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FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests On the West Coast (gizmodo.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a Gizmodo report: Starting today, it appears the U.S. military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say "appears" because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the U.S. Navy's largest installation, China Lake, Californi -- home to the Navy's 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won't tell us much about what's going on. The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing(PDF) will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you're on the ground, you probably won't notice interference.
Good thing they're trying so hard to eliminate VOR, LORAN, NDB, etc, because GPS is 100% reliable!
What about telling the satellites directly to not send positional data anymore? After all, I've thought the satellites were put in space by them? Or is this in fact a training program for GLONASS and similar systems which they don't control?
This testing actually started last month. We got notification through several DHS related channels.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
It's all part of a government conspiracy to put everyone in concentration camps built out of abandoned Walmart super centers. Yup.
First they launch the satellites and then they try to jam their signals. It would have been more efficient if they didn't launch the satellites in the first place, me thinks.
But if you're on the ground, you probably won't notice interference.
You will see the aircraft based on captured UFOs being tested.
Why else would they do this? Obviously it has to do with UFO technology.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons - with an aluminum foil hat lined with plastic wrap - it keeps the government's wifi signals out.
Slightly off topic, but China Lake related. My rusty memory says that there was an odd series of tests in the eighties where scientists on the west coast thought that they were hearing infrasound from meteors and such like, then realised it was happening once a week at the same time. Speculation was it was related to the testing of a SR71 replacement, but unless I'm much-mistaken. nothing came of it. Thirty-plus years on, can anyone say what it was?
3 hours in a checkpoint with my shoes off, my laptop out, and my belt in a plastic tub as i shuffle with my pants now around my ankles into a giant microwave oven only to have boarded a flight where a thick beard or a mathematics equation on a napkin will get me sent to torture prison wasnt enough. Now, the very agency purportedly keeping me safe from the "terrorists" has knocked out the global system used to guide everything from uber to cruise missiles and my flight to Phoenix is now a flight to Scotland.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The FAA advisory says there is a 253nm ring of interference at 50ft AGL (above ground level)
So, depending likely on your line of sight to the transmitter, there is a good chance most of Southern California and Nevada are going to have ground-level interference.
My question is what will happen to the many datacenters with roof-mounted GPS antennas that feed to a local NTP server, which is trusted as a Stratum-1 source inside the company? Those antennas are very likely to be at 50ft AGL or above.
GPS is just a timestamp. If you're screwing with that, there is a good chance what you're doing is screwing with the time.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Sightings of U.S.S. Eldridge have been seen moving towards the west coast.
I gotta say - those Waze Warriors are getting pretty darn serious!
#DeleteChrome
Wait, that's a legitimate question.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
NOTAMS are deliberately written for the worst possible case. The range of effective jamming generally appear to be about 10% of published range. Additionally, buildings and hills and such will protect you from jammers that are not line of sight to you (L-band) so I'm not terribly concerned ... except of course that the FAA is pushing a very expensive ADS-B mandate which is 100% GPS dependent.
The Navy is in control of GPS. If the wish to make it louder, they will bring up the volume. If they wish to make it softer, they will tune it to a whisper. They will control the horizontal. They will control the vertical. They can roll the position, invert it or make it flutter. They can change the accuracy to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the foreseeable future, they will control all that you see and hear. There is nothing wrong with your GPS receiver. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the surface to -- The Outer Limits (of Earth orbital space).
see honey? I told you it wasn't my fault!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
My question is what will happen to the many datacenters with roof-mounted GPS antennas that feed to a local NTP server, which is trusted as a Stratum-1 source inside the company? Those antennas are very likely to be at 50ft AGL or above.
What normally happens to the NTP servers if the GPS device fails? They run on internal clocks and I'd imagine and demote themselves?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How would you ever notice a 250 nanometer region of interference?
The GPS systems need to have super accurate timeclocks, so they even have to account for relativistic variations due to orbit and all that. ... ;)
So of course if someone were messing around with an FTL drive, or a TARDIS or something like that, it could cause problems.
Yes, it's a joke, but I wonder how many conspiracy nuts will go off the rails on this one.
The California primary is today.
Obviously they've turned the mind-control rays up to 11 to ensure the preordained outcome.
suspiciously close to the horrible truth (tm)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
>"GPS interference testing(PDF) will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time."
Why the F would they pick such a time frame to intentionally disrupt the service? Wouldn't 11pm to 5am make a LITTLE more sense?
Anyone know why the FAA specifically mentions the Embraer Phenon 300?
From the FAA NOTAM: (it's in all caps in the NOTAM)
ADDITONALLY, DUE TO GPS INTERFERENCE IMPACTS POTENTIALLY AFFECTING EMBRAER PHENOM 300 AIRCRAFT FLIGHT STABILITY CONTROLS, FAA RECOMMENDS EMB PHENOM PILOTS AVOID THE ABOVE TESTING AREA AND CLOSELY MONITOR FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS DUE TO POTENTIAL LOSS OF GPS SIGNAL.
What's the mystery?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Dark Helmet: Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Star!
[camera moves in closer and closer during his dialog until it smashes into Dark Helmet and knocks him out]
If they skew the time enough to have GPS report a location a mile away from actual location, or even 100 miles away, the time will still be within a millisecond of being correct. Given network delays, few computers need the TOD more accurate than a millisecond. Also, ntpd won't jump a full millisecond all the sudden, it will slowly move closer to the reported time. So all in all I'm guesstimating the time may be off be 10-100 nanoseconds.
If they skew it by a lot, ntpd will detect it as a "false ticker" and ignore that clock. Typically important ntp servers peer with a few others.
So, here is just a little bit of amateur desk research into some things we might be able to gather from the information:
The FAA flight advisory provides the coordinates and the nature of the GPS signal disruption, which is centered near China Lake, and has expanding rings of area, each of which rises in altitude. For the pilots out there, imagine the classic upside-down wedding cake shape. Or cone with its point at the ground.
This would seem to indicate some kind of broadcast or interference from a source that is located at the ground, propagating line of sight with larger radii with altitude. Rather than something to do with the satellite itself.
The center of the coordinates are 360822N, 1173846W, which is in a big empty desert area, just south (SSW of Darwin, California), see here: https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
It could of course be some kind of antenna, or even a flight that is producing this signal. But there's also an interesting long V-shaped two-legged testing(?) facility just to the east of these coordinates, which you can see in the Google Earth image. I might be mistaken about what that facility is, because aeronautical sectional charts also show a mine in that area, but this doesn't look like a mine site. Also there are a bunch of vehicles that look like Humvees on the pad nearby. And there are three antenna looking structures at the north end of the paved line.
Anyway, it's interesting to speculate about.
One thing that you can be sure of now is that both the Chinese and Russians will be "listening" in very intently to everything that goes on during those days in the southwestern USA.
What do I mean by "listening"? Collecting lots of EMR, be it from satellites or cars parked somewhere or whatever else happens to be handy. While *we* may not know what the results of the test are, you can bet that the Chinese and Russians will.
Testing their drone jammer?
No doubt all of this is in bits and pieces elsewhere. Feel free to mark redundant.
1. The GPS system is owned and operated by the military. Civilians are secondary users. They get to turn it off any time they want, or reduce its accuracy, etc.
2. People already use readily-available GPS jammers, primarily to steal LoJack-equipped cars. Not sure why they're legal to sell, as a device intended solely for disabling a military-owned system, but http://www.thesignaljammer.com...
3. My money is on the military testing its resiliency to deliberate wide-area jamming or attacks on GPS satellites. It's an obvious way to seriously affect the US military without shooting soldiers, so some countries/NGOs might be more willing to do this than, say, blowing up a bus. My money is also on testing during thesummer during the day because pilots can... y'know... look out the window and see where they are. VFR conditions pretty much guaranteed. (yes, yes, at FL180 up you're in class A airspace and always are on instrument rules, but even A380 pilots need to use eyeballs)
4. There are no commercial aircraft that rely ONLY on GPS. VOR and DME are widely used (especially VOR), and pilots are trained to be able to navigate using those methods (evne non-commercial license holders and non-instrument-rating license holders).
5. I'm a pilot. Only private, but I can navigate perfectly well without GPS, and the plane I most commonly rent doesn't even have GPS. And as a pilot, I'm nothing special. If I were flying in that area, I'd do nothing differently whatsoever.
6. I'm not sure what's up with that Embraer. Something to look up tonight.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
And the order was written in a way that Obama couldn't undo it.
The FAA advisory says there is a 253nm ring of interference at 50ft AGL (above ground level)
So, depending likely on your line of sight to the transmitter, there is a good chance most of Southern California and Nevada are going to have ground-level interference.
Take a look at a topo map of southern California. We've got the San Gabriel Mountains between us (LA/Orange/Ventura counties) and China Lake. Ain't no little hill, neither.
If I were to make an uneducated guess, I would be thinking along the lines of a live fire test of their next generation cruise missiles. ( Something like LRASM )
One of the requirements of the next gen systems is their ability to operate in a communications / GPS denied environment.
So best guess is, sometime within the month, a live fire launch from a platform in the Pacific should be expected. Especially if the target area is China Lake AND the FAA is involved.
Will very likely have a chase plane or two following it during the course of its flight.
Just a guess though :)
Servers running NTP (properly setup) will just conclude that the time server has gone insane and will stop using it as a reference (even if it's their only source of time). The better setups augment the on-premise PPS stratum 0 clock with 3-4 off-site NTP pool servers. That way, the majority of the time, the servers will prefer the on-premise clock (which hopefully has low jitter and high accuracy), but won't follow it blindly over the abyss when it goes insane.
nm == nautical mile. 1 nm = 1852 meters
253 nm == 468.556 kilometers, or 291.15 miles.
They've managed to reconstruct the crashed UFO from Roswell (which was actually a German V3 made in conjunction with a planned attack by the blue aliens in 1944) with the help of a benevolent Bigfoot that was living near Loch Ness, and are moving it out of the hanger for test flights. No, really... The History Channel documentary on the project should be on later this week.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
For the Central Valley area there is the Sierra Nevada which is still a good bit higher as well. (Also Shields the bay area up to some elevation) , plus for parts of the bay area the Coastal Mountains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... nm is not a nautical mile. nm is unambiguously a nanometer (even in the US).
Learn to love Alaska
Here:
nm == nanometre. 1 nm = 0.000000001 meters
NM == nautical mile. 1 NM = 1852 meters
253 NM == 468.556 kilometers, or 291.15 miles.
FTFY :-)
I think you can have 'nmi' if you like...
The abbreviation nm, though conflicting with the SI symbol for the nanometre, is also sometimes used.
Do you read what you link to?
Aha! Solid evidence that the US military is building a time machine! I knew it!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Anyway, even in the 1960's experimental LORAN modes had accuracies under 6 meters, which is comparable to modern GPS. Money was not put in to develop this to wide deployment, but there was no major technical limitation. Some LORAN-C stations were still online as recently as 2 or 3 years ago, to serve as redundancy since GPS is easy to jam or destroy outright.
The USCG shutdown their Loran network in ~2010 to save $190M over five years (~$40M/year). The DoD actually wanted them to keep it around as a backup for GPS, but it was not to be.
Sadly, the USCG also started dismantling the towers and antennas for their Loran network, so now that everyone is interested in a backup system again, a lot of things have to be rebuilt from scratch.
There's a functioning eLoran system in the UK/EU I believe, and South Korea is also building one (due to the North's jamming of GPS).
This is a military experiment to see if they can replicate the method used by Iran to capture our drone several years ago, because, admittedly, our military has no idea how Iran was able to spoof the encrypted GPS channel. The Pentagon has been trying for years to figure it out, but as usual, the Chinese military is WAY ahead of us with its technology. And, as usual, we are incompetent because our military has become another socioeconomic welfare system. "Free money for college!" Right. Let's just ruin it a little more.
Sounds like nothing good.
But in any event you paid for it once so far.
It's probably a countermeasure test of a GPS/Glonass jammer. GPS is simply a convenient guinea pig but the actual targets are EU, Russian and Chinese nav systems that are compatible with GPS signals.