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NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS
judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"
"I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are! What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” Two thousand against ten?” – the veteran shouted. No! We will run – and live!” Yes!” Wallace shouted back. Fight and you may die. Run and you will live WITHOUT GPS at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and GET A SATELLITE LOCK? Tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our GPS SIGNAL!”
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
why not fake it?
just turn off the red teams GPS's when their with in 20mi of a warship, problem solved.
You can target the jammers =) like a great glowing radio beacon.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught? Also can someone explain why phones need GPS for their operation. Do 3g/4g services require the phone's location to more precision than the tower can provide? Is there no fallback to some lower bandwidth mode?
Funny, I get exactly the same sort of goofy-ass ideas when *I* engage in operation "Joint Warrior". ;)
Will it jam GLONASS?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If GPS is no longer a military tool, perhaps the cost of the satellites and the global infrastructure that supports the GOS utility should no longer be funded out of US military accounts.
Why do we need an exercise to jam our own satellites? Shouldn't they be practicing jamming GLONASS or something?
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
An exercise is when you pretend something is happening and react according to instruction/protocol. Jamming GPS is kinda like breaking your sparing partners arm, completely uncalled for.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
REST IN PEACE DENNIS RITCHIE
(i'll use another post to say what i think about slashdot)
I thought gps was a military thing and that all that civvy stuff was just freeloading.
From TFA ... jammed in a radius of 20 miles around the various warships............There have been even reportedly been complaints about the impact on walkers in certain affected area, since many now use GPS devices both for navigation, position finding and for reporting the location of accidents.
What, did Jesus call up and complain? who else would be out walking around within a 20 mile radius of the warships? wtf?
#include bier;
The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"
So, the point is most operators just "reboot" the receiver and never really react to the jamming... They need the practice, provided by an exercise, to understand that even though most problems in the real-world are just glitches, sometimes they ARE being attacked.... YES I know I'm using the word attacked loosely. They should take some steps to realized what's happening and then as the Marines would say adapt and overcome. BTW I'm totally drunk right now, take it easy on me!
Wouldn't it be simple enough to practice as if the enemy is jamming your GPS by... not using your GPS?
RASPBERRY!? There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry...
LONESTAR.
Seriously, guys. Off the coast of Scotland? Why not, say, here?
Tell them to suck it up.
If they complain further turn selective availability back on to block out the entire region from all civilian receivers.
Its a free service donated by the united states, if you don't like it, don't use it. If its unavailable, don't complain unless you're paying for it.
So nice of NATO.
After participating in kill of more than 20k humans for the Defense Mapping Agency, such reprochment is gladly and greatly welcomed.
Dare I say, ... killing come easy, its ... not killing ... that is hard. Obama has not learned this fact.
--
The US owns the satellites, how about turning a few of them off?
I think that would get the point across about who owns them really fast.
Anybody knows how that Jamming affects a Drone? Aren't they mainly running on GPS? I'm definitely no expert, but just curious.
Navigation at sea isn't that straight forward. You have to take into account the magnetic declination, the magnetic deviation of the compass on the ship, corrections for wind and current. And then comes the different chart type you have to know. And the tides, yes, the tides. And that's about it...
I recently studied all of this and passed the theoretic exam. Hey, I want to be a seaman.
The practice is somewhat different. You take GPS for granted. You also take the plotter for granted. And the collision warning thingy that goes beeeeep.
I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
GPS satellites are in a 12 hour orbit, which is fairly high up. That also puts them in the middle of the Van Allen radiation belts. If I remember correctly, they are hardened to about a MegaRad, partly to survive their normal orbit conditions, and partly to survive nuclear effects. So yes, they would survive the start of a nuclear war, it's part of the design requirements.
A nuclear sub's job is to get lost on the ocean. That means to sit quietly underwater so nobody can find it. Coming up to the surface to get a GPS fix defeats that job. Getting your fix just before launching is OK, since you have to surface anyway to launch. ICBMs have used inertial navigation since they first came into use. The accuracy of hitting the target is mostly governed by the accuracy of knowing the launch point. Star finders only tell you which way you are looking. They tell you nothing about your trajectory.
Why exactly are they testing something which can disrupt the operation of civilian and commercial equipment when there is a GPS band dedicated solely to military operations? NATO has access to L2.
Each band only needs a single frequency to operate, so using the military band would provide an almost identical test. The only real difference is encryption and accuracy, but that has no bearing on actual signal quality. Granted, they operate at different frequencies, which can have an impact on signal propagation, but it would still allow for testing the technology and then factoring the difference into your presumed range.
Looks to me more like the military wanted to keep their own band working while they tested on the one which didn't matter to their operations as much.
>the ocean is big
Sigh. Mercator Projection.
The "ocean" around Scotland is NOT big. The SEA around Scotland is actually quite small. It's as far north as Newfoundland and Labrador.
It just LOOKS big on the map due to two-dimensional maps stretching out the northern and southern extremities of Earth.
Scotland, in particular Faslane, is where NATO keeps its nuclear submarines. The locals live cheek-by-jowl with these submariners and for the most part get along just fine. But closing off all the sea between all the inhabited islands in the west of Scotland just isn't feasible.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
>> or heck probably just a Lightsquared tower =)
or by the associated mobile phones
Seriously, who had the brilliant idea of mobiles in the 1,5GHz band ?
This guy should be sent to the electric chair !
- a phone needs a third transceiver There are already a lot of new bands for LTE, its nearly impossible to support all bands +WIFI + BT + GPS + radio ...
- a phone will jam it's own GPS
- a phone will jam GPS around it (more than the tower, coz towers have better filters !)
- a tower will jam GPS in a big radius
I think this band will die due to no support from phone manufacturers
aaaaaaa
>What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?
Scotland is only 200 miles x 150 miles in size. A fourty-mile exclusion zone (20 miles radius) would kill the entire marine economy for the western coast of the country.
And the marine economy is pretty much the only economy in western Scotland.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
You're number one dickheads.
There should be a "GPS license fee" for Non-US-entities who think that they have some kind of a right to GPS service which is funded by US taxpayers. I also think that most Europeans would happily pay it too just like they do for their so-called "TV licenses".
It's simple lack of communications. The same thing that plagues everybody at times. OFCOM, the regulatory body for the radio spectrum in the UK, has a mailing list where they post upcoming jamming events - http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/subscribe/gpsjamming.htm If you're not subscribed to it, then that's your problem. I'm not saying the fishermen should be signed up, but at least the coastguard, local councils, or fishing HQ wherever that may be.
Someone is to blame, and it's not the military (unless, of course, they failed to notify OFCOM)
The practice is somewhat different. You take GPS for granted. You also take the plotter for granted. And the collision warning thingy that goes beeeeep. I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't. http://www.starmoncler.com
Look at a map of the area, a lot of the naval exercises are held less than 20 miles from shore. Islands and west coast of Scotland is prime tourist area, walking in wild places and outdoor sports are big here. Jamming GPS here might mean walkers getting lost (yes I know they should be able to navigate without GPS, but hey, they still come, and they still spend money in the hotels and local shops) and if they do get lost, mountain rescue might have to go out in rain and fog and snow and try to get them back off the hills and moors, so they might need GPS to coordinate with air sea rescue helicopters etc.
Close down tourism in this area and you've got a lot of unhappy local people and a lot more local unemployment.
This isn't the Pacific Ocean we're talking about here, where you can just shove off another couple of hundred miles....
What the hell is a major exercise doing within 20 miles of fishing boats?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
This just demonstrates that we rely way too much on GPS, which is easy to jam. Maybe it is about time the civilian society also do "exercises" where GPS is jammed and see how we cope? If it is that dangerous for the navy to jam GPS, then it must be real tempting for terrorists to do so..
We're jammin'. I wanna jam it with you.
Your reception sets aren't hardened.
Leave GPS switched on, but stop them downloading the maps...
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
From TFA-
"There have been even reportedly been complaints about the impact on walkers in certain affected area, since many now use GPS devices both for navigation, position finding and for reporting the location of accidents. "
OK, if you're walking, how far away are you from some type of landmark? (Walking, not hiking or mountain climbing, mind you) You can't look at a map and say 3 blocks down Sherry St, make a right and go 4 blocks down Pub Ave.? Position finding- "I'm in Glasgow!" Accident location? "Hello Scottish 911? I'd like to report an accident at 55.858N 4.259W"
Yes, I get that boats and cars can have real issues, but if you can't walk around town without a GPS, you're either clueless, a hipster, or a man who never, ever asks for directions.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
why dont they just lose of Scotland ? Permanently
Getting your fix just before launching is OK, since you have to surface anyway to launch.
The exact depth you can launch from is classified, but even the Poseidon missile could be ejected from the submarine and the engine ignited when it was a safe distance away.
Anyway, the inertial guidance system on a nuclear missile can be run 24/7, so it makes sense to keep the guidance running in all your missiles and phase lock them with the boat's guidance system.
Military inertial guidance systems can drop a warhead within tens of meters after being flung at ballistic speeds. At the maximum speed of a sub, averaging all the guidance systems of all the missiles on board can get you to within a centimeter or so.*
*Note: My info is 30 years out of date, things might be much better now.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Coming up to the surface to get a GPS fix defeats that job.
Yeah because no one is going to see those 12 ICBM's launching....
Getting a GPS fix through an antenna while still 150 feet underwater is an acceptable risk, considering it's done just before launch.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
by "lose of" I'm going to guess that meant something akin to "let go of".
In that case, it'd be a bad thing since it's a country part of the UK. Thought I'd point that out, and all.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
...if you aren't part of the exercise, you shouldn't be in the fucking neighborhood, eh? Here in the beautiful but empty desert southwest of the US, we routinely conduct live-fire military exercises in the middle of an off-road playground used by people with more money than common sense. If they ignore the big red banners and cut through the padlocks on the gates while we are testing our latest and greatest munitions, it's their ass. If their next-of-kin try to litigate for damages, no jury on the planet would find for them. Why would it be different off the coast of Scotland?
GPS does a lot more than you might think. Jamming the signal has the likelyhood of causing all the ATMs to stop functioning. So nobody can get any money.
An article that was on slashdot previously.
IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.
It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Good. Now Roto will be able to find his lobster pots again on his way out of Cove harbour and the sheep will not get lost on their way to loch Draing.
Stick Men
Just for the record, when they were contacted, they suspended jamming for the remainder of the exercise - more info at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15242835
Actually Scottish independence is reasonably likely in the next five or ten years (not probable, but double-figure-percentage likely).
The independence party (Scottish National Party) have said that they would remain members of the EU and would not enforce any border restrictions, so it wouldn't be much different to the existing land border between Northern Ireland (UK) and the Republic of Ireland (hasn't been UK since, erm, 1920 something?), where there are already lots of roads and railways crossing the border with no border checks whatsoever - just fire up Google Maps Street View and you can follow roads betwen NI and ROI with not a border check in sight (most of the time there isn't even a road sign telling you which country you're in). Being a member of the EU would also mean that Scots would continue to be able to work legally in England, and Englishmen would continue to be able to work legally in Scotland.
The SNP have also said that Scotland would remain a member of NATO so the use of the Faslane nuclear submarine base would be pretty much unchanged. The only real problems would be beancounter stuff like exactly who owns the submarines, warships, fighter jets and tanks.
There would be similar beancounter problems in genuinely trans-national government-owned entities such as the BBC; for instance the BBC's children's programmes are mostly made at dedicated studios in Scotland, whereas the BBC drama programmes are mostly made at dedicated studios in the English Midlands and BBC sci-fi programmes are mostly made at dedicated studios in Wales. But for most entities, including the socialist-model NHS, it is already broken down into regional or sub-national components anyway.
The UK is pretty much already set up for independence. Since we're already in the European Union it really wouldn't make much difference.
Even the Queen-as-head-of-state thing is already covered by the Commonwealth. There are lots of independent countries which have kept the Queen as head of state; Canada, for example.
A lot of English people are actually quite pro-independence for Scotland, since Scotland has a poorer economy which gets subsidised by England (although you could argue that most of the UK is actually subsidised by Greater London).
It might happen, it could easily happen, there aren't any big practical barriers, there'd be very little day-to-day change and most British people are pretty indifferent about it. Scottish independence? "Meh".
(Disclaimer: I'm English living in England)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com