Saturday, 10 March 2012

Solar storm and GPS devices.

I heard from the news that yesterday we were under the influence of a strong solar storm that would possibly cause problems with energy and gps devices. I thought that it would be a good chance to make another extreme test to my Garmin Etrex H.
So yesterday I went for a night hike in the forest, as the weather was half-decent.
Well, once again I did not experience any problem with gps tracking. I have to say that there was no clouds, so the signal was very clear. Anyway, the solar storm did not cause a single glitch to the Etrex H.
Too bad I hadn't my camera with me, as in the woods I met a very friendly wild boar who seemed very curious about this silly animal walking on just two legs and crossing the forest during nighttime (me). I had with me one of those cheap crank flashlights, and when I had to make some turns of the crank as the light started to be weak, he looked like bemused of the noise of the crank and ran away. I really like wildboars.
Back to solar storm, I've not heard of problems with gps devices in vehicles too.
Maybe this solar storm was not so powerful as it was expected to be.
By the way, I've googled solar storm because I wanted to see some videos of northern lights. I've found a lot of videos, but not of these last two days, when northern lights were expected to be very intense and visible from lower latitudes too. Anyone lucky enough to see northern lights during this week? Would like to see a video.

No comments: