Rollover in old electronics
Apr. 6th, 2019 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI am happy to keep old consumer products instead of upgrading if they continue to serve their purpose well. For example, I remain satisfied with my third-generation Amazon Kindle though maybe the later Paperwhite ones are lovely. Among my possessions is a Garmin Geko 101 GPS unit that I bought when first looking to buy land in Ohio: it helped me to tell that I was actually at the rural field that was for sale. I would look forward to it again having a similar use except that I guess smartphones now supplant it.
The Geko 101 is low-end: there is no WAAS and it does not even offer a connectivity port by which one may interface with it for data downloads or to effect upgrades but it was cheap and small, also waterproof. Mine still works fine except for revealing an amusing implementation detail: while it gets the time of day correct, it also reports a date exactly 210 weeks anteceding the present which corresponds to the ten-bit week number encoded in the signal from the satellites.
I read that the epoch for these GPS week numbers started on January 6th, 1980. Tomorrow is 211 weeks after that. I suspect that the date displayed by my Geko 101 is about to become even more wrong.
The Geko 101 is low-end: there is no WAAS and it does not even offer a connectivity port by which one may interface with it for data downloads or to effect upgrades but it was cheap and small, also waterproof. Mine still works fine except for revealing an amusing implementation detail: while it gets the time of day correct, it also reports a date exactly 210 weeks anteceding the present which corresponds to the ten-bit week number encoded in the signal from the satellites.
I read that the epoch for these GPS week numbers started on January 6th, 1980. Tomorrow is 211 weeks after that. I suspect that the date displayed by my Geko 101 is about to become even more wrong.
