US military tests massive GPS jamming weapon over California The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is warning aircraft to stay a few hundred miles away from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, because the military is testing a new gizmo that disrupts GPS – and may also mess with flight control systems. gps jamming map Like Bob Marley, the US military is …
Just as navigation got convenient! It's time to get out my sextant and dust it off, get a current copy of the nautical almanac, and practice a few sights. The military owned and controlled the entire system until it became essential for civilian use. Now they're asserting their control again. Fuckers.
You do realize that the GPS sat system was put in place by the US Government for military purposes. That the civilian clock signal is intentionally less accurate. Right? They have always had control.
At the same time... you don't want your own GPS system to be used against you.
Imagine a very cheap slow drone packed with explosives... Essentially a V 1 Buzz bomb that was really accurate... well accurate enough to hit major targets.
An inertial system is more expensive, heavier, and requires careful startup positioning and alignment to work.
Anyway suicide terrorists may not need a GPS much - you can still drive a car full of explosive to your target without. While some terrorists may like to hit specific targets, killing a lot of people in easy accessible places still works - see Paris and Bruxelles.
Because alternative positioning systems not under US control exist (Glonass, Galileo, don't remember the Chinese one name), US military needs to be able to jam those systems as well, and try to ensure its weapons still works if its one is jammed.
While plane can still fly in and out the area even if GPS is not working (VOR/NAV based navigation I believe should be not affected), as long as their systems are still reliable, I wonder if it will impact other GPS based applications.
Imagine a very cheap slow drone packed with explosives... Essentially a V 1 Buzz bomb that was really accurate... well accurate enough to hit major targets.
To be fair, the "because terrorists" argument can be used to justify anything. Now think of the children!
You still need the ground data with enough resolution and you'll have to program the correct path. And the system needs to sample an area large enough to avoid misleading data. Maybe doable in a cheap enough system today, but still requires fairly advanced skills.
There's a reason even the military prefer GPS over other navigation systems whenever they can. Setting some GPS waypoints is far easier and quicker.
I think line of sight from the ground is suggested by the range figures. If you can see the transmitter or ground which can see the transmitter it will affect you, so if you are at higher altitude, you will be affected at greater range. Might also affect satellite operations which may use info from the GPS system.
Yes, I'm pretty sure you're correct; the shape of the affected volume of air-space indicates a ground-based system.
GPS operates on several frequencies between 1.17645 - 1.57542 GHz and requires line-of-sight to receive a signal so any jamming system would need to operate in the same frequency range, give or take a few harmonics, and will also be essentially line-of -sight. As a consequence, if you move away from a ground-based transmitter/jammer, it will fall below the horizon and out of line-of-sight. This effectively raises the floor-elevation of the signal as distance from the transmitter/jammer increases, which is what the map and numbers show.
However, an even worse faux-pas, than getting the basics of the system wrong, in this article is the pathetic attempt at sensationalism by making the ridiculous claim that the FAA are grounding all civil/commercial aircraft in the region concerned, for six of the busiest hours of the day, when the tests are running...
Quote: "The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is warning aircraft to stay a few hundred miles away from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake"
Yes, it's clarified in the next paragraph... Quote: "The FAA has issued a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) warning [PDF] that on June 7, GPS readouts will be unreliable or nonexistent for..."
But that's not the same as saying that aircraft shouldn't fly in the region, which is what the first quote above says.
Whilst I can forgive the journalist's ignorance regarding the nature of the system being tested, the pathetic attempt at sensationalism is simply insulting in what is supposed to be a tech/science journal; just because your readers enjoy the informal and light-hearted 'tabloid' format it doesn't mean they're stupid.
The radii of the circles are too big to be line of sight to a ground-based transmitter. At FL250 your horizon is about 170NM, but the radius of the FL250 circle is 432NM.
The numbers seem to roughly correspond to line-of-sight to something at an altitude of around 60,000 feet.
Could they have picked a more crowded bit airspace for this? I'm in southern Oregon right under the major north/south air corridor between Portland/Seattle and the major southern California airports. While outside much of the day, I noticed I wasn't seeing the normal air traffic. But then.... we don't always get contrails over head here.
Here's hoping there won't be any major or even minor air incidents. If there are, I'm sure the authorities here will blame.. "ya' know.. terrorists".
Why China Lake? Simple, it is near major civilian and military test facilities, so the effectiveness of the test can be felt in the real world. The idea that this is an airborne system is suggested by the shape of the affected area, spherical. The fact that this is affecting flight control systems as well speaks to the frequencies and energy invested. We depend on GPS for so many conveniences, but the military aviation community does not; for them GPS is an alternate system. I sure hope the Airbus community is ready for this because their aircraft are so much more dependent on such systems.
The scale of this may be new, but they've been playing with it for years. I was out exploring back roads in the Panamints when suddenly my GPS told me I was 300 feet below sea level just east of the Bahamas. I was concerned for a while until I remembered that China Lake was just over the mountains to the west. At least they gave out a warning this time.
Yep. During the NATO campaign in Ex-Yugoslavia you could tell when the USAF were flying sorties - GPS would go a bitt wobbly. If you were in, say, Munich, your GPS would tell you you were moving if you were in fact stationary, and your position would be off by 50-100 m, even while receiving 6 or 7 satellites.
Exactly that, the "lack of ground jamming" indicates that there is no line of site to the transmitter from stuff on the ground, so I expect it is in a hole/basin/surrounded by mountains in the desert somewhere and only "visible" from elevations more than a few degrees above the horizon.
So, GPS is now useless in a major conflict scenario, as whatever mobile piece of kit you send along to enhance your signal, will be trumped by the enemies static terrawatt transmitter.
Perhaps the time has come to dust off the killer pigeon suicide squad and I kid you not, they were successfully tested many years ago as a guidance system for anti ship missiles.
The pigeons were conditioned to peck a piece of glass at the spot where it could see a ship, and thus get a seed as a reward. Once placed in the nose of a missile, the pecking deflected the glass which in turn adjusted the flight of the missile straight to the target.
Although I can see the lure of promising 72 virgins, as promises are far cheaper than bird seed.
"So, GPS is now useless in a major conflict scenario, as whatever mobile piece of kit you send along to enhance your signal, will be trumped by the enemies static terrawatt transmitter."
And said status terawatt tramsnitter becomes a sitting duck for a HARM missile. The real worry is multistatic non-continuous jamming still capable of effectively blocking (they can't redirect the military GPS signal as it's encrypted) GPS signals for hundreds of miles (within that range, users can get close enough and then switch to alternative targeting).
and .. what *exactly* makes you think that come the Big Day ... they will either a) be targeting this capability at their own GPS systems, and not the other side, and b) be turning "selective availability" on again on their own systems .. don't forget, most systems, the uS GPS system included feature at least two key channels, and the low-res public channel can be either dithered (as the GPS system was until a few years ago) or turned off at will ... without affecting the secure/private channels. There is no need to jam your own systems .. so you can bet this tech is going to be targeted at something else other than the US GPS system when used in anger ...
Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to do something like this over an area that isn't populated by ~120 Million humans? The US DoD still own Wake Island, or they could park a carrier out in the middle of the South pacific and test from there.
What if it turns out that the test also screws up the radios on ambulances and fire trucks? Or aircraft avoidance systems? Wouldn't it be better to test where there is a lot smaller chance of accidentally killing a bunch of civilians?
"In addition, the FAA is warning pilots flying the Embraer Phenom 300, one of the world's most popular executive jet aircraft, that the testing could interfere with flight stability controls and has said extra care should be taken in the area."
Just out of idle curiosity - what does the Embraer Phenom 300 have (or hasn't got) that singles it out?
Thanks for the link!
But I'm still a bit confused. From my point of view, any navigational device is something that tells me where I am. So I know in which direction I must turn in order to get where I want to go. And that's it. It doesn't seem a good idea to make that navigational device a part of the systems I need to keep the vehicle I'm in dirigible, or airborne, or afloat or whatever.
This can't be a test of a GPS jamming system because the US military already has a far better option, turn GPS off for everyone else but leave it on for themselves via encryption. So two options, either:
It's a test of a GLONASS / IRNSS / BeiDou / Galileo jammer which also happens to take out GPS.
It's a test of a GPS anti-jamming tech of some sort.
Not necessarily. A jammer can be deployed for a smaller area of interest, and for denial times determined by the local ground force for a specific operation (instead of going all the way through the GPS command system, getting approval along the way).
I suspect though it is all-systems jamming as you say, and they want to check their own kit is still usable.
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