Solar Events Disrupting Satellite Signals - Trimble Has a Solution

May 20, 2024

With recent solar storms and resulting disruptions to satellite signals, farmers across the globe experienced significant downtime with corrections. 

Trimble is continually monitoring satellite signals to form detailed research focused on these types of solar events to ensure they are providing farmers with the signal corrections they need.  

With the research from this and other solar activity, the team is developing technologies that will help customers gain improvements and overcome these disturbances in the future. 

While those technologies are in development, there is still something farmers can do to improve signal during these types of solar storms that are expected to continue through 2024 and 2025.  

To maintain productivity through solar peak, the number of satellites usable by the GNSS receiver is key to mitigating the impact of ionospheric effects. 

While RTK corrections rely on the capability of a base station, Trimble CenterPoint RTX, paired with a Trimble NAV-900 GNSS receiver, provides multi-constellation corrections for more than 100 navigation satellites, giving a superior performance in case of high ionospheric activity – all while still providing the centimeter-level accuracy that RTK customers seek. 

The more signals that are available to a high-quality GNSS receiver, the more equipped it will be to reduce ionospheric disturbances. 

Putting farmers in a better spot to mitigate signal disturbances in the ionosphere, CenterPoint RTX is built on a global network of base stations constantly feeding data into state-of-the-art processing centers. 

The resulting correction data is then broadcast through geostationary satellites in space and used to provide highly accurate positioning performance for precision agriculture. 

While the ionospheric increase will impact the overall performance, Trimble RTX, with its global network of base stations, can withstand these effects better than other correction services, resulting in higher productivity for farmers. 

This is why CenterPoint RTX is currently trusted by more than 100,000 farmers globally.