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Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

wsj.com

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

#231

Post by psadauskas »

15155 wrote: post #171
matheusmoreira wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boss watching over their shoulder all the time Sounds like the root cause to me. It should be illegal to use GNSS to track employees, or anyone really. Jamming is starting to sound a lot like self-defense against surveillance.

So as a business owner, I'm not allowed to know where my $100,000 asset is? My insurance carrier requires me to track the vehicle as a condition of coverage, they also require a dashcam be operating at all times.

If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee.

If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)

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

#232

Post by dghlsakjg »

bluGill wrote: post #181
dghlsakjg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have atomic clocks on board? I was under the impression that Starlink needs GPS for initial acquisition.

They don't need atomic clocks on board. NTP is close enough for most purposes. Sure your error goes up, but often within 100 meters is good enough. The exceptions though do need accurate clocks and are a problem.

For the aviation use case the article talks about 100m is unacceptable. Even for more mundane uses like car navigation 100m accuracy isn’t great.

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

#233

Post by K0balt »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #221
K0balt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead reckoning with a minute or two to get a gps fix with the jammer off once a day.

What's to stop someone spoofing a GPS signal during that fix?

Nothing, and if it were subtle enough it could be effective at making it drift around. Lots of ways to get a rough fix though, and you don’t need very good absolute accuracy offshore, using a compass and log to DR your way around. Even better if you have a wind vane and anemometer. The majority of your drift will be wind driven.

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

#234

Post by ondra »

herczegzsolt wrote: post #220
nerdsniper wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you don’t have a family member who uses CGM’s. They are extremely sensitive to RF disruptions, and often fail for mind bogglingly dumb reasons. 2s on / 2s off would completely disable all of their functionality until the interference was gone. And possibly much longer - they are finicky.

Bluetooth operates in an unlicensed band. If any medical device relies on any unlicensed band for any life-critical thing that is horrible design. I would absolutely support consequences to any device manufacturer if a death is caused by a jamming of unlicensed frequencies. (In my opinion, medical devices should be able to keep you alive in any jamming scenario if feasible. But using licensed bands is just bare minim…

How is additional paperwork supposed to help? Jamming is already illegal and usage of ISM bands is quite strictly regulated.

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

#235

Post by ExoticPearTree »

_moof wrote: post #52
verelo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On VOR: It's also a PITA to use, and for inexperienced people, or someone who rarely uses it, they can confuse flying towards and away from the station.

Time was, if you didn't understand how to use VORs, you couldn't really fly. We used them as primary en route nav, as well as for approaches, for many decades. As a CFI I think most of the confusion around VORs these days comes down to poor or inadequate training.

> As a CFI I think most of the confusion around VORs these days comes down to poor or inadequate training.

I would say it is partially true. The reason I have trouble with VORs is that the equipment inside the plane is very awkward to use. The fact that the plane is in the center of the VOR display is super confusing as it shows everything in reverse: if the line is on the left it means the plane is on the right. And having to learn Morse Code to validate you tuned in the right frequency. And so on.

I get it that when they invented that we did not have technology, but now we do and nothing is stopping us from using a digital display that can translate VORs/DMEs/NDBs fixes into GPS like routes. And knowing where every VOR is can make the map accurate too. That would make it very easy for a lot of people to use and not have to learn the arcane ways of how people used to fly 50 years ago. I don't need to know that I'm flying TO or FROM the station.

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

#236

Post by ExoticPearTree »

ryandrake wrote: post #206
verelo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. I replied to someone else with a similar remark, but essentially doing most of my flying in 70s to 90s prop planes, I imagine the tools I'm most used to are just dated. Your point around training is likely very accurate, I had some great teachers but I also had a few instances of being given inaccurate information and having to teach the teacher so to speak.

A lot of those planes still exist and have not gotten panel upgrades, so IMO you still should learn how to navigate purely via only visual references and radio navigation. I believe you are still required to know how to use them to pass your private pilot check ride, too, but I may be wrong.

> I believe you are still required to know how to use them to pass your private pilot check ride, too, but I may be wrong.

Thankfully, they are not needed to pass a PPL check-ride.

Creating a track on a 1:500k map and fly it is incredibly complicated when you have to do a ton of other things inside the plane too.

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

#237

Post by ExoticPearTree »

bluGill wrote: post #174
deadbabe wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow but a GPS jammer is okay so someone could get lost and possibly killed, or even crash a plane?

Who said a GPS jammer is okay? They are highly illegal in the US and the FCC will hand out large fines when they find one. GPS jammers are cheap though and so it is unlikely the FCC will catch the majority of users. Though most GPS jamming is by countries at war. Russia has a large GPS jamming operation around Ukraine, and this often affects GPS in other parts of Europe as well. I have no information, but I would be…

> Who said a GPS jammer is okay? They are highly illegal in the US and the FCC will hand out large fines when they find one. GPS jammers are cheap though and so it is unlikely the FCC will catch the majority of users.

FCC will hand out fines if they can find the owners. Reading through the comments here about the hardware size and capabilities nowadays for pretty much off-the-shelf solutions, it is not a far fetched thought that an adversary can plant thousands of jammers in dense urban environments and then turn them on whenever they want to. Imagine what a blanket jamming can do in NYC airspace.

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

#238

Post by 15155 »

psadauskas wrote: post #231
15155 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So as a business owner, I'm not allowed to know where my $100,000 asset is? My insurance carrier requires me to track the vehicle as a condition of coverage, they also require a dashcam be operating at all times.

If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee. If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn'…

> Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_

How is an insurance company provision an excuse? Do you propose self-insurance? If so, would that be advisable from a fiduciary responsibility standpoint for most small companies?

Who ultimately bears the increased insurance premiums and deleterious effects emerging from legislatively banning GPS on company assets and dashcams? (Hint: not the business)

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

#239

Post by 15155 »

torginus wrote: post #126
michaelt wrote: post #42

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…

Antenna tech has moved way beyond what was possible in the days GPS was invented. Planar arrays and MIMO are ubiquitous and cheap. These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements and can detect and filter ambient noise. They are super hard to jam. The reason why drones have become such a PITA is that these inexpensive antennas are very hard to defeat even with milita…

> These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements

"These antennas" is doing an impossibly large amount of work. What you are describing here is a delay-calibrated coherent receiver, not an antenna, and it's absolutely not "inexpensive" to pull this off.

With passive antennas, most of the attenuation of adversarial signals is being done by the relatively-high-directionality of planar arrays: off-boresight signals have far greater attenuation with these (20dB? - tricky because you still do want good satellite data close to the horizon), and most garden variety jammers are terrestrial and off-axis.

Still, these signals are always below the noise floor and mostly unsigned, it's somewhat easy for an airborne (or spacefaring) jammer to fully drown out, replay/time-shift, or spoof the signal.

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

#240

Post by 15155 »

torginus wrote: post #148
minetest2048 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech is already there, but the reason those antenna are not widely used is that they used to fall under ITAR, so no US companies want to touch those for civilian uses. Of course Turkey and China is not US so they don't give a damn about ITAR compliance, and so you can buy those anti jam antennas out of alibaba. Brad Parkinson, the father of GPS and PNTAB, they've been trying to lobby the US government to remove I…

There's also a bunch of Western stuff you can buy off the shelves. MIMO tech is standard in every Wifi 5+ router, Cars have pretty sophisticated electronically steered radars nowadays, boats even more so. 5G towers also have phased array antennas. This tech is everywhere in consumer or industrial stuff. Not sure what makes an antenna/sensor ITAR restricted, I suspect if you try optimizing it to military use-cases, yo…

> Not sure what makes an antenna/sensor ITAR restricted,

Intentionally-designed anti-jam features (active-nulling and electronically-steerable receivers made for this purpose) marketed towards GNSS applications are EAR items (and are incorporated into ITAR by reference.)

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