Russian Device Jams GPS

A russin company has developed a small device that can jam the global positioning system (gps). The device is portable and can take out both military and civilian gps-signals.

Many systems are dependent on GPS nowdays. Things like smart-bombs (used in Afghanistan) rely on gps, ships, airports, lots of stuff need gps to function.

Who knows what would happen if someone turned one of these gadgets on in an airport on a foggy evening? Maybe the planes would loose direction and crash? Scary!

And for military operations, the smart bombs wouldn't be very effective if they couldn't hit their targets. Now they can hit a spot +- 10 meters. Warfare would increase in cost and more lives would be lost. I bet the dictators around the world have bought a jammer or two by now. Saddam has probably turned his gadgets on already...

Links:
http://www.ac11.org/gps1.htm
http://www.info-sec.com/denial/denial_012298a.html-ssi

THe GPS system is made up of 23 (or ws it 32 I can never remember) satalites that do nothing more than send a signal 24/7... In the signal is the sats number, the date and time that's it... Your receiver is what does all the work of figuring out where you are... And as of 2400 hours 31 DEC 2000 there is no longer any differance in the accuracy of a civilian receiver and a military one.... There are no longer two signals sent by the sats.... AS of Dec 31 2000 (I think it was) the accuracy generated by a civilian receiver is the same as that for a military one... I don't think that it is possible to "jam" the GPS system with out an extremely powerfuf signal that transmits on the same frequency as GPS does.... Then about all you could do is fool the receiver and then only maybe...

The problem, as I understand it is that the gps sattelites signals are very weak and easy to jam. To solve this problem the sattelites have to be altered which obviously is costly.

I received an antipoint saying all this is scam, and that may be true. However, it's naive to think that the gps system (which is an old system) does not have any vulnerabilites. But as I have no knowledge of the gps I can't tell if the articles consist of many errors.

4MidgetHitmen: I think it's unlikely that the us military only uses only one signal for both military and civilian use. That would mean they can't turn off the civilian system in warfare (used by the enemy), and still use their own military signal. That just don't make any sense....

You shouldn't have gotten neged... From what I know about the GPS system (I use it a lot camping, hiking, hunting, etc) there were two signals until midnight on Dec 31 2000 at which time they switched to a single signal usable by both military and civilian alike... They can turn the civilian signal back on if need be and it was stated that they would if there was a war... For all I know they may have already done it (turned it back on) in which case there would be the same degridation in accuracy on civilian receivers as in the past... I will have to check (I can go to the land navigation site here and use my GPS and compaire it to the marking GPS coordinates on the course) And yes the signal is fairly weak... Jamming it is possible I would imagine but I am sure that there is a way around it...

AFAIK jamming GPS signals is nothing new or revolutionary. The US military is currently considering ways of upgrading or retuning the satellites so that they have the capability to beam a tighter (and stronger) signal to areas of strategic interest to punch through jamming which would otherwise drown out the current wide-angle weaker signals.