Micah Elizabeth Scott (scanlime) talks about using a similar trick as a first step into reverse engineering firmware: https://youtu.be/UTUYl-2g-r4?t=328
171 karma · joined May 27, 2016
‘And way, way before that, a letter published in a 1771 issue of Town and Country manages to sound laughably familiar, in sentiment at least: “Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt.”’
> GPS receivers will benefit from onboard clocks. This is perhaps surprising, given that the GPS signal itself carries time information, but it happens because the signal from the satellite is weak—comparable to the power of a lightbulb transmitted across a continent. Landscape features, buildings, and interference make it harder to detect. To track this weak signal, the receiver must precisely lock onto the broadcast frequency. The more stable the local frequency reference, the faster and more reliable this tracking can be.
> In hostile environments, such as battlefields, this becomes even more important. The GPS signal is vulnerable to jamming, and effective (but illegal) jammers are widely available and likely to be encountered in future wars. With precise timing information, GPS receivers could isolate the true signal above the noise of the jammer. The receivers could even allow navigation to survive partial destruction of the satellite network.
> Present-day receivers must determine their positions by using signals from four or more satellites simultaneously, but a sufficiently accurate clock could instead use successive signals from a single satellite. Other defense applications include frequency-hopping communication, bistatic radar (in which an attacker stealthily acquires a radar signal from a target illuminated by a distant transmitter), and sensitive monitoring of enemy communications. For these reasons, portable clocks are of great interest to militaries in several countries.