It’s Hard to Ban GPS Stations in Russia That Don’t Exist

News websites spanning a wide readership from Gizmodo to the Wall Street Journal and Russian site RT reported Tuesday that Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries, plans to ban operation of U.S. GPS monitoring sites in Russia.

This evidently is a reaction to language in the 2014 Defense Department authorization bill that barred Russia from setting up monitoring sites for its Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS, in the United States.

The only problem with these media reports is the United States operates 12 GPS master control stations and 16 monitoring sites globally, and none are located in Russia, according to the official U.S. website about the Global Positioning System.

Evidently Rogozin (and the news reports) confused data rich GPS monitoring sites with the worldwide network of Continuously Operating Reference Stations used to monitor earthquake activity, which pass only a limited amount of geodesic data.