In a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, rather than storing both
GPS satellite ephemeredes and almanacs to the GPS receiver's on-chip
non-volatile memory, storing into the non-volatile memory only the more
recent ephemeris or almanac data for each satellite. When an ephemeris
expires, the parameters in the ephemeris are converted into corresponding
parameters of an almanac. The ephemeris or almanac is used to determine
whether a given satellite is visible to the GPS receiver. A method of the
present invention allows efficient use of the memory space in the
non-volatile memory. A study by the inventors shows that differences in
positions and velocities of satellites estimated using aged ephemeris and
almanac data associated with the same week number are insignificant.