Okay for serious, if an apocalypse-like event happened on Earth, for how long would GPS continue to be usable/useful? Let's say all the ground stations are suddenly unmanned
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A ground-based GPS unit would keep operating "normally" for six months to a year at least, I hope
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Two weeks IIRC. The satellites need to be manually adjusted apparently.
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Thank you for being the first person with a direct answer! This actually helps me a lot. Do you have a source by any chance
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I researched this for my sci book http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ Positional accuracy is pretty good for six months but then degrades rapidly from then as satellite orbits and atomic clocks drift. References in the book bibliography
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The satellites do most of the work autonomously. Getting a good GPS lock will get slower if you can't download ephemeris data over the Internet in advance, but considering standalone GPS receivers still work... it should last as long as stationkeeping fuel remains.
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The problem is that the ephemeris data is adjusted continually with new data from ground station tracking. So over time the satellites will move further from the orbits specified, resulting in increasingly poor accuracy. The question is, how quickly does that drift occur?
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