A single well-placed gps jammer or spoofer could interfere with the signals across an entire region of the United States, a Department of Homeland Security official said at a GPS conference in Nashville, Tenn.
At the same time, the United States still lacks the ability to “quickly identify and geographically locate interference or spoofing of GPS services,” said DHS program manager John Merrill at the Annual Meeting of the Service Interface Committee for Civilian Global Positioning Systems, a global forum that promotes Interaction between the United States and global GPS users. The USA developed and operates GPS.
Merrill did not define the size of a region that a GPS jammer could turn off, but Jules McNeff, who has worked in the Air Force for GPS for 20 years and is 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 company with GPS experience called LS Consulting, said in a webinar hosted by Inside GNSS in May that a GPS jammer with a tenth of a watts of 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 about GPS and other satellite navigation systems operated by China, the European Union and Russia, known as Global Navigation Satellite Systems.
Consumer jammers in these performance levels can mainly be obtained on the Internet from Chinese manufacturers at prices starting at $ 40.
The DHS and the Department of Defense have worked to develop a jammer location system that receives jammer signals and routes them to a main station operated by the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency since 2010. So far, however, only sensor data has been fed into Newark. Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Merrill told the conference.
From March 2009 to April 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission located only one GPS jammer on the New Jersey Turnpike for two years. This jammer interfered with an FAA system that provided aircraft near the airport with improved navigation signals for precise approach, departure procedures and operations in the terminal area.
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 transportation system, and plans to shut down its ground-based VHF radio (VOR) by then.
Jammers can affect GPS and other GNSS systems. In September 2012, the FAA set up a GNSS study team on intentional interference and spoofing to “identify technical, political, legal, and operational ways 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 provide “concrete, actionable recommendations” to combat spoofing and jamming.