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Secret UK Network Hunts GPS Jammers

Posted by samzenpus on from the hunt-you-down dept.

garymortimer writes "A secret network of 20 roadside listening stations across the UK has confirmed that criminals are attempting to jam GPS signals on a regular basis. From the article: 'Government-funded trials involving the police have revealed more than a hundred incidents of GPS jammer use in the UK. The Sentinel project, which has been running since January 2011, was designed to measure GPS jamming on UK roads. The project, run by GPS-tracking company Chronos Technology, picked up the illegal jamming incidents via four GPS sensors in trials lasting from two to six months per location.'"

6 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. at the risk of sounding stupid.. by neokushan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why block GPS? What do criminals gain from it? Genuine Queston.

    --
    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
    1. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Duncan+Booth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Possible but unlikely. I think at the moment they are just jamming the GPS signal which is really easy to do. To redirect you to another location they have to provide fake signals that your receiver will think are real. You can do that but it requires more sophisticated equipment. New Scientist had an article about GPS jamming last year and one of the more interesting things they suggested was that if you could distort the GPS instead of just jamming it you could cause mains blackouts over large areas of the US. Apparently US power stations use GPS as the reference time signal to ensure that the different power stations keep their generators in phase, so knock a few of them half a cycle out of phase and the entire network could come down.

    2. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I work for a telemetry company. Our units have a privacy mode the driver can activate when off duty.

      GPS jamming is also only really going to hide location, since these units are connected to the vehicle's CANBUS so read engine rpm, wheel speed, crazy acceleration, braking, cornering etc. So when the jamming is removed, it will still report back you drove the company car 500 miles at an average wheel speed of 86mph, with peaks of 112.

      Plus its blatantly obvious when the data stream stops due to comms failure.

  2. Misleading Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not criminals blocking GPS it's blokes in trucks that don't want their bosses to know where they are and how fast they are going.

    Most UK fleets operate GPS tracking so they can schedule deliveries/keep tabs on driver behaviour, jamming the GPS allows that truck driver to exceed the speed limits, take unscheduled breaks, drive for longer periods of time and generally do things without his bosses knowing about it. In cab tachographs can be tampered with, GPS tracking done remotely cannot so the solution for them is to block the GPs signal.

    Yes it's illegal to interfere with GPS but we are not talking about hardened criminals here, what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve ?

    1. Re:Misleading Article by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 5, Interesting

      what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve

      Part of me thinks the enforcement of this is a prelude to the coming age where our vehicle positions are all tracked ; that isn't tinfoil hat territory, it's a serious proposition that has been raised by the government of the UK amongst others in Europe. I'm firmly convinced that this is one of the major justifications for the new Galileo navigation satellite constellation - it's been designed to work much better in the kind of convoluted urban environment common in European cities.

      The legislative justification is "road pricing" - the idea being ostensibly to reduce congestion on busy roads at rush hour by charging higher tolls for them, all enforced by an on-board GPS / Galileo datalogger with a cellular modem. Since a back-of-the-napkin calculation can tell you that it's an order of magnitude cheaper to toll roads by mandating active RFID tags in license plates, Occam's Razor says that road pricing is not the real aim of fitting every vehicle with a tracking device.

      Quite apart from the current reasons for enforcing a ban on GPS jammers (interference with airport GPS equipment, etc), they have a vested interest in not letting these devices become common enough to render them effectively impossible to police.

  3. Trucker disrupts air control tower by abelb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As mentioned above truckers, delivery van drivers etc can use jammers to hide thier location inadvertantly disrupting critical systems.
    "An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll."