LightSquared plays the patriot card in spectrum battle

LightSquared has gotten craftier in its public relations campaign against the GPS device industry.

Last week it filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission and issued a public statement that essentially painted a picture of GPS device makers as having willfully ignored government recommendations on GPS receiver design, placing themselves squarely in the interference jam that would result if LightSquared’s proposed long-term evolution network goes live. These weren't just any random recommendations. They came from the Department of Defense, which launched the Global Positioning System satellite network in the first place and is the closest thing the GPS industry has to a standards body. In 2008, the DoD issued a Standard Positioning Service Performance Standard that set guidelines for receiver design aimed at avoiding interference from other L-band transmitters. The gist of it is that receivers need to filter out adjacent airwaves to prevent them from overpowering GPS signals. LightSquared also pointed to similar recommendations made by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) back in 2000.