At the same time, the US still lacks the ability to quickly identify and geographically locate “interference or spoofing of GPS services,” said DHS Program Manager John Merrill at the Service Interface Committee’s Civil Global Positioning Systems annual meeting, which promotes a global forum Interaction between the US and worldwide GPS users. The US developed and operate GPS.
Merrill did not define the size of a region that could turn off a GPS jammer, but Jules McNeff, who spent 20 years in the Air Force for GPS and now vice president of strategies and programs at Overlook Systems Technologies Inc., a GPS engineer, The company in Vienna estimated that a 1 watt GPS jammer could cover a medium sized city.
Logan Scott, president of a GPS consulting firm called LS Consulting, said in a May May webinar conducted by Inside GNSS that a GPS jammer with a tenth of a watt of transmit power has a range of 9.4 miles, a one-watt jammer 29.8 miles and a Fen Watt jammer, 94.2 miles. Inside GNSS is a magazine on GPS and other satellite navigation systems operated by China, the European Union and Russia, referred to as Global Navigation Satellite Systems.
Consumer jammers at these power levels can be purchased on the Internet mainly from Chinese manufacturers at prices starting at $ 40.
The DHS and the Department of Defense have been working to develop a jammer location system that picks up jammer signals and forwards them to a main station operated by the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency since 2010. So far, however, only data from sensors fed into Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Merrill told the conference.
From March 2009 to April 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission spent two years tracking down just one GPS jammer on the New Jersey Turnpike. This jammer interfered with an FAA system that provided aircraft near the airport with improved navigation signals for precise approach, takeoff and terminal operations.
McNeff called the GPS jammer location system a “concept,” not an operational nationwide system.
The FAA plans to rely heavily on GPS by 2030, with the satellite system at the heart of the next-generation air transport system, and plans to phase out its ground-based FM radio (VOR) by then.
Jammers can affect the GPS and other GNSS systems. In September 2012, the FAA used a GNSS intentional interference and spoofing study team to “identify technical, political, legal, and operational opportunities to mitigate the effects of GPS spoofing and interference.”
Deborah Lawrence, manager of the FAA navigation programs, told the conference that by the end of September, the Agency’s study team would have “concrete, actionable recommendations” to tackle spoofing and jamming.