I would not say the cocom limits aren't enforced, any exportable GPS receiver is required to have the cocom limits and needs a special license to unlock under EAR regulations. This means that anyone building a cubesat and using a commercial receiver has had to specifically get that exception.
You are correct, I did not mean to say that there are no more regulations on export of GPS receivers. Yes you still have to obtain an EAR license for a GPS receiver capable of tracking at > 600 m/s. But the specific CoCom limits are at least relaxed since they specified that the GPS receiver will stop functioning if velocity is > 1000 knots or the altitude is computed to be above 18,000 meters. The latter part was restricting operation of high altitude balloons which is why I believe there is only a restriction on the velocity and not altitude now.
Sorry for the mixed units, but that is the actual wording from original CoCom, for reference:
600 m/s = 1342 mph
1000 knots = 1150 mph
>The latter part was restricting operation of high altitude balloons which is why I believe there is only a restriction on the velocity and not altitude now.
A group of friends and I did a ~90,000' balloon launch on the "cheap". We used a consumer handheld GPS unit that reported it's location every 10 minutes to a server we could keep an eye on. We suffered through the issue of altitude limitations as well, but it was still better than nothing. Learned a lot of stuff from that project. A big take away was using a mobile version of Google Maps when using Lat/Long coordinates is not very accurate, as it seemed to always want to put the location close to a road. When using the same coords in the desktop version of Google Maps satellite view, the Maps' pin dropped to within 3 feet of where the payload had landed. Using the mobile version, we wandered around in the wilderness for an embarrassingly long amount of time before I got fed up with it and though there must be a better way. Using the desktop location, we were able too pretty much walk up directly to the payload.
The units used around GPS has always been interesting to me. I once received an email from you a vendor of a commercial GPS unit informing us of a bug "above Mach 15". For a scenario that pretty much only happens in space, talking about Mach 15 seemed very bizarre.
The bug ended up being that they stored Doppler shift information in a signed 16-bit integer, which is fine on Earth but breaks in orbit.
Even when there were altitude and speed limits, I think CoCOm said only said it needed to be implemented as an "and" (e.g. too high and too fast), although many manufacturers implemented it as an "or" (too high or too fast).
