GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet

(sciencealert.com)

41 points | by thread_id 19 hours ago

6 comments

  • chaps 1 minute ago
    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-...

  • 1e1a 45 minutes ago
    Wouldn't RTK help mitigate this, as the base stations would also be affected by the atmospheric disturbance?
  • delta_p_delta_x 11 minutes ago
    *10 metres
  • NooneAtAll3 55 minutes ago
    were other satellite positioning systems affected as well? was it checked that it wasn't just a misconfig on US command side?
  • ck2 58 minutes ago
    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...

    • z2 43 minutes ago
      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...

      • ck2 4 minutes ago
        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

  • Insimwytim 33 minutes ago
    TL;DR:

    1. Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear.

    2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim.

    3. Navigation issues happened before, they state it right there. They were more disruptive as well.

    Every presented link seem to have this awful Cloudflare js challenge.

    Bad article overall.

    The author has articles all over the topics. Everything is sensationalized.

    • Elidrake24 5 minutes ago
      > Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear.

      My brother in christ it's the first 3 words of the article.