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Comment by fxfan | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't work.

India relied on GPS and Clinton turned off (regrettably IMHO) India's access to high precision data in the 2000 Indo-Pak war.

India went on to build their own.

EDIT: Year was probably 1999, not sure.

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I remember talking to a sailor in the BOC Solo Round The World race in late 1990. They all knew and talked over radio to each other about "something going on" in Late July and early August - when their GPSs started reporting much more accurate CEP numbers, which allowed them to much more accurately detect the ocean currents they were sailing in and position themselves most favorably in them.

Because selective availability had been switched off.

They might have been the first civilians to be aware of Gulf War 1...

The same thing happened north of Lofoten, in Norway. The fishermen noticed at once that their GPS waypoints were much more precise than on the day before.

> India went on to build their own

Presumably there’s some lead time on that though

India’s NavIC is riddled with problems. Atomic clocks on some of the satellites have failed. ISRO is opaque about the malfunctions. Researchers have found that it can be easily jammed with household WiFi signals causing severe degradation of signal strength. Nobody is really using the system, all the talk has been about fishing boats carrying the receivers.

India started developing after GPS was denied during Kargil War with Pakistan in 1999. More recently India’s (More like Russia’s) cruise missile, BrahMos, veered off target by 7 Kms as GPS signals were cut off mid flight.

India has tried replicating GPS, but the system is still not proven.

Could you provide sources on all of these claims?

I know the clocks were breaking down but those clocks are not made by ISRO.

Atomic clocks failing (4 satellites have malfunctioning clocks out of 7): https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/isros-clock-to-prop-u...

In one article, ISRO shared that they heaved a sigh of relief every morning on seeing that IRNSS satellites were functioning normally. ISRO is trying to replace the clocks from a Swiss manufacturer with their own. Same clocks failed on Galileo, but causes were different.

BrahMos cruise missile failure: https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl2607/stories/20...

WiFi jamming: https://thewire.in/space/study-says-navic-frequency-too-clos...

Original research paper is quite damning on this one.

India is now trying to be part of Galileo project: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1156188

Thanks! The signal jamming issue is quite glaring.

> India is now trying to be part of Galileo project

"Now" would be a stretch, would it not? That article is from 2005.

Meant to post 2-3 days old article: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1119329/india-galileo-s...

Original article on Business Standard is paywalled. This one is bit outlandish, but retains the essence of the article.

Same with Russia. USA turned off GPS during the Russo-Georgian war. Russia went ahead to build GLONASS and it's military performance during the intervention in Syrian Civil War was much better.

If by "doesn't work" you mean "only works for a while", then there might be some value in that.

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