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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.
Play nice... don't HARM the jammers!
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?
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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?
The innumerable shipwrecks dotting the shores of the British Isles over the centuries suggest that GPS navigation might be a bit more foolproof than those methods.
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?
They still are taught (certainly to military navigators), but these techniques are only useful for relatively coarse navigation. Fine to get your boat home to port, but not very useful to accurately locate a particular crab pot, trawl a particular area while avoiding no-go zones or known obstructions, hold station over an dive site, oil or gas well head etc.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Will it jam GLONASS?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's not to practice jamming... it's to practice operating when the Bad Guys are doing the jamming.
I wouldn't depend solely on GPS either, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to *intentionally* disable GPS and force people to use less reliable and rarely practiced methods, even if they all know how to use them.
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!"
The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.
I think maybe you forgot who works for whom.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
1, There are are a whole lot of GPSes involved. It's a lot more than a nav unit on the bridge, and they don't all share a single off-switch.
2, You don't want to practice "OK, everyone turn off your GPS now and switch to plan B!". You want to practice "Why are we drifting to starboard? Is this an instrumentation failure? WTF is ERROR 7505?", because that's how it happens when you're doing it for real and you need to learn to work through that kind of confusion.
This is why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
>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
>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