Comments on: Solar Flares Could Seriously Disrupt GPS Receivers

By: OmarTheAlien

OmarTheAlien — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:52:35 +0000

Perfect Storm: Earth’s magnetic field collapses, Sun vomits solar flares ten AU’s (and bigger). All life on Earth (except cockroaches) perish, Earth heals across lonely centuries, brain eating amoeba come out of the seas, find no brains, starve to death, Earth and roaches happy.

By: Lauren the Ghoti

Lauren the Ghoti — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:12:16 +0000

Nah. ‘Flares’ is the topic.

Next up: Railroad flares

• • • • • • •

#11 – Mike Voice

“And those re-broadcast signals would be immune to degradation by the flare?”

Well, they’d certainly be relayed on a very different band, one maybe not ‘immune’ but definitely less susceptible to serious disruption…

By: OhForTheLoveOf

OhForTheLoveOf — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:19:10 +0000

#9 and #10 –

And of course these flares have no affect on temperature.

Comment by MikeN — 10/1/2007 @ 5:59 am

And of course these flares’ effects on temperature have nothing to do with whether or not human contributions to greenhouse gasses are causing more of any resulting heat to be trapped in Earth’s atmosphere.

Thanks for the red herring, though.

Comment by Lauren the Ghoti — 10/1/2007 @ 9:29 am

AND greenhouse gases heat the Earth because idiot leaders like George Bush keeps promoting the myth of Christianity and covering up for pedophile priests who secretly plant cameras in all our bathrooms for the NSA (which stands of Nazi States of America)…

Okay…

Is the thread hijacked yet?

By: Mike Voice

Mike Voice — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:50:09 +0000

5 one way some current receivers get around such inaccuracies is placing GPS receivers at known location and measuring and then rebroadcasting the difference between the known location and the measured location.

And those re-broadcast signals would be immune to degradation by the flare?

By: Lauren the Ghoti

Lauren the Ghoti — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:29:34 +0000

And of course these flares’ effects on temperature have nothing to do with whether or not human contributions to greenhouse gasses are causing more of any resulting heat to be trapped in Earth’s atmosphere.

Thanks for the red herring, though.

By: MikeN

MikeN — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:59:14 +0000

And of course these flares have no affect on temperature.

By: GigG

GigG — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:47:55 +0000

Google the following

WAAS
LAAS
RAIM

Not to worry though. The FAA isn’t going to be sutting down the ground basied navigation system (VOR/ILS) any time soon.

By: Charles Nicolosi

Charles Nicolosi — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:39:31 +0000

ummm…isn’t the airline industry in the process of switching to some kind of GPS tracking system?

By: Mac Guy

Mac Guy — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:36:21 +0000

The real question is: will it finally kill Vista?

By: Scruffy Dan

Scruffy Dan — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:15:31 +0000

one way some current receivers get around such inaccuracies is placing GPS receivers at known location and measuring and then rebroadcasting the difference between the known location and the measured location.

GPS receivers in the field will then have a good idea of the inaccuracies in he measured location and be able to apply a correction value to the measured location.

This tends to vastly increase the accuracy of of GPS receivers under ‘normal conditions’ considerably and wold likely also improve accuracy during solar flairs… i think

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:44:10 +0000

Boy am I glad my enlistment ends in 2010, I would hate to have to support totally failing GPS units!

By: Gary_in_WA

Gary_in_WA — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:42:14 +0000

Doesn’t this fall under the “Duh!” category?

By: Lauren the Ghoti

Lauren the Ghoti — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:37:03 +0000

Tunnel Vision Alert:

The upcoming spike in solar activity is going to disrupt one Hell of a lot more than just GPS… the effects on most systems won’t be as severe as with GPS, but there’ll be a lot of it, and for quite a while.

By: Greg Allen

Greg Allen — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:28:38 +0000

This is a very good point — we ham radio operators are well aware of these solar flares and how they affect our hobby. If I remember right, one practically brought down the 10 meter band in 1989.

Solar flares don’t affect all frequencies the same (I’m not sure which the GPS broadcast on) so any air traffic control should have redundant systems.

Best would be to have one redundancy be non-radio. Could something be done with laser beacons from the ground maybe? Or maybe even from low flying satellites? Like a new high-tech form of the old light houses? (I’m just brainstorming here.)