Reported Issue:
SmartNet North America, as well as other GNSS Network Service providers, have identified an issue that we believe to be caused by the pending Leap Second introduction that is affecting GNSS tracking characteristics of GNSS receivers on a global basis. We have confirmed our findings with our sister network, SmartNet Australia, as well as 2 other service providers and are actively working on a permanent solution.
The issue, primarily affects GLONASS tracking, but has also caused some makes and models of GNSS receivers to completely stop tracking both GPS and GLONASS rendering services in the immediate area offline when receiving an RTK broadcast containing GLONASS corrections. There are also certain firmware versions of certain GNSS receiver types that seem to be more sensitive to the issue as well.
As an interim fix, we have disabled GLONASS corrections on all SmartNet North America RTK products and would encourage you to also disable GLONASS on all of your rover receivers until a permanent solution can be found. If you are not familiar with how to disable GLONASS on your rover, please contact your local support representative for more information.
Update - July 1, 2015 2:00 AM ET
At this time, we are still seeing issues when we re-activate GLONASS on all SmartNet RTK products.
In instances where a reference station is still using a GLONASS almanac from before 00:00 UTC on July 1, we are still seeing the issue that was first experienced on June 30, 2015 where a rover would not fix until GLONASS was turned off. We have been monitoring this during the night and hope we will see almanacs on stations update automatically in the normal course of operations before working hours on July 1, 2015. We will be performing another early morning test on July 1, 2015 to verify where things stands in hope normal GNSS operations can resume.
In the event that almanacs do not get updated automatically in the next 5-6 hours, we will continue to operate without GLONASS until such a time (we expect in the next 24 hours) that the almanacs on all effected stations update in their normal operational way.
If we see in the next 24 hours that almanacs are not updating automatically, we will begin to take a more aggressive approach, manually forcing an ME reset on all receivers in SmartNet. This will be a VERY large undertaking and we are choosing at this time to enact patience until we have a more concrete way forward.
Update - July 1, 2015 10:00 AM ET
We will be applying a patch for testing in the coming hour to attempt to remedy the GLONASS issue & Leap Second issue. We will roll the patch out in the Northeast region first; customers in this region may experience momentary outages as this patch is applied. Once we have verified the patch works at scale, we will begin to apply the patch to the remaining regions. In the event that this patch and test does not remedy the situation, we will post an update here for everyone's information.
Thank you for your patience and we look forward to having a solution in place in the very near future.
Update - July 1, 2015 11:50 AM ET
We have successfully applied the patch and testing indicates that all operations have returned to normal. We will be applying the patch to the remainder of SmartNet and users may see momentary outages as these go into place. We will make another update once all patches have been applied and tested.
Update - July 1, 2015 1:10 PM ET
We have successfully applied patches to ALL SmartNet North America servers. Testing and logs indicate that normal operations have complete resumed, however we will closely monitor the situation over the next several hours to verify there are no residual issues.
Please email support@smartnetna.com if you are still experiencing fixing issues when using GLONASS. Please make sure to include receiver type, firmware version, measurement engine version, etc, in any issue report.
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