Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests On the West Coast (gizmodo.com)

Posted by msmash on from the X-files-I-want-to-believe dept.

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.

7 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Redundant Systems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Good thing they're trying so hard to eliminate VOR, LORAN, NDB, etc, because GPS is 100% reliable!

    1. Re:Redundant Systems by SCPaPaJoe · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Time to dust off the sextant. My father insisted that I learn celestial navigation when I started sailing long distances when I was a teen, but that was back in the early '90's. I also read recently that the US Navy is bringing sextant training as well. Now if I could only find some new charts...

    2. Re:Redundant Systems by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My brother is in a commercial fleet, and he was required to learn how to do navigation by manual methods (charts, compass, sightings, etc) to pass whatever certification exams he was taking at the time (and there's a *lot* of them). I'd have to imagine Navy navigators have to pass the same sort of standards as civilians sailors. It definitely seems like a good thing not to rely too heavily on technology, not just in case it fails, but as a way to sanity-check the computer systems that nearly all modern vessels rely on.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. Re:Why not press the switch by Aqualung812 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see two possibilities, which may both be true:

    1. They want to learn more about what it would take to compromise the existing USA GPS, so they know how to detect such activity and perhaps test countermeasures.

    2. They want to be able to compromise GLONASS and Galileo without compromising the SA GPS signal. However, in testing this, they might get it wrong and take down GPS.

    --
    Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
  3. Re:Mysterious ways of the government by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's funny because you think the US is the only one with GPS satellites.

    Technically they are. Russia has GLONASS and the EU should have Galileo fully operational by 2020. China, Japan and India (Beidou, QZSS, and IRNSS) all have their own versions that function regionally, but none are called GPS.

    At the moment only GPS and GLONASS are global. Both China and the EU systems should also be global in 2020.

  4. Just a few notes by Caerdwyn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. An uneducated guess by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 :)