SmartnetNA IMPORTANT - Critical Upcoming Changes

​As leaves fall and colors change, it is time for our Fall Adjustment. This year's Fall Adjustment is no different with only California users needing to be concerned with broadcast coordinate changes and users in the rest of North America only needing to be aware of a small outage while processing coordinates are adjusted and network processing restarted. No reference frame changes, only epoch updates. There are however critical changes close at hand we wanted you to be aware of.

On September 17, 2019, NGS released its new ITRF2014 and NAD83(NA2011) Epoch 2010 Multi-Year CORS Solution 2 (MYCS2) coordinates, along with GEOID18. Unfortunately, this release was far too late to consider changes to our Fall Adjustment, but activities are already underway to move to these new reference frames and realizations in the US to assure consistency between NGS products, the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) and SmartNet North America. With this in mind, we are releasing the information in this email internally prior the Fall Adjustment release on November 11 to make sure you are informed of the upcoming changes.

We will be publishing the Fall Adjustment on November 11 in standard fashion and then, on November 12, we will be making an announcement to all SmartNet users of our Coordinate Update Webinar series. This webinar series is designed to inform our US user base of our move to the new reference frames / coordinate realization and inform our CAN user base of broadcast coordinate updates to assure we are in compliance with NRCAN published coordinates. Understanding these changes and their associated impacts is critical for everyone (sales, support and users) as there will be material and sizable changes to broadcast coordinates on stations throughout our service area. And while this path offers significant challenges, it is the only way to assure we are in alignment with both to the adopted NGS solution and the NRCAN RTK compliance agreement.

The webinar series will start on November 19, with additional webinars being conducted on December 10 and December 19. We will also be making additional announcements and notifications on November 27 and January 3, 2020 of the broadcast coordinate updates in an attempt to reach every possible user of the pending changes. And finally on January 6, 2020 at 5 AM ET we will publish the new MYCS2 broadcast coordinates (US), updated NRCAN broadcast coordinates (CAN) and ITRF14 processing coordinates for all stations in SmartNet North America.

While we understand the end of the year is busy with holidays, sales, wrapping the year, etc it is critical that we perform this update at a time that has the lowest possibility of impact on users. And while it is a serious topic deserving serious attention, it also offers an opportunity for everyone to reach out to their customers to make sure they are aware of the upcoming events and changes, as well as other possible sales related activities.

We strongly encourage you to attend at least one of the coming webinars and AFTER November 12 to start talking with your customers about attending as well. Below you will find a few questions we anticipate will be asked both internally and externally once the announcement goes out, however In the interim if you have any questions that are not addressed below, please feel free to reach out and ask.

Thank you,

The SmartNet North America Team

--- QUESTIONS ---

Question #1 - How much will the coordinates of a station change?

This is a difficult question to answer at this time, very little or a whole lot. The actual adjustment is just now beginning and we most likely will not have final coordinates until early December. However, during the QA/QC process of the Fall Adjustment significant velocity changes were noticed that could have impacts of 5+ centimeters on some station. With this said, other stations could have only a 5 millimeter change in its coordinate.

We will develop content to try to explain the changes and updates, identify the stations with the largest coordinate changes and be as transparent as we possibly can be

Question #2 - How can I (or my user) continue on the old coordinates?

We will be releasing a new MRF (multi-reference frame) Mountpoint to make the old station coordinates available for all stations in SmartNet. However, these mountpoints will only be in place for a short period of time to allow customers to transition to the new coordinates and they will be deprecated to assure everyone does move. The transition period has yet to be defined, but will be announced during the Webinar series.

Question #3 - What about GEOID2018?

Once the new MYCS2 coordinates have been adopted on US stations, you (or your user) can begin using GEOID2018. We would not recommend adopting it prior to January 6, 2020.

Question #4 - Why are we going to cause this disruption for our users?

The only way to assure a consistent tie to the NSRS in the US and Canada is to remain in compliance with both NGS and NRCAN coordinates. This is the only 'right' way to do things. But again we will have MRF mountpoints available to reduce the possible disruption

Additionally, this will allow us to introduce processes and begin preparing customers for a much more significant coordinate update that will take place once the new North American Terrestrial Reference Frame of 2022 (NATRF2022) is adopted.

Question #5 - Are you crazy?

Yes, yes we are. We know full well what this update could possibly mean to users. In some areas users will see little to no change in the broadcast coordinates of the stations, in others, there could be large changes. As a group we have been and will continue to invest hundreds of man (and woman) hours supporting this adjustment, the QA/QC processes, the content creation, the webinars and other activities required to make this as seamless as possible. This is the commitment we continue to make to assure SmartNet does things the proper way, and we probably should be committed for it.