NCC Pleased With Appropriations Bill’s GPS Amendment

The House Appropriations Committee approved the FY12 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. It includes an amendment from Reps. Austria and Yoder on GPS devices.

Published: June 23, 2011
Updated: June 23, 2011

The House Appropriations Committee approved the FY12 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. It included a voice-vote adopted amendment from Reps. Austria (R-OH)/Yoder (R-KS) that prohibits funding for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to remove conditions on or permit certain commercial broadband operations until the FCC has resolved concerns of harmful interference by these operations on Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

The NCC responded, "American cotton farmers depend on GPS tools which are critical to the precision of location identification. Allowing the LightSquared proposal to go forward will infringe upon the bandwidth used by agricultural GPS, impact the accuracy upon which precision agriculture applications depend and seriously compromise its overall effectiveness."