GPS Jamming for $50

Anonymous writes "One of the newest hacker tools out there is a homemade GPS jammer. According to this article in Computerworld, such jammers can be built with $50 worth of electrical parts. Phrack has published a how-to aimed at inexpensive GPS-based navigation and "hidden tracking devices.""

Comments

The article in question

[brocheck]

It has of course been out for a few weeks.

It is right here

Love them phrack DNS'.

OMG WTF LOL

[n1ywb]

any radio signal can be jammed. GPS signals are especially easy to jam because the satelites are 10 thousand miles away and have low power transmitters to begin with since electricity in space is precious.

How big does the device need to be? Not very big. No bigger than a typical GPS receiver. What's FAR more important is the size of your antenna. A nice parabolic dish (say, an old DSS dish) with 24db gain could probably be used to jam a GPS receiver from a mile away while running very low power. A lower gain antenna could be just as effective if the power were higher, though, and would be less directional to boot. They pack 100 watt transmitters into a case the size of a car stereo these days, so the device definately doesn't NEED to be very big.

Of course that's assuming you want to block from a good distance, if you are within about 10 feet of the GPS receiver, you can probably jam it with a few miliwatts of power and a wet piece of string for an antenna. You could make a GPS jamming PC card, or SD card even. Oh wait SD is a stupid closed standard. But a low power unit could be easily be made small enough to, say, jam up your ass.

This isn't new, or revolutionary, or even news worthy. Electronic warfare has been around as long as electronics and the bad guys are always trying to jam the good guys comms and vice versa. Ever since that bozo went on the news and talked about this everyone's had their panties in a bunch. Iraq could probably shit out a couple of ghetto GPS jammers but I doubt if they have the resources to produce the 10,000 units they'd need to really make a measureable difference in the outcome of the war. Oh and by the way we can play the same game by using directional antennas on our receivers to reject jamming signals.

And one final note, anything that emits an RF signal is easily locateable. See radio direction finding, ham radio fox hunts, etc. Shit, our forces could just home in on the jamming signal :)