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 jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.
I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming.
That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test.
I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming.
One is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be.
If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.
If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military.
If you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.
In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.
>If you overpower a signal, is there a difference?
Yes, obviously. Losing signal on your GPS unit, and having your GPS unit tell you that you are in a different position than you actually are, are two very different things.
Also, since other aircraft reported GPS issues, that is evidence that would speak to jamming or spoofing. All three other aircraft reported a loss of GPS, not inaccurate GPS. Coverups are real, government conspiracies are real. But the completely evidenceless “I’m just saying…” or “isn’t it weird…” or “I’m just asking questions” is tiresome.
IMO tracking is just way too useful. You know when things are about to arrive (so you dont miss a parcel because you went to the toilet or you can even intercept your driver once he's in the area, removing most of the last-mile problem), routes can be changed on the fly (e.g. for on-demand public transport pickup, trunking or delay mitigation) or, well, you can track your vehicles, allowing you to find them quickly in case of theft, optimize routes or have decent evidence in case of disputes.
The real problem is not really drivers being tracked, but how the tracking data is or might be used. Timestamped delivery notifications might be just as bad in this regard.
As often, the solution is probably more about accessible and pro-human law. No idea how that should work, maybe certain sensitive data services having to be provided by a third party or even the government itself? There are probably much smarter ideas or variations of this...
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)
> 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)
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 military jammers.
If this becomes a geniune need in the civilian sector, then I'm sure the tech is up to the challenge.
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 ITAR from that technology so the civilian can benefit from anti jamming, and finally they managed to do it sometime last year. Now it falls under EAR
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, you'll get hit with ITAR, but I suspect Brad Parkinson is right - security through obscurity just doesn't cut it any more.
I remember in the 90s, computer security was either missing or an afterthought (you could bypass the Win98 password prompt by pressing escape in the release version). Thankfully the industry got together and figured it out.
Now everyone else needs to follow suit. We already have a bunch of examples of assuming security does not matter (hackable cars, meters that can be switched with a Flipper zero).
> 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.)
> 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.
Eh a month or two before the October 2023 Israel conflict - there were many reports of GPS jamming in the middle east impacting air transport aircraft. To the point where it basically caused various failure modes that shouldn't have happened with avionics (think the things you'd expect in a fuzzing scenario). It was pretty eye opening example of just how poor modern avionics are (and their integrations) when they get unpredictable inputs & the dependant downrange systems that rely upon that data.
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.
> if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home
Similar things already exist - although it's used for increasing GPS precision and detecting faulty satellites, moreso than detecting jamming, so the networks might not be dense enough to detect small areas of jamming.
For one state's example, see [1] - choose 'RINEX archives' if you want historical readings.
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.
If you wanted to exactly pinpoint it with a single device sure, but I'm thinking of a map where nodes just report that they are experiencing jamming, and then with the whole network you can see a radius of the jam, see it moving around, and assume it's somewhere in the center. All with cheap off the shelf hardware.
The police could probably combine this data with license plate scanners and see the single truck that always exists in the jammed location.
I know we all like to jack ourselves raw to the big powerful government handing out ruinous fines for things we don't like but realistically none of that is gonna stick to some McDonalds manager who's got a side gig importing Alibaba stuff or some delivery driver who bought it. You can't get blood from a stone. You're just guaranteeing the stone always stays a stone.
Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
Yesterday's actions include 7 $25k fines apparently all for companies illegally importing banned drones (a procedural fine just for ignoring the investigation attempts). You can peruse that list and find plenty of things, lots of pirate radio recently. They absolutely do go after apparent small fry and your "mcdonalds manager" absolutely has assets that can be seized.
>Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
This is exactly the kind of circle jerk commentary I was complaining about. Tone doesn't make right.
The notices of liability the FCC posts to their website are not final orders. They're the federal equivalent of when your zoning sends a notice saying "your patio is 6in too close to the property line, according to the aerial photos it's been there since <years ago>, you owe use <insane number of dollars>". It's essentially civil enforcement speak for "hey asshole, lawyer up and take this seriously". So then like a naive idiot you reply back "this patio predates my ownership of the property" and the money grubbing commissioner fires back "don't care, pay up". This is what the forfeiture order the FCC post on their website are. That said, the FCC is less slimy and less interested in fine money than your local commissioner probably is and I personally hold them in high regard.
Most of these end in the subject of the enforcement simply changing their behavior and paying a trivial fine (the lawyers are the real winners).
To quote those numbers as if they're final is no less dishonest than to quote lawsuit claims as if they're final judgements.
>They absolutely do go after apparent small fry and your "McDonalds manager" absolutely has assets that can be seized
Once again, you can't get blood from a stone. You might get a little but it's not worth the squeeze It is not politically sustainable to make a habit of ruining small time businesses and individuals (we're not talking about the Sackler family here) over nonviolent violations in technical laws where there is no clear chain of causation from the violation to some sort of harm to life or limb. The Mcdonalds Manager will settle for $5k, throwing away his storage unit of Alibaba stuff and not doing that anymore.
The reason I brought up the ATF is because they have a track record of forcing compliance with arcane arbitrary laws and they do it through flamboyant violence. This comes at political cost.
>The FCC doesn't have guns, they can't arrest you
Right, they'd get the FBI be the muscle like all the other Feds that don't have entry teams do.
The feds effectively all have guns. It's just a question of how many desks the papers must cross before they turn into bullets.
The FCC takes the public commons very seriously. Given how easy it is to make radio frequencies unusable, they need to hammer hard and fast to discourage people from trying. They don’t wait for a report to be filed, they can proactively search for violators. They may only be able to fine you but they can get law-enforcement involved. Especially if your city or state has laws against what you’re doing. You usually see this when you start messing with airplanes.
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.
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 jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.