Solar Flare

[Mark Wheeler]

Today is July 8th. Could the July 3rd solar flare still be inhibitting the LS+'s ability to lock fixes? This morning I spent 4 hours on a site with PDOP between 1.3 and 1.4. 4 Constellation satellyte availability varied, but was generally very good. At times excellent. For topo I had confidence set on 6 and then backed it down to 3 or 4 to speed things up. Most of the work was in the open and at times I would wait 5 minutes with all 4 engines floating. For the majority of the time I would only get 1 fixed engine (usually engine 1). This varied throughout the morning, but definitely not good results. Last Friday I updated to the latest softwware. This issue could be related to the update or it might be the fallout from the Solar Flare. Has anyone else had any issues this past week?

 

[Matt Johnson]

What was the source of your corrections?

Space weather has been good the last 24 hours with no radio blackout impacts, solar radiation storm impacts or geomagnetic storm impacts: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/impacts/space-weather-and-gps-systems#

 

[Shawn Billings]

Try disabling Galileo during these periods to see if your performance improves.

 

[Brian Ray]

I was experiencing a similar issue after updating to the current release version this weekend.
I was had open sky at base and rover and only one engine would fix.
I started the units the following day and they worked fine with 4 engines on both of my LS+ rovers.
Tried again later that day and the still worked fine.

My field crew said that yesterday, the 8th, they mainly had one engine all day on both LS+ rovers.
They were in some areas with tree canopy and some in the open.
They're back out today with them, so we'll see if this is happens again.

They did disable Galileo yesterday at times and it didn't seem to help.
If they run into the same problem today, I asked them to take some photos of the engine screen.

 

[Mark Wheeler]

Today I set it up in the front yard both with the RTN and as Base/Rover. No issues at all. This was about 10 miles from Thursday's site.

 

[Brian Ray]

Okay, so my guys did have the same issue today.
Here's a photo of the engine screen.
You'll see that the only engine that fixed appears to just be using GPS sats. only.
This is the same issue I saw this weekend after updating my two LS+ units with the latest release software.
My regular LS seemed to work fine with the new update. At the same time it had 2 engines fixed at the same location as the plus units, same base.