This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people getting reincarcerated after their electronic monitoring devices mistakenly report them leaving their homes.
Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...
TFA article claims: "Indeed, the solar storm of May 2024 is estimated to have cost the US agricultural industry $500 million due to disruptions in precision navigation."
This seems hard to believe. The link provided hand waves through how it maybe could happen, and ends with an Economist just SWAGing that it could have been maybe a dollar an acre or so.
"He estimates that affected farms lost about $1 per acre. Nationally, this equates to an estimated half-billion dollars in lost earning potential, Griffin says."
So yeah, hard to believe was the right call. Very few farms were affected, but if we assume half of the total 900 million acres of farm land were, add 10% to get a round number, and guess it at a dollar per acre, we get the quoted big number.
That’s how all “estimated damages” work. It’s all just made up by some random person who guesstimated a number then multiplied it by the maximum possible people effected, realistic or not.
There’s probably a reasonable methodology but it has a lot of multiplications and some base parameters that make the whole thing wildly sensitive.
An interesting warning as Austin is blanketed by Cybercabs. I think a town full of golden driverless cars 33 feet from where they think they should be is terrifying.
I would be shocked if Cybercabs solely rely on GPS for positioning. I imagine they look at their surrondings, etc.
Wouldn't RTK help mitigate this, as the base stations would also be affected by the atmospheric disturbance?
I think so, yes. That's the main purpose of RTK
Somehow, Selective Availability returned.
Maybe not intentionally (at least by the U.S. Government, but the consequences are far greater now.
Now that GPS has subsumed a large part of air navigation as more VOR and ILS approaches at non-towered airports are being left to fall into disrepair, it forces more and more aircraft operating in instrument conditions to fall back to a navigation system that may not operate to the tolerances that you need to shoot an approach to LPV minimums (which puts you close to 200 feet or so above the ground) or LNAV minimums (higher, but still pretty low to the ground). If you lose signal integrity, you abort the approach. You don't want to break out at minimums only to find that the runway is 33 feet to the left or right of the centerline when it's not a circling only approach where you're expecting it. If that field only has RNAV (GPS) approaches, you have to divert. Hopefully the alternate airport you filed has a ground based approach plate available that is authorized .
When SA was around, we had more VORs, more VOR and ILS approaches, and while NDBs (decades old radionavigation beacon that operated on the AM band) were on their way out, they were still around.
One of the reasons SA was discontinued was that if you knew the coordinates of a base station, you could correct for the error. Are airports not doing this already?
*10 metres
were other satellite positioning systems affected as well? was it checked that it wasn't just a misconfig on US command side?
The linked actual research article did look at multiple GNSS systems. GPS is presumably being reported out of familiarity https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124645
[dead]
TL;DR:
1. Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear.
1.1. One would expect that to be put in the title, when the article is written almost a year after that.
1.2. No, the article doesn't state that in the first paragraph. Posting in it full seem to be the only way to fend off lazy comments:
In November 2025, Earth was buffeted by several massive eruptions of solar material that slammed into the magnetosphere.
2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim.
UPD: Commenter below found the source, but TFA doesn't make a good job of presenting that as a source of the 33 feet glitch claim, but rather posts another citation from it.
They should've just quote this and be done with it:
During the storm main phase, an east–west elongated band of intense auroral brightness expanded equatorward, producing a horizontally extended strip of strong density gradients that favored the development of small-scale irregularities. These small-scale irregularities triggered pronounced amplitude scintillations (S4 > 0.5) and caused significant positioning errors exceeding 10 m—large enough to disrupt GNSS-dependent applications across CONUS for hours, particularly precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries. [1]
4. The author has articles all over the topics. Everything is sensationalized.
5. Every presented link seem to have this awful Cloudflare js challenge.
Bad article overall.
P.S. Response to the false claim below - no, there's nothing about GPS in "the first 3 words of the article".
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL12...
>P.S. A separate comment would be too much to respond to the false claim below - no, there's nothing about GPS in "the first 3 words of the article".
He's talking about your first (incorrect) claim. The article begins "In November 2025"
> 2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim.
7th paragraph of the article states the source, and contains a link to research paper where they go into great detail.
> Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear.
My brother in christ it's the first 3 words of the article.
Their first line is TL;DR!
not just space weather, I am pretty sure the atmosphere is being disturbed by toxic human activity both by accident and on purpose
I've run outside every morning for decades and used Garmin with GPS since 2015, I've never had so much trouble
Garmins finally supports dual-band (L1+L5) and BeiDou on newest models but it's still not enough to compensate, I have to use a Stryd footpod to guarantee accurate distances/speed
btw BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision but despite Russia's GPS being legal in US, technically BeiDou is not
* https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat...
* https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabili...
> BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision
Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians.
But, going down a rabbit hole, I found that BeiDou is way more accurate than 10m--3.6m and 2.6m outside and inside the Asia-Pacific region, respectively [1]. And that's with the most simple algorithm. It goes down to ~2.5m using dual-frequencies to account for atmospheric error.
> Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians.
Maybe in 1998, but Selective Availability was turned off in 2000, and here in the modern era: https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequen...
Oh interesting, I think I conflated two things; Selective Availability and the military-only bands on GPS. While it's true that access to the military band could improve accuracy with dual-band receivers, consumer devices can use dual-band as well (as your link shows), since there are multiple unencrypted bands from navigation satellites nowadays.
I am not sure how to interpret your link, though. It doesn't measure accuracy on it's own, and doesn't include a number for precision between the two units.
Called M-Code.
Has a fascinating history.
https://odimpact.org/case-united-states-opening-gps-data-for...
I think the new US GPS satellites have ability to do a spot beam of increased strength in a region of interest.
That is my understanding as well. But having another band allows for error correction as a side benefit.
With a base station in a known position you can get to cm resolution with somewhat pricey but decidedly hobbyist-accessible gear: https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-gps-rtk-sma-breakout-zed-f...
For resiliency reasons alone, it's been proposed to allow (stop software-disabling) BeiDou in the US, but the last time this was brought up, the administration ran out of time. It's a shame, because when there is precise coverage, it enables things like lane-level city navigation.
https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat...
yup that was my first link
but of course this administration is never going allow China-anything like low cost electric cars even if it means saving people a fortune in gas
so hopefully in 2029 it can be looked at again
or maybe Dems will also get the Senate too and can be petitioned if they run out of corruption investigations before 2029
it is critical to explain to everyone who isn't technical that GPS is "read only" and no data is being sent to China via BeiDou (just like it's not sent to Russia's Glonass) because that apparently is some kind of weird misunderstanding
on that same note if they somehow made Starlink into a lower resolution GPS backup I'd even trust that too despite personally being anti-Musk everything
Whoops I don't know how I missed that in your links!
The weird part to me is that Glonass was not approved either, yet it's as openly as allowed as Galileo that went through a tedious FCC approval process that was invented later. Grandfathered or not, we're clearly not in a worse place using Russian tech for the last 15 years.
Read only or not, relying on Chinese or Russian gps data for increased accuracy even in civilian increases dependency no? That seems like a bad idea to me. I’ve thought for about 20 years that increasing our dependence on anti democratic regimes was a risk, no matter what the benefits for global development etc. It’s not isolationist to want to only rely on your friends and not enemies. (Which is why Europe needs to disentangle itself from the US as fast as possible).
It decreases dependency on GPS and thus it decreases risk because if there's an attack on a GPS system by an adversary, it's likely that they will not be attacking their own system at the same time. I'd rather have my enemy's open source, perfectly functional clock in my back pocket than be without the time. Enjoying that the competing clock has a sub second display is optional.
It seems that all the device manufacturers (they mention Apple, Samsung, and Google) are using BeiDou anyway. I don't know if that includes Garmin watches, though.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-probes-risks-fo...
AGPS also helps if you have cell towers nearby.
This is only to make getting a fix faster - A-GPS downloads the almanac data via the internet (fast, but needs internet) instead of directly from the GPS satellites (slow but works everywhere). It doesn't make it any more accurate.
> This
As in, GPS being off by 33 feet?
> leads to people getting reincarcerated
I'm reading your article and it seems to be about police coming to check and realizing that the reporting of being miles away was in error, not people getting reincarcerted because of GPS incorrectly reporting they moved ~30 feet too far? One of these is much more insane than the other.
Not sure where your confusion is coming from. Have you never used GPS in a place with bad signal? Where it gets confused and you miss your turn? It's the same failure mode. Just the repercussions are getting arrested instead of getting off on the wrong exit.
Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/
I think the confusion is probably coming from the fact that the one reference to people being potentially re-incarcerated is buried right down the story.
> Harkins said that since last October, she has seen 30-40 people ordered back into custody based on these progress reports. When asked what can be done to improve CCSO’s EM program, Harkins said that the sheriff’s office needs to “properly and fully” investigate alleged violations before writing reports or taking actions.
FWIW I enjoyed your articles. You write very clearly.
Well, don’t commit crimes and you won’t get a gps tracker attached to you, I guess. So that’s easy.
Not really sure what it has to do with tech though. That’s a problem with how certain humans behave, not ancillary technology.
Don't live in the US.
> so presumably a number of them are attached to people who did no crimes.
You and I have very divergent views of the type of person likely to be charged or prosecuted for a crime or indeed to participate in a diversion program that involves GPS trackers, my friend.
You're claiming that erroneously reported movements by ~33 ft lead to incarceration, yet the article you're linking to reports that erroneously reported movements by ~1mi+ lead to police coming to double-check what's going on. Am I incorrect and do you therefore have examples of ~30ft errors actually leading to their incarceration, or are you struggling to see the disconnect between what you're claiming vs. what is actually happening?
As a neutral participant I think “the hostility” is probably because of your condescending tone when you said “hopefully it helps your confusion”. Your initial article really didn’t say anything about people being re-incarcerated for these sorts of errors. I really want to say “maybe you got CONFUSED and posted the wrong one!” but that would be snotty and condescending too.
But maybe you posted the wrong one to begin with.
Let’s all be friends and nice to each other.
Do you have any examples of someone getting thrown behind bars due to a GPS error on the order of ~30ft like you're claiming? That's all I'm asking. Really don't understand why you keep avoiding it. You've essentially claimed police/judges are doing something rather stupid and terrible. I'm asking you to show example(s) of what you claimed (~30ft error → thrown behind bars), not something significantly different (~1+ mi error → only-police-visit-but-not-thrown-behind-bars).
The story is about GPS errors which end up making life hell for people under monitoring since they end up generating a Police response. If 80% alerts were false, then an error like this can result in a surge of these alerts. It is an important story to tell.
Sounds like you could be a convict, have your gang interfere GPS on a local level but enough to have other people in the neighborhood notice, make a quick run for whatever you'd need to, and still claim plausible deniability.
Or you could cause such localized things more so to try to get a person sent back to prison or otherwise penalized intentionally
Also true.