The Critical Role Of GNSS In Today's Business Ecosystems

Ronald Bisio is Senior Vice President, Field Systems, at Trimble.

While you might not be familiar with the term global navigation satellite system (GNSS), you’re likely always carrying a GNSS receiver with you. The one in your car helps you find the best route, the one in your phone enables you to easily share your location and the one in your fitness tracker tracks your trail run and pinpoints your heart rate at mile three.

GNSS is a radio navigation system providing precise positioning based on satellites orbiting Earth. It helps us in many ways as consumers but is also critical for today’s business economies, which use it to run and operate many of their most important workflows. Farmers use it to precisely manage their crops, truck drivers use it to navigate the best route and construction workers use it to accurately track where their workers and machines are on job sites, helping to keep them safe.

While most of us haven’t thought much about the relevance of GNSS in our daily lives, industry and business leaders are attuned to it because of the critical role it plays in their daily operations. When there are issues with the precision of GNSS due to things like solar storms, jamming or spoofing, major workflows can go off-kilter, negatively impacting productivity and profits. When business leaders know this technology and understand its impact, they can be better prepared to handle any issues that arise.

The History Of GNSS

The U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS)—the first GNSS—was developed in the early 1970s by the U.S. Department of Defense for military use. Trimble—the company I work for—helped commercialize GNSS in the early 1980s, greatly expanding its use for personal and professional purposes.

Today, GNSS spans the world via four global GNSS networks that belong to Europe, the U.S., China and Russia, alongside two regional networks located in Japan and India. The U.S. network consists of 24 satellites traveling in a 12-hour circular orbit over 20,000 kilometers above Earth.

Here on the ground, GNSS is a smart sensor that includes an antenna and receiver. The antenna receives satellite signals and the receiver interprets them to provide an exact location. What makes GNSS ubiquitous in everything from cars to watches is the miniaturization of GNSS modules. These systems have gone from 17 x 22 mm modules (pretty small) to now 2.4 x 2.7 mm—small enough to easily fit in smartphones and fitness trackers.

The Commercial Use Of GNSS

While we may use GNSS to verify where we are relative to the world around us, contractors, farmers and transportation providers use it to provide essential services. For example, Idaho-based Sundt Construction, a user of Trimble technology, leveraged GNSS to keep workers off the ground and in their machines while they reconstructed the I-86/I-15 interchange in Pocatello, Idaho. This helped keep workers safe while maintaining traffic flows through narrow work zones. GNSS also helped ensure the machines stayed in exactly the right place, lessening the chance they’d be hit by traffic.

More cities are leveraging GNSS data to create 3D digital models of their infrastructure so they can predict maintenance needs and respond to changing conditions. In Ankara, Turkey, for example, high-resolution geospatial data of high-speed railway tracks was collected while maintaining regular train operations.

Farmers routinely use GNSS to sow seeds and apply inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides, which requires precise machine steering to avoid gaps and overlaps. With precise positioning, farmers can plant, maintain and harvest more efficiently, improve soil health and reduce their environmental impact by using less fuel, water and waste.

The Causes Of Major GNSS Disruptions

GNSS is only useful if it’s accurate, with accuracy measured by its ability to reduce errors that occur when signals are transmitted from space to devices on Earth. For example, you may have noticed that your phone’s accuracy diminishes when you’re walking in a city. That’s because the signal frequently bounces off buildings to get to the receiver in your phone.

What may be a minor annoyance to you could be a major disruption if your entire supply chain relies on accurately verifying your position relative to the satellites above. While GNSS positioning has been historically reliable, many issues have the potential to negatively disrupt it. This includes solar storms, including one in October 2024 during which the sun’s coronal mass ejections impacted GNSS signaling due to emitting massive ions. This was preceded by a significant solar storm in May that disrupted the precise positioning of many GNSS satellites.

Earth has already experienced multiple major solar storms in 2024, with the one in May being the strongest to reach Earth since October 2003. More are anticipated in coming years, with the potential to sideline precise machinery on critical infrastructure projects or impact the ability of farmers to plan their crops.

While solar storms are unpredictable, other disruptions are more intentional. Spoofing or jamming are techniques used to interfere with or manipulate a satellite system, causing it to miscalculate its position. Various conflicts caused an increase in state-sponsored jamming for defensive purposes where state actors hope to better protect their territory from drones and other threats using GNSS.

Unfortunately, jamming does not obey national boundaries, so it can spread to other regions. Active countermeasures are in development to protect GNSS systems, as jamming and spoofing are increasingly seen as extensions of more traditional cyber threats.

GNSS advancements are focused on improving accuracy and preventing signal disruptions given the costly repercussions of lost productivity and profits.

How To Prepare For Threats To GNSS

To prepare for GNSS disruptions, companies should assess the potential impacts of atmospheric threats (solar storms with impact lasting hours), jamming (denial of service and adjacent to conflict zones) or spoofing (misleading position data in conflict zones.) They can then:

• Plan for outage scenarios with appropriate representatives from IT, operations, security and business continuity teams.

• Conduct disruption simulations.

• Test backup systems, such as cellular networks or traditional navigation tools.

While it’s hard to predict what’s ahead for GNSS, its relevance and impact on our economies and daily lives make it important for both consumers and business executives to pay attention to this evolving technology.

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