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Comment by AWildC182 | Hacker News Reader

Try explaining that to the FAA. They've been shutting down more VORs and airways every year.

The FAA is guilty of cost focused magical thinking. They had some idea that anti-jam techniques would migrate to civilian platforms, but that is delusional, especially as the number of GPS enabled in flight devices has exploded. Maybe for special certified devices for ADS-B. But it is extremely sensitive tech, and anything smarter than a noise jammer can be difficult to deal with.

I think they plan on having jamming surveillance nodes set up near airports. But of course, detecting isn't fixing. How long did that (imaginary?) drone take out Heathrow airport for?

It's not that awful of a problem. Simply making the antenna directional enough is a solution, such as using a phased array coupled with an IMU to tell if the signal is coming from a known satellite location.

It depends on how severe and consistent the jamming is. If the receiver has a good lock (and a good clock) and a basic IMU then jamming on the last few minutes of approach might not cause too much drift -- but it could certainly spook a pilot into diverting.

As to mitigation, it is all expensive (in terms of antenna construction and processing) and GA is price sensitive. Airports with urban buildup get multi-path interference in the GPS signal and jamming signals, and it becomes complicated to computationally null the jamming signals. Chirp jammers are now as cheap as basic noise jammers.

Anyway, it's not so easy, look at any current research paper on anti-jam. Imagine if 500 MAGA/Antifa types plugged in PPDs over a city wide area and kept them mobile? It would be chaos.

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