Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Praxis: GPS chaos-- How a $30 box can jam your life


Now THIS is interesting.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

GPS jammers are a useful item to have squireled away...

Dedicated_Dad said...

In all sorts of ways.

Am I the only one who remembers recent articles discussing imminent demise of the system due to age and lack of replacement satellites?

Pretty scary how many parts of our infrastructure depend on something so fragile...

DD

Whizbanger said...

Gee, can anyone guess how "guided Munitions" find their destination?
Worth knowing that a big solar flare will do the same thing.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/

drjim said...

And it's not just deliberate jamming devices. Several years ago, all the GPS units in a private marina went nuts, and it turned out to be a defective amplified TV antenna, one of those round units you see on motor homes. The amplifier had failed, and turned into an oscillator spewing out wide-band noise, effectively masking the GPS signals.
Perhaps a good Praxis column (if you haven't already had one yet) would be a primer on using maps and a compass.

Anonymous said...

And when they send a SLAMMER to your JAMMER you'll know what it feels like to get hit with a HAMMER

WarriorClass said...

"How a $30 box can jam your life," and THEIRS.

Get a box.

WarriorClass
III

Anonymous said...

you can also obtain Cell jammers too. just saying...

SiGraybeard said...

There was an incident in St. Louis, if I recall correctly, where the entire metro area lost GPS. It was due to a UHF TV station's transmitter having a harmonic (multiple of the transmit frequency) that went out of spec.

GPS is actually fairly easy to jam.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous@1157: And locating a jammer takes equipment that has to be available. Think of WWII efforts to find spy transmitters and what it took. Jammers don't have to be very powerful, just locally effective.

Gunner

Cybrludite said...

Anon 11:57, Were it to come to a situation where I'd be using such devices, I certainly wouldn't be putting the widget near anything I wanted to keep. Home On Jam is a 1980s era technology at the very latest, and there were plenty of reports from our invasion of Iraq of our forces hitting such jammers. If they started hitting jammers that way, I'd be inclined to place them as close as possible to opfor locations.