Illegal GPS Jammers Are Widespread, Study Finds
techweekeurope.co.uk
techweekeurope.co.uk
The risk is not just theoretical. For example, in 2009 the Newark airport had a daily GPS failure that was finally traced to a trucker using a jammer, presumably to defeat a tracker enforcing safe driving rules. http://www.economist.com/node/18304246
Much better than just noise because you wouldn't know there is a problem.
I'm not so worried about this kind of attack on civilian aviation. It would be a directed attack: potentially deadly but rare and focussed. I'm much more worried about the casual disruption to GPS from truck drivers spending $99 on a grey market device.
Also military GPS is far more accurate than civilian GPS by a factor of 10x.
However if you have a low strength signal from one source and you receive a frame that is a second or a two off, it can cause you to think you are miles away from where you think you supposed to be.
Civilian transmission rates on L1 are 10x slower than the military L2 frequency. It takes a full 6 seconds to get a single frame downloaded and that is also hoping your almanac is up to date. (Thankfully AGPS can provide the almanac data by other menas.)
The military version it takes .6 seconds to do the same it takes us civilians to do in 6 seconds. The SA drift is gone now but still the slower speed makes fixing a perfect position slightly more difficult and less accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Satel...
These personal sized units are not really a risk to aviation etc as is being said, that is just an argument to make the public turn against the freedom from unwanted surveillance that jammers bring. These work by transmitting noise at the frequencies that the GPS satellites transmit at so the local receiver can't tell where it is, which is the same as when it's in a tunnel or parking garage. The range on these battery operated personal ones is only a few feet, so no naval ships or airplanes thousands of feet or miles away are bothered. The ones that bother fishing boats and such are high powered transmitters designed to block other parties at a distance and have nothing to do with these small ones people use to stop their boss knowing what they are doing with the company delivery truck.
I personally know people that have had problems with their systems that have been traced back to truckers with GPS jammers.
To put it another way, the only solution is already known - build critical systems which are not dependent on continuous access to GPS signals. One cannot prevent jambing of a widespread consumer system - the asymmetry of costs and knowledge is too far in favor of the jammer in any civilian case (military solutions to jamming are another matter).
For example, the London Underground used to have its own small power stations. These needed refurb/upgrade about 20 years ago, cost £12million, so not done, bridge to National Grid instead.
No big problems since, because there are several connections, complete failure would need almost complete black out in London, but unpleasant when it happens locally
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-556910/Power-failure...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4108-double-failure-ca...
Perhaps National UK systems need more duplication and less reliance on central systems like GPS?
I've seen reports of a plan to use mobile phone based signals on railways to offset problems with antiquated wiring and cable theft...
http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.8564
At present, when there are problems on the local commuter trains, we can fall back on 'sole possession of the way' although the drivers no longer have the brass tokens. The driver stops the train, gets out of the cab and resets the signal, which sets the signal on the next section of track to danger, so no other train will enter that section until train clears it. Not sure if they will keep the wiring that allows that in the future.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-eve...
Instead of hiding their location, this actually gave them away as it had been disturbing the GPS-coverage in this area. When the source of the jamming was found, the police was alerted and the thieves arrested.
i have long thought government postal carriers and other government vehicles should be required to stream realtime road congestion and traffic flow data.. this data could also show jammed or poor reception.
Although North Korea was intermittently jamming GPS in the
border region between 28 April and 15 May it is not known
if the jammer was operating at the time of the fatal crash.
The South has reacted angrily to the jamming, which has
interrupted navigation on more than 600 civilian flights -
and it has been likened to a form of terrorism by regional
media.
"All information recovered to date indicates that after a
loss of GPS signals to the aircraft's receivers incorrect
handling and omissions over a time period of a number of
minutes, resulted in an unfortunate chain of events that
ultimately led to the crash," the statement says.
On a historical note, if this turns out not to have been caused by GPS jamming and was purely an accident, I think this will be the first case of an accidental death caused by a drone (not counting people erroneously but intentionally targeted by drone weapons).
I'm not so sure about others. If you're driving a truck for a shipping company, I suspect it's their right to know where their equipment is.
[EDIT] The only thing I can think of is that the GPS is always recording, but only examined in the event of an accident. The driver can claim the unit was defective and not his fault, so there's no proof he was driving 90 in a 60 zone.
The other option is that insurance companies and regulators want the GPS trackers installed, but the companies don't care as long as the deliveries get made.
There are limits on how many hours a driver is allowed to work, for safety reasons.
Agreeing to have such a device installed and then installing a jammer doesn't strike me as logical.
They could probably put a stop to this by making jammer detectors and inspecting for them at weigh stations and then checking the logs on the GPS for anomalies. If the cops have a jammer detector, they can start pulling people over for having them.
If a few people lose their CDL, they should fall out of favor. These aren't very easy to hide, given that they have to broadcast to work. And if this pushes them to invent some other way to tamper with their GPS monitors, so much the better: it wouldn't cause nearly as much harm as these.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17119768
is a little clearer on how widespread the usage is. It estimates that there may be as few as 50 jamming incidents per day in the UK, or as many as 450.
If a jammer is driving by more than 1 of their stations or driving by a station 2 times a day, the whole thing could be explained by a few dozen of them being in use.
What would be interesting is though with a network of self driving cars you could figure out where all the GPS jammers were.
Edit: The story seems to be too simplistic, but it there are at least certain devices around that use microwave power to jamm electronics: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PPC.2009.5386327 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_HPM_Blackout
"buy online at dedicated websites like www.[snip].co.uk, and a basic model costs just around £60"
Hmm...