Forty years later, Rockwell celebrates first GPS signal

CEDAR RAPIDS - When a team at Rockwell Collins received the first Global Positioning System signal 40 years ago, they thought it hadn't worked. A 'profound” message they thought they would have decoded from the government satellite only had a stream of 'A”s.

'We had actually thought we failed until we talked to the government and they said ‘did you receive the message' and we said ‘yeah.' They said ‘what'd you get' and we said ‘it's just a string of As.' And they said, ‘that's it,'” former employee John Keefer told a Rockwell crowd Wednesday.

Former Rockwell employees gathered in Cedar Rapids this week to celebrate their work on GPS technology, including the anniversary of a team receiving the first GPS signal in 1977.

'It was all new, young engineers. One of the advantages of being fairly young and naive is, you don't know what you cannot do. So when they gave us a challenge we did it,” said James Maxted, a former employee and now an associate professor of engineering at the University of Iowa.

To get the signal, Rockwell employees had to use a six-foot tall receiver with seating for two. It took a forklift to move it, a far cry from handheld devices used today. While colleagues worked inside, one employee, David Van Dusseldorp, sat on a company rooftop and adjusted an antenna every five minutes.

'We had to build a totally new radio receiver type for a signal format that had not existed before and designed to receive extremely weak signals from satellites,” said Norbert Hemesath, former technical director.

Around 1:40 a.m. on July 19, 1977 in Cedar Rapids, the team acquired the signal.

'I don't know that 40 years ago, 35 years ago, anyone that was associated with GPS could have foreseen what we're living with today,” Hemesath said.

The Gazette wrote about the occasion with a one-column article on the right-hand side of page 4. 'Collins starts last, but gets signal first,” the headline read.

The Cedar Rapids-based company had competition from Magnavox and Texas Instruments, all of which wanted to win a government contract. One employee at Wednesday's event said he bet a military officer a case of beer Rockwell would win, which the officer doubted.

The employee found a case of Budweiser on his desk soon after the signal was received.

Loren DeGroot, Rockwell's former vice president of GPS programs, called the GPS work 'the most exciting program I've had experience on.”

GPS became more widespread in the 1980s and 1990s after a Korean flight was shot down by a Soviet pilot. The Korean flight, KAL007, deviated from its planned route and flew into Soviet airspace.

President Ronald Reagan ordered access to the United States' satellite navigation systems made available worldwide soon after.

'The KAL007 shootdown could have been prevented absolutely, no doubt, had it had GPS to determine where it was and a telegraphy to transmit that position to air traffic control,” DeGroot said Wednesday.

GPS was 'a revolution in navigation,” the Los Angeles Times quoted DeGroot in 1985.

'The applications are limited only by our intellectual curiosity,” he said at the time.

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