nice dry run for us to learn from thanks BP
she mentioned putting a gps in a faraday cage and thought occurred to me. i know most comms satellites are in geostationary orbit above the equator, but could a massive man made emp take them out and make all of our satellite dependant technology redundant?
i dont know much about this, but i would have thought a natural EMP would do this? then yes, all your satellite techno would be so much scrap metal. as someone who wants to go back to a more basic lifestyle on the land i shall look forward to this!
Sats get nukes by solr flares all the time. They are outside the earths natural shielding. So with an EMP they would be so much floating debris.
However, there are so many variables; No of sats, position of EMP, power used that it isn't going to do any harm to store one anyway. A GPS reciever picks of signals from a few sats and even if only three are working you can use your GPS.
If the satelites themselves do not have their chronometers rest twice a day they become space junk within 48 hours as their accuracy goes out the window, they are all harmonised with an atomic clock in Cheyenne mountain IIRC twice a day. Apparently time is not relative and moves at different speeds!!
if you've got a GPS it's worth while storing it in a faraday cage if an EMP man made or solar flare based hit just in case enough sats survive but at the end of the these hing will eventually fail or you'll run out of batteries or the rechargeable ones will run out
so map reading and the proper use of a compass will be invaluable
Unless the EMP is world wide, and I doubt it, there would still be lots of sats up there, but weither your GPS would be able to pick them up over a distant country is another thing
I did read two days ago, that they are not quiet sure if batteries would survive if already in an apliance at the time of the EMP,.. so the key there is to keep rechargable batteries seperatly and get yourself a wind/hand charger of some kind