GPS signals have become widespread in the world. gps jammer are gradually being used. What is the background of GPS in the UK? Let’s take a look.
A secret network of 20 road surveillance stations across the UK has confirmed that criminals are regularly trying to block GPS signals, a conference at the National Physical Laboratory in London later said. The Sentinel network, set up by the government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and operated by Chronos Technology in the Forest of Dean, United Kingdom, has recorded an average of ten disruptions per month since September 2011.
“Our jammers use very small GPS receivers like those in cell phones. They are installed in places where our partner companies have unexplained failures in their professional GPS jammers,” said Chronos CEO Charles Curry. “The jammers sweep a signal through the GPS band by 1.5 gigahertz and we record the influence that affects the local GPS signal.” The British surveying authority Ordnance Survey was a victim of these GPS failures.
Details of the 60 incidents so far are sparse, as Sentinel is still evaluating the causes, but at least one jammer has been confiscated. Curry says most jammers appear to be used by truckers to prevent tachographs from working in the cab, prevent their superiors from being tracked, or prevent thieves from stealing commercial vehicles. “The one police who were seized are the type that fits in a vehicle and is powered by a cigarette lighter socket,” he says.
Oddly enough, in some places, more than one person appears to be responsible for the jamming: Chronos tries to differentiate between different jamming stations in order to “give a better idea of how many people are interfering with GPS in a certain place”. Vigilantes could be a source: A big problem with GPS is the way some small villages and towns visit dangerously oversized trucks – often stuck in tiny streets – to follow the shortcuts recommended by the satnavs. It is possible for locals to place jammers to prevent motorists’ anti-social behavior.
The GPS signal is weak and slightly jammed – its radiation is only as intense as a car headlight from a distance of 20,000 kilometers. Hundreds of online retailers illegally sell jammers online and at the same time the GPS signal has quickly become the critical national infrastructure. In addition to positioning services via satellite, the atomic clocks on board the satellites also provide important clock signals for systems as diverse as cell towers and banking systems – they fall over without GPS.
It is therefore not surprising that a US company called LightSquared, which wanted to operate a 4G cellular service very close to GPS frequencies, was prevented by the Federal Communications Commission. It could not show that its technology could avoid GPS signals that deviate from the allocated bandwidth.
The conference will also hear how the GPS signal jammer can be faked so that navigation devices are lured in the wrong direction. You can see videos of how spoofing works at the University of Texas. Spofer could become the last equivalent of destroyers who made false lights to pull ships onto the rocks. The General Lighthouse Authorities, for example, suspect that ships are now so dependent on GPS that they can safely expect “an incident” in the world’s densest ship – the English Channel – that will be caused by GPS interference, traffic jams or spoofing in the next decade.
“The question for the authorities is what we will do once the jammer owners are identified and how we can prevent others from using them,” said Curry.