Jordan Wallace of GPS Ontario.
North Gower GPS vendor got more than 1,600 calls in 3 days after solar storm
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
OTTAWA — On the upside, a burst of solar radiation set off a spectacular display of northern lights during the second weekend in May. On the downside, the solar flare temporarily knocked out many in-tractor GPS units when they were needed most during planting season.
Ironically, the only technological challenge for GPS systems last month was supposed to be the planned outage of a key GPS satellite between May 13 and June 7. That looming issue was known months in advance, and Jordan Wallace of GPS Ontario switched his customers to another satellite last fall. Then Mother Nature intervened to knock the alternative satellite out of commission anyway as the sun entered its most active phase in 11 years.
The affected satellite supplies a commonly used free Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) GPS signal.
“We were seeing WAAS position jumps of between 10 and 20 feet. So when you’re trying to run within 6 inches on a corn plant, 20 feet becomes a lot,” Wallace said.
He received more than 1,600 telephone calls from concerned clients all over North America between 2:30 p.m. on Friday, May 10, and noon Sunday, May 12. He temporarily switched many of them over to a demonstration version of Trimble’s proprietary Centrepoint RTX satellite to keep them going. That premium service continued to function during the solar storm but normally charges a $1,500 to $2,000 annual subscription fee. Clients were switched back to regular WAAS the following week.
The last comparable solar storm during planting season occurred more than 20 years ago, he said.
A few smaller solar storm blips are possible in early June, he suggested, though these aren’t expected to be disruptive.
Solar storms are a very serious force of nature that politicians have no illusion about controlling and rarely talk about. The biggest example in recorded history was the so-called Carrington event of 1859, which sparked fires at telegraph stations. An equivalent blast of radiation from the sun today would catastrophically knock out modern communications and power grids, possibly for years. It happens once every 100 to 1,000 years, based on solar activity knowledge, experts believe.
