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Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

wsj.com

111–120 of 243 posts

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#111
post #32

What I want is a tiny portable bluetooth jammer for those who insist everyone in public must be listening to their music. Sadly they are too clunky to haul around each day.

This guy has an open schematic:

https://github.com/cifertech/RF-Clown

You can use their files to make one via a pcb vendor like jlpcb or you can look for someone who has already done that:

https://www.tindie.com/products/ryanyu/rf-clown-v20-esp32-wi...

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#112
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally it cannot provide coverage over oceanic areas. It's really hard to jam oceanic areas though, you need a vessel capable of sustaining human life autonomously at least for days plus dealing with the high seas. Buoys could theoretically be used for that purpose, yes, but good luck getting them stationary enough. Maybe some of the secret services could pull off such a trick but at least no ordinary civilia…

> sustaining human life Not really. Drone ships are very much a thing these days.

How can a drone ship hold its designated position while it's blocking gps?

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

GPS jamming is fairly detectable right? I wonder if we could create some crowd souced map of jammers. I think this kind of already exists as fairly course data but if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home and wired them up to note every time their location lock is lost or moves. It could create a hyper detailed map of where the jammers are and track them moving in realtime.

They're easy to find, but not necessarily with stuff from off the shelf. Professionals with the right equipment though have no trouble locating them. The FCC is happy to hand out 5 and 6 digit fines for operating a GPS jammer and has fined retailers tens of millions for selling them.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#114
post #105
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC, GPS picks one satellite and 3 more to establish time differences between the first one and the other 3. There's only one point in universe where the set of differences would match what was observed, given the broadcast orbital data of satellites, and that gives the location of the receiver. It's like you are provided radii and center coordinates of 3 circles on a paper that intersect at 1 point and you are to m…

Coherency is a state. My question is if that state can be achieved by just tuning the individual clocks/locations based on GPS as a master. And, there's other tricks, with all the inter-satellite communication [1]. And, there's a contextual difference here between civilian GPS and military GPS. Much of the precision in the existing GPS satellites is to support the military use of GPS, with intentionally error injecte…

What you describe is very normal in telecom and has been for a long time. 4G, 5G, etc are all totally dependent on every device syncing to the one higher up in the chain. These days typically a digital control loop is used to tune a high frequency voltage-controlled oscillator which feeds a counter. An event (like GPS PPS, or an ethernet frame arriving on the cable) is extracted from the signal and the counter generates a timestamp. The chips to do this are incredibly cheap and the performance is hard to comprehend.

https://www.ti.com/product-category/clocks-timing/clock-netw...

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#115
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sustaining human life Not really. Drone ships are very much a thing these days.

How can a drone ship hold its designated position while it's blocking gps?

Astral navigation is probably accurate enough

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jam resistance and spoof resistantance are very different. What work is done to make GPS more jam resistant?

https://gps.stanford.edu/research/current-and-continuing-gps... Single element antennas, adaptive antennas, beam steering antennas. Basically attempting to pull good RF while avoiding bad RF. (this has been applied in the Russo-Ukrainian war in modified Starlink equipment) GPS antenna mods make Starlink terminal immune to jammers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39616417 - March 2024 (72 comments) https://olegk…

The Russian response to directional antennas is to mount GPS jammers on satellites

https://www.gpsworld.com/todd-humphreys-russian-satellites-a...

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#117
post #96

I wish there were cheap Bluetooth jammers to prevent speakers from playing when hiking

I strongly suspect those would be very illegal and could result in serious side effects, such as for people who use continuous glucose monitors.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#118

Whats really sad for aviation is there was already an extensive network of ground based navaids. As GPS has proliferated, they've slowly been decommissioned as they age out to save on cost. I'm specifically referring to VORs which provide azimuth and range to station. GPS is fantastic and as a primary source everyone loves the benefits it brings. However, in a century of aviation, everyone has kinda sorted out that y…

What about terrain following? I would guess decent topographical maps of the world aren't that hard to come by today, to get a good idea of where you are.

Although that approach depends on you being able to see the ground neither of which is guaranteed over a body of water or in poor visibility.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#119
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

If I was a concerned boss, I would likely use GSM cell info to track my drivers. While not good enough to do turn-to-turn navigation it certainly is good enough to tell where people are.

Btw, don't smartphones have this built in? I remember some old and cheap Android phones without GPS that came with this.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#120
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

Russia has a satellite constellation for global jamming.
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