What do you consider recent history? The design work for GPS started about 50 years ago. Shaving bits off of the L1 transmission also leads to a small but real

What do you consider recent history? The design work for GPS started about 50 years ago. Shaving bits off of the L1 transmission also leads to a small but real improvement in acquisition time. Every bit you waste on a counter that only changes every ~20 years means receivers have to wait that much longer to get the latest ephemerides (this is less of an issue nowadays since cell phones can just download almanac and ephemerides from the internet). Weeks worked nicely as a time unit due to the periodicity of the p-code signal. If you have any doubts about the competency of the people who designed GPS, IMO it's worth checking out the Woodford/Nakamura report that considered a lot of alternative implementations. From an engineering perspective, they had a lot of tradeoffs to consider but typically took the direction that made the system more user friendly but harder to implement (like not requiring receivers to have atomic clocks or transmitters). It's also interesting to see how that sort of info was presented in the pre-powerpoint days