Another launch, and the Glonass day-number rollover

GLONASS is about to do another one of it's own rollovers. It does not use the week number like GPS and instead and uses a "day number". It resets every four years, with the next due on New Year's Day, 2020; which will be late Dec 31st here.

I am having trouble finding any hardware/software/FW specifics for this rollover, but chances are if your gear survived the last one four years ago it will be fine. And if it is newer than four years old it should have no issues. So if you are out there using GLN on New Years day, there is a (very) slight chance that whatever funkiness you experience might not just be your hangover. Keep the support numbers handy.

Europe's Galileo and China's BeiDou use 12- and 13-bit week numbers, so we have quite a bit of time before they reset to zero: February 2078 for Galileo and January 2163 for BeiDou.

Speaking of which, BDS just launched two more yesterday; bringing their nominal MEO sat BDS III constellation pretty  complete. Those two new ones and two more a month or so ago should do it sometime in early 2020. Note that BDS II is almost a separate constellation (only about 15 of those and few are MEO here) but III is a full global MEO and likely the only ones any of us will use over here (though some units can mix the few II's with III's in solution).

Galileo should complete its nominal MEO constellation this next year as well.

Geez, with all the new boards and engines out there that are designed to use all this stuff, I am tempted to develop the GavNav 2020 (only rover with a bottle opener and hand warmers) 😉