Offshoreonly.com - BoatUS does it again

This organization does some very good work as an advocate for boaters. Support hem, they are our friends and comrades.

"Exactly 15,009 recreational boaters showed up at Federal Communications Commission headquarters in Washington DC July 26 to tell the agency: “Don’t mess with GPS!”

Well, all those boaters didn’t actually turn out in person, you understand, but in the form of eight large file boxes filled with their printed comments regarding an FCC ruling that could very well compromise the nation’s Global Positioning System (GPS). At issue is the agency’s conditional approval for a new nationwide broadband wireless telephone network, which, subsequent tests have shown, could cause significant interference with most GPS signals. That’s why BoatU.S. mounted a grassroots campaign that encouraged boaters to file official comments on the issue and offered to deliver their messages — quite literally — to FCC in their place.

“Boaters expressed a wide variety of concerns about what interference with the GPS signal could mean in the areas where they use their boats but the overall message came through loud and clear: ‘Leave my GPS alone’,” reports BoatU.S. Vice President of Government Affairs, Margaret Podlich.

Last January 26 FCC approved the proposal of a private company called LightSquared to use the radio frequency bandwidth adjacent to frequencies used by the relatively weak GPS signals for cell phone transmissions. That approval came subject to assurances the new service would not interfere with GPS signals and accuracy. A subsequent report to FCC released June 20, however, includes the statement that, “all phases of the LightSquared deployment plan will result in widespread harmful interference to GPS signals and service and that mitigation is not possible.”

When FCC announced a public comment period on the report but for an unusually short 30 days, BoatU.S. undertook the grassroots alert campaign and subsequent in-person document delivery.

Actually, Podlich said, three days after the initial delivery BoatU.S. physically delivered another 1,700-plus paper comments from boaters, on the Friday before the weekend deadline. But wait! On paper? This is 2011, after all, in the electronic era, so why couldn’t boaters file comments on-line?

“We found the formal FCC electronic filing process to be very complex and not particularly user-friendly,” Podlich reports. “There wasn’t a single fixed form that boaters could fill out automatically so the simplest way — not the easiest, of course — was to take comments electronically ourselves, then print out and deliver the results. We had no idea what to expect but, obviously, this hit a nerve with boaters and if FCC is listening, now they know how critical it is to have a reliable navigation system, not just for boaters and anglers, of course, but for pilots, drivers, outdoor adventurers, and first responders. It is unimaginable that the federal government – the guardian of the bandwidth – would consider approving a proposal with so many problems and grave public safety consequences, she added.”
BoatU.S. is a member of the Coalition to Save Our GPS, which is working to resolve this serious threat to the GPS system.

http://www.boatus.com/gov/dontmesswithgps.asp