[time-nuts] GPS outage?

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 6 13:25:19 UTC 2013


On 9/6/13 4:00 AM, Bob Camp wrote:
> Hi
>
> A "truck jammer" isn't what you would use to take out a large area,
> you would need > 100,000 of that sort of jammer. Since the truckers
> that use them get fired, there's a limited number of them in use….

Considering they cost $30, and they're not that easy to detect, I think 
it's a bigger problem than that.  If the trucking company's GPS logging 
system is always failing, they may *think* the driver is using a jammer, 
but they probably don't *know*, so the driver just winds up not getting 
called for trips.  But that same driver will go work for another 
company, carrying the jammer in his/her pocket.

In fact, even if the driver were caught by the FCC, AND they filed an 
enforcement action, I doubt it would show up in the usual background 
check.  It's not on your "driving record" or "criminal record", which 
are the things that people hiring drivers check.

If the driver were actually caught by the trucking company, I doubt 
they'd tell the FCC (since the FCC will come after the company too), and 
there's probably no law enforcement involvement.  The driver is 
terminated, and if someone were to ask, the company would just reply 
"yes, they worked as a driver from %date% to %date%".  I can't imagine a 
company telling someone calling for a reference about a driver using a 
jammer: there's too many downsides.  It's not cut and dried like "oh, 
Bob was terminated when he wrecked 3 trucks" or "came into work after 
being awake for 3 days straight waving a sword".  Those kinds of things 
are objective and easy to report.


But as you say, you'd need a lot of eBay GPS jammers to cause a large 
area outage.  We here on Time-Nuts, of course, are far more 
sophisticated, and with the thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and 
millions of hours of experience (cumulatively), it would be short work 
for one of us to deny GPS to a significant area.  Just sayin'... {Let me 
go out to my garage and start warming up the filaments and start the 
water cooling system on the L-band Klystron. I need to drive up to the 
top of Mt. Wilson where I have a good view of the LA basin, bwa-ha-ha-ha...}


>
> That said, if the "event" is simply toggling into holdover and then
> immediately popping back out, there's a lot of things that can cause
> that. Exactly what depends a bit on how long the firmware takes to
> declare a loss / recovery of GPS.
>
> Bob
>



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