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GPS Jamming for $50

Posted by michael on from the missile-defense-starts-at-home dept.

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.""

2 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Defeating these by ejaytee · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Jammers can be defeated or made substantially less useful using beamforming. I would be stunned to find out that military users are not doing so.

    If a beamforming receiver gets its position and orientation (yaw, pitch, roll), at any point in time, it can steer the sensitivity vectors of its antenna pattern to minimize the effect of jammers from then on. More sophisticated systems will probably also steer nulls right at the jammers.

  2. What's the fuss? by llauren · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really don't understand what the fuss is all about. The military has surely had this technology for ages, along with every thinkable agency and "enemy". It's just a normal radio frequency jammer, one in the long line of other technical warfare devices, like radio jammers and EMP guns to wipe out magnetical data or stop a car. It doesn't take an electrical engineer to invent one (well, actually, it does :).

    All organizations have this technology, but it's only when it falls in the hand of the "stupid" (uncontrolled/uncontrollable) individual that these organizations start making noise.

    • ~llaurén