SouthPAN dishes in position to refine GPS efficiency
Two satellite dishes to improve GPS accuracy down to 10cm have been hoisted in Awarua, near Invercargill.
Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), which is building the Southern Positioning Augmentation Network (SouthPAN) with Geoscience Australia, has installed the dishes at the uplink and ground centre site.
LINZ director of customer delivery Michael Appleyard said the system would provide “productivity gains across the board, especially in sectors critical to Southland like agriculture, forestry and agritech”.
He said SouthPAN supported precision agricultural applications like aerial crop spraying, virtual fencing of livestock and real-time stock monitoring with location data accuracy of within 1m, compared to 5m-10m at present.
“In forestry, SouthPAN will enable more precise pruning and planting using drones, virtual barriers protecting workers from heavy machinery and more accurate mapping of forestry blocks,” he said.
According to LINZ, forestry operators used SouthPAN for inventory mapping, harvesting and worker safety.
The Awarua site was SouthPAN’s second, following one that was opened at New South Wales in Australia in December 2023.
The two dishes in Awarua would improve the availability of SouthPAN’s services, while the system itself would work with both sites to provide “network resilience”.
In March 2023, then-land information minister Damien O’Connor turned the first sod on the site, at the Space Operations NZ Satellite Ground Station in Awarua.
The project was expected to be complete by mid-2024 and would generate at least six hi-tech jobs in the region, to operate the centre 24 hours a day.
“These will include technicians and operators. We understand these new jobs will be open to the broader New Zealand talent pool and will be based in Invercargill,” Appleyard said.
The satellite-based augmentation system used both space-based and ground infrastructure to compare satellite data against precisely measured positions.
It would identify and correct positioning errors in global navigation satellite systems such as GPS.
The corrections would be sent to geostationary satellites and broadcast throughout New Zealand and Australia, and New Zealand’s maritime zones.
LINZ expected SouthPAN to be fully operational by 2028, and stated that the system would “enable helicopters and planes to fly safely in poor weather they cannot fly in now”.
LINZ estimated that SouthPAN would provide economic benefits worth $864 million to New Zealand over 20 years.