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Shortly after our Startup Tour began this summer, Heath Ledger died. No, not Heath Ledger the actor, who died a couple years ago of an accidental drug overdose — Heath Ledger, my four year-old Garmin NUVI GPS who spoke with an Australian accent. My Heath had been going quietly insane for some time. This is his story.

It seemed like nothing serious at first — a forgotten route, a missed turn, some confusion about where home was. Heath was still Heath but maybe a step slower than in his youth. Then he started routing us gratuitously, sending us to places we didn’t want to go. After that came the endless loops, which with a driver like me sometimes aren’t noticed until the third lap. Heath, in advanced age, was experiencing dementia. It’s not supposed to work that way (this is digital of course — perfect) but it was.

Drive across America visiting little companies in little cities and your GPS becomes you best friend. Only this best friend had forgotten my name.

Time for a new Heath.

Bought on sale for $134 at Best Buy somewhere in Illinois, my new Heath is a NUVI 255 with a bigger screen, faster processor, and overall badder attitude than the Heath he replaced. After 10,000 miles and almost 200 hours of driving together, I know this new Heath very well. And I don’t always trust him.

It’s like playing a video game so many times to where you come to understand the flow of the game and how it functions on a level maybe even the programmers didn’t consciously know or intend. That’s how I understand this new Heath, my driving partner and sometime enemy. He doesn’t lose his mind like the Heath he replaced, but he doesn’t always like me, either.

Indulge me while I explain my understanding of Heath’s routing algorithm.

To my new Heath, faster means faster and shorter means shorter no matter how stupid the route turns out to be in human terms. So if you tell Heath you want the shortest route and there are many possible choices but one is 40 feet shorter than the others despite having 60 percent more turns and stops, Heath will save the 40 feet. Same for faster, even if faster requires cutting a corner by taking a one-lane dirt road in your 34-foot RV. The speed limit in his database says 65, after all, even if you can only go 30.

Heath has done both of these things to me.

One of the joys of GPS, of course, is its nonjudgemental nature. Heath rolls with the punches no matter how many bonehead turns I make. But even in his compensation for my mistakes he mocks me, pulling a fast one by, essentially, maintaining two sets of rules.  His jabs are subtle.

You see Heath has two routing modes that I don’t know what they call in Kansas where Garmins come from, but I call the two modes smart ass and dumb ass.

Smart ass mode is invoked whenever I make a wrong turn. “Recalculating… As soon as possible turn around and go back,” says Heath. Or he’ll say, “Recalculating,,, As soon as possible make a U-turn.” In smart ass mode, you see, Heath questions my judgement, undermining me in front of my children.

But Heath never second-guesses himself, because if he isn’t recalculating Heath never looks back. He doesn’t even appear to know there is a road behind him.  In this mode Heath is like an Italian Formula One driver who throws away his rearview mirror because what‘s behind him doesn’t matter. That’s dumb ass mode where Heath could backtrack half a mile saving half an hour but won’t ever do that. I first realized this in some small town when I got off the freeway for gas and — rather than put me right back on the highway a hundred yards from the pump — Heath guided me slowly through town before putting me back on the very same highway.

As the expression goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Ask Heath for a handful of distances, like how far it is to the nearest Mexican restaurant, and he’ll instantly spit out half a dozen places within a few miles. Not so fast: those distances are as the sombrero flies — un-routed. That 5.7 miles to Dos Perros in Durham, North Carolina could in fact be 10 miles or even 20. All you can know for sure is that it isn’t 5.7. Not even close.

GPS helps us eventually find places while, at the same time, putting us in our places. It’s a love-hate relationship, at least for me.

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The Government Accountability Office, a Federal watchdog agency, reported on May 7th that the Global Positioning System of satellites used for navigation and many other business and scientific purposes as well as for proving that your teenage son was actually driving down the Interstate at 100 miles-per-hour last Thursday night when he claimed to be bowling, well that satellite system is in danger of becoming unusable because satellites are not being replaced quickly enough by the U.S. Air Force.

Only it isn’t true.

Right now on Google News you can find more than 400 stories all saying the same thing with varying degrees of alarm.  The Air Force is three years late in launching a new generation of GPS satellites.  The replacement program is over-budget by more than $700 million.  The whole mess has been incompetently run and ought to be fixed.  All this is true.  What isn’t true is that it matters very much to the real world operation of the GPS system or its users.

The GPS system has 31 satellites in orbit right now, the oldest of which has been operating since 1990.  For the system to work perfectly it must have 24 or more satellites functioning.  The GAO says it is only 80 percent certain that the Air Force can maintain full coverage before replacement satellites can be launched.  This lack of confidence is not based strictly on the idea that eight or more satellites will go dark over the next couple years, but that some undetermined number of satellites will go dark, the Air Force will make no progress in replacing them, and that the remaining satellites will be unable, for some reason, to be moved into new positions, filling gaps in coverage.  That’s quite a combination of improbable events and makes me very suspicious of the 80 percent number.

For the GPS system to work requires that the receiver in your car, airplane or iPhone  be able to simultaneously track at least three satellites (four if you require altitude information).  If your receiver can show the satellites it is tracking (many can) you’ll see the number in sight is usually five to seven satellites with the rest being over the horizon and out of view.

If your GPS equipment was purchased in the last couple years it probably makes use of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), which is a system of ground stations and two geosynchronous satellites that help your receiver correct for ionospheric variations that can slightly degrade GPS performance. Without WAAS your GPS is only accurate to 7.6 meters.  With WAAS accuracy is about one meter.  The reason we care about this is because GPS is used now to land airplanes and the difference between 3.8 meters above the runway and 3.8 meters below the runway could ruin your whole day.

In addition to improving GPS accuracy over North America (and just North America — there are different systems for Europe and Japan), WAAS also effectively adds two virtual satellites to the GPS constellation.  These are the two geosynchronous reporting satellites, which for ease of use in the system are treated by receivers like regular GPS satellites except they for some reason don’t seem to move in the sky.  For WAAS-enabled GPS receivers, then, it is possible to maintain acceptable accuracy with only ONE (not three) of the regular GPS satellites in view.

The chances of the GPS system going down are very remote — FAR lower than the 20 percent suggested by the GAO.  That’s because the GAO ignored completely in its analysis the implications of WAAS.

So what’s going on here?  Why is this even a story?

The Air Force is late and over budget and the GAO wants to make a point of that.  The best way to make that point is by putting the technical story in the worst possible light, which the GAO has done to an extreme that I think is excessive.  This is just political infighting.

What’s worse, though, are those 400+ news stories that miss the point entirely.  Where is a professional and questioning press?  It looks to me like 400+ media outlets rewrote the GAO press release and left it at that, giving-in to the fear-mongering that has become the way government policy is promoted these days.

Some stories quoted experts saying a failure isn’t likely.  Some stories said the GAO likely has a non-technical agenda.  But I couldn’t find any stories that put the whole thing together and questioned whether there was any news value at all.

We need smarter, better-informed, and less gullible reporters.  THAT’s the story.