Meinberg GPS receivers are ready to handle the April 6, 2019 Week Number Rollover

On 6 April 2019 the GPS system, used by many organizations for critical infrastructure, will perform a rollover. The rollover is the result of a legacy GPS navigation message which gives a week number as a 10-bit parameter. As a result, the week number parameter in the GPS navigation message needs to reset to zero every 1024 weeks. That means from that date onwards, we are likely to start seeing rollover problems in GPS receivers that aren’t programmed to cope with the week number reset.

Meinberg has a different approach with their own GPS receivers. Instead of a 10-bit parameter, Meinberg’s firmware uses a 16-bit week number, and it is simply incremented at the end of each week.

This means that by the first rollover on August 21, 1999, the week number sent by the satellites rolled from 1023 back to 0, while the internal (Meinberg) week number simply counted to 1024, then to 1025 and so forth. So, on April 6, 2019, the GPS week counter will reset to 0, but our internal one, which will have been reached the value of 2047 by that time, will continue to count in a consecutive order.

More information about the GPS Week Number Rollover can be found on our Knowledge Base


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