Detect and Locate GPS Jammers using radar gun
The most infamous GPS jamming event in history of GPS has to be the San Diego Airport disruption. A Single event brought the flight control room in the San Diego airport to its feet, wondering and panicking to as to what was really going on. ATM machines refused customers , the Harbor traffic management system was going haywire. All this because of a GPS jamming event. A clear indication that the GPS system does not just run your Sat Nav on the car, it does a lot more than that.
GPS is in a sense, is a silent force that powers the modern communication world. mobile signal jammer network service providers use GPS time signals to coordinate how your phone talks to the cell phone towers. Electricity grids turn to GPS for synchronization when they are connected together. Banks and stock exchanges use the GPS/GNSS for time-stamping transactions without which commerce would be rendered impossible.
The GPS Jamming was eventually identified after 3 days of investigation – a navy exercise to test procedures when communication was down. The had also jammed GPS signals unintentionally. Unfortunately, the jamming expertise was not just localized or available to the Navy or the Military. There was another infamous event where a truck driver was using a GPS jammers near an airport to avoid being tracked! The GPS jamming device is available for under 30$ online but it’s illegal to use/buy such a device only in a few countries. Many across the world have not yet realized the danger and disruptions that these devices can cause.
So isn’t there anything that can be done to find the Jammers? Actually, until now it was possible to find the presence of a GPS jammer but was not possible to locate it.
The case of the jammer at the Newark Airport is a perfect example. A simple $30 device was able to take down a state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated landing system at one of the busiest airports in the world. Worse, the device user wasn’t even trying to do so. Imagine what a person who DID intend to do harm could do?
In timing applications, jammers can disrupt the GPS signal, causing the underlying systems to lose their ability to synchronize their internal clocks and, in turn, their ability to stay in sync with the rest of the network. Since many critical infrastructures sectors require synchronization across their network to be within millionths of a second, even short-term GPS outages can have a major impact. Worse, when an outage occurs, there’s typically nothing to indicate that it’s a result of jamming. The GPS signal simply is not received anymore.
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