the FCC at fccinfo@fcc.gov.