Disastrous GPS Jamming

Just wonderful our government looking out for us (lol) we need to protest this.I bet this will mess up my satellite signal in my car also. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.I read the article and the FCC is going against their own rules even though the GPS industry showed the FCC that there would be problems.I wonder how much money the FCC is getting to wave their own rules.

Wait until the GPS manufacturers start getting all those brand new units returned to retailers because they don't work.

Fur will fly!

This is a new 4G network, so everyone with smartphones will be able to use the GPS aps..Do you think they'll take GPS trade-ins for new smartphones??

It'll be interesting to see what happens with civil, and military aeronautics units (aircraft) when these transmitters go live.

Pardon the pun but, I don't think it'll fly...

And I was going to buy another Garmin GPS, I think I'll hold off for a while now.

Through the aviation community, I have heard reports of intentional jamming near airports in VA by some who don't like the noise - even though the airplanes and airports have been there much longer. Illegal jammers are obtained over the internet from outside the US. The FCC needs to get their act together to de-conflict and stop interference from any source - that is their charter mission! For impetus and to substantiate the action they take, they need to hear vociferously from all commercial GPS users!

The available public record supports a conclusion that the FCC slid this one through on the sly, timing it to avoid public awareness and comment.

Garmin's tests, while clearly not those of a disinterested third party, certainly raise concerns, particularly when a widely used aviation system is used, and its performance severely degraded.

I would certainly hope that we will see followup from the FAA on this one.

Sounds pretty alarming!

It would be interesting to see who in the FCC has or had the closest ties to major comms companies.

FCC procedures/regulations/rules started smelling a bit fishy to me when I found out that after the official changeover to all digital TV, it didn't have enough horsepower to broadcast uninterrupted into the little 'ravine' my house is in (4 miles from the towers) to even get the TV news/weather any more. Funny. No amount of amplifiers or antennas worked. Had to subscribe to cable or fios to keep in touch.

Now it looks like reliable locationing might have to be done via 3G or 4G? Funny again, eh?

This issue had come up on the web site BroadbandReports.com several days ago. That site is dedicated towards broadband so the bulk of the users are going to be pro-wireless whatever the cost. I posted the following comment and was basically accused of spreading "FUD":

Mind you I am not surprised at the FCC. Several years ago they threw licensed high frequency radio users under the bus when they approved Broadband over Power Lines (BPL). Anyone who complained was basically called a Luddite holding back the advancement of the internet. Ultimately BPL failed under the poor economics and performance. Still the FCC was found to have hidden from the public, engineering results that showed the problems and instead bent over backwards in deference to the BPL consortium. I suspect Lightsquared is getting a similar pass. To hell with GPS users because more money can be made from Lightsquared and their licenses.

This is the Corporate States of America, after all...

Money rules and we, the taxpayers, don't count for much. GPS is free now + this company is paying fees = we lose.

Unless Garmin and the other GPS companies get together and make a lot of noise in TV commercials or something, the FCC is not going to pay attention. They should obviously put the blame square on the FCC.

Maybe this is Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's dumb idea to protect us from terrorist trying to use our GPS to guide their bombs or missiles.

Its called regulation vs legislation..
Kinna reminds me of..the EPA.

This is one totally corrupt part of the government.

Sadly it is not a unique situation. In Canada, the equivalent of the FCC is the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission). The have been "for sale" for decades as the are staffed by industry insiders who pass back and forth between the government and the industry's being regulated. Canadian's have been taking it up the you know what for a long time as just every ruling that came down from the CRTC was designed to give even more money to the industry.

Well it seems even Canadians have their limits. The various large Internet service providers decided to make a major cash grab via Usage Based Billing that was to go into effect March 1st, all with the CRTC's blessing. Mind you, nobobdy's bill was going to go down. You would still pay the base rate you were paying but then have to shell out another couple dollars for every gigabyte you consumed. That was apparently enough to finally rile of a lot of people. The government received so many complaints that the Prime Minister told the CRTC to scrap it and put the CRTC on notice that what they are doing will not be tolerated by the government (who can disband them and create something new).

If only we had that kind of consumer power in the United States. Time Warner tried something similar in Rochester, NY about two years ago and was slammed by public opinion but they still have their plans.

Note that they are discussing deploying 40,000 transmitters, each capable of interfering with a vehicular receiver at more than 5 miles (it is worse for aviation receivers) . . . which implies about 95 square miles of interference per transmitter.

Further note that the continental US comprises some 3.8 million square miles.

So, if you take 3.8 million and divide it by 40,000 you discover that the provider is proposing to completely blanket the country and interfere with current consumer and aviation GPS coverage throughout the continental United States.

Complaining here about the fact that our vehicle tracking and navigation systems will drop dead long and loudly will likely do little, if anything to raise the general public's awareness.

What is needed is a solid publicity campaign that companies like Garmin spearhead and fund to fight this. It is possible that Garmin could be complicit in this because THEY see it as a GREAT opportunity to create a fresh client base for improved GPS devices. It wouldn't be the first time in American history that a company knowingly supported a concept that had negative public implications in order to further it's own goals

Americans would need to create a grass-roots uprising like the UBB issue did in Canada. Note, however that UBB isn't dead yet.

Perhaps a class-action suit against the provider AND the FCC is needed to get them both to pay to replace the tens of millions of GPS receivers that will be impacted;

The only way to stop this is to make these jerks pay for what they propose to destroy.

PS: I recently read that BPL isn't quite dead yet, but that some utilities are playing with it to handle telemetry on their networks promoted by companies like BPL Global (stupid, if you ask me because if the line goes down, then so do your diagnostics and controls. It is very bad practice to put your control comms into the same infrastructure as the system it is intended to control).

I wouldn't worry too much, bleeding over on the GPS band (or any other for that matter) won't be tolerated for long if at all. Especially with GPS since other government and commercial entities use it.

I suppose you don't know about the 800 MHz band and what Motorola knowingly did to wreck it with their iDen products . . . .

The reality is that Nextel wound up owning a good chunk of a public safety and commercial communication band because of complicity between Motorola and possibly (you couldn't prove the link) the FCC.

Military GPS hardware is likely built with better quality receivers that are less affected by this adjacent channel interference given what the military pays for it's hardware. So you won't find an ally there.

The point is that the FCC didn't shut down the offender. Instead they told everyone else to move and the radio industry got to sell a whole lot of new product, a large percentage paid for with US tax dollars because police & fire departments used the move as an excuse to invest in high end, expensive P25 and similar voice networks.

It's been said here already but the mess that was BPL was an FCC train wreck too. At least BPL came against licensed radio operations (and operators- ham radio) that had the expertise and experience to do their own testing, throw immovable facts back at the FCC and the BPL industry and stand their ground. In the end, the facts did not matter so much but the economic and real-world limitations of BPL for high speed data is what caused it to crumble.

Years ago the FCC was directed by persons trained and skilled in radio communications. Now they are professional politicians who are more likely led by bureaucracy and visions of dollars rather that what may be best to protect and best utilize the shared airwaves.

They technically own the equipment, correct? Doesn't make it right though.

Who owns what equipment?

It wasn't Motorola and their iDen, it was the way the 800 MHz band was originally allocated and the Nextel used and installed their systems on frequencies immediately adjacent to the public safety frequencies that causes the interference problems.

Nextel never did own any public safety frequencies. They purchased licenses from businesses such as taxi cab and delivery companies in the frequencies that were interleaved with the public safety frequencies.

The FCC allocated small chunks of spectrum to both public safety and business/industrial in the 800 MHz band and then interleaved the channels. The Nextel "direct-connect phones" were/are a 2-way portable radio (a walkie-talkie) with a telephone keypad. The normal operation of a voice radio system is that it is normally not in use about 90% of the time. The system Nextel installed required multiple channels which were transmitting almost constantly. These were 'low power' in that they operate at around 10 watts or so of radiated power, but the sheer number of stations continuously transmitting on the adjacent frequencies caused unacceptable interference to the receivers in the public safety spectrum.

Contrary to your statement, the FCC has had a lot to do with moving what remains of the Nextel operations from the 800 MHz interleaved frequencies. Nextel was allowed to use other frequencies, some of which are former public safety frequencies and public safety is moving to some of what were commercial frequencies. Sprint is footing the bill for moving public safety - or at least a good portion of it - which is now in the billions of dollars. This has absolutely nothing to do with a shift to a different technology, P25. The shift to P25 technology is driven by a need (perceived or otherwise) for digital rather than analog technology and the ability to use encryption for transmissions.

So don't blame Motorola or even insinuate they were part and parcel to the problems with 800 MHz. Motorola, along with other manufacturers all manufacture equipment used in the 800 MHz bands, but it is true iDEN is proprietary to Motorola but blaming them is like blaming Ford for all the vehicle crashes on the highways.

it's all planned...

And here I thought it was Lonestar not Lightspeed giving us the raspberry!

I would be surprised if the military did not have higher quality receivers. Considering the "expense is no concern" in defense spending, they probably have the necessary front end filtering to protect the receiver from interference from adjacent frequencies.

For civilian receivers two solutions are; 1) better bandpass filtering for the 1575.42 L1 frequency and/or 2) implementation of the L2 frequency at 1227.60 MHz. Of course this does nothing for all the equipment already in the field. Also I believe L2 is not yet fully deployed making it less useful than L1 which is running on all the birds.

Ah, but it WAS Motorola and their iDen that caused all the trouble. And that's because the emission mask for iDen was much broader than what the FCC rules allow, which in turn caused interference even to users the requisite distance from the Nextel towers on those adjacent channel.

Clearly then you weren't around when, after almost 18 months of complaining it was discovered that Motorola had falsified (or perhaps it was an honest mistake?)their approvals reports to show that they fit within the FCC standard emission mask, when they clearly did not. I was working for a competing radio manufacturer during that period and it was a heck of a time for us.

However by then there were thousands of interfering towers installed and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. So the FCC chose to initiate rebanding, rather than to force Motorola and Nextel to make the equipment compliant.

So lots of users wound up with years of suffering and the problem lay with the FCC, who by intent, collusion, omission or a misguided sense of duty caused a huge number of primarily public safety subscribers (and a lot of commercial ones as well) to suffer with radio systems performing below expectations.

Oh, and bear in mind that the first shift was to ASTRO, which used analog voice and digital signalling and then to P25 which digitised the voice and cost an inordinate amount of money for a bunch of features no one ever uses and lackluster performance.

The reports I have access to show iDEN remained within parameters until the number of time slots was increased to either 8 or 16 I believe. Although the hardware allowed the number of slots to be increased, it was operating outside the recommended parameters which increased the OOBE. The decision to push the envelope on this landed in Morgan O'Brien's lap.

Lauren Weinstein has picked up this topic in his long standing "Privacy" forum. The complete posting is shown below:

Data Shows Disastrous GPS Jamming from FCC-Approved Broadcaster

http://bit.ly/hGgPQn (GPS World)

The company, Lightsquared, has stated that it will work with the GPS industry to see which GPS equipment needs "filtering so that they don't look into our band."

- - -

Uh, yeah, that sounds like a *really* practical fix for existing GPS units in the field, cars, etc. Get back to us on that one, boys.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com

Ah come on. You know that's just splitting hairs and is nothing more than semantics. With NexTel buying up the licenses from all the companies that were on those freqs (and because of it those freqs are now completely free and void of all the previously mentioned license owners but NexTel), NexTel is in effect the "OWNERS" of that set of freqs.

Let's be realistic. Companies do various things like this all the time. As a example (and talk about taxi cab companies)..

A city commission decided that it was sick and tired of having taxi cab drivers fighting each other over the city owned taxi parking/pick up spots at the airport. The city held a bidding raffle for the 5 (soon to be), "LICENSED" spots.. and all the taxi companies and independents were invited to bid.

At the end of the bidding raffle three of the spots were owned by "companies", while the other two were owned "independents".

A short time later one of the company "LICENSES" and one of the independent "LICENSES" was purchased by a holder of one of the spots.. which now gave them "3" of the 5 taxi parking/pick up spots.

The point I was/am trying to make is.. even though the government may own something (as in this case either freqs or taxi parking spots), if you are able to buy enough (or all) of what's there.. it in effect becomes yours.

Nuvi1300WTGPS

Nextel never did own any public safety frequencies. They owned land transport and business industrial frequencies which were interleaved between the P/S frequencies.

You knew what I meant, yet you had to nit-pick over it. Be assured I will do the same.

Nuvi1300WTGPS

And that's the difference between fact and conjecture.

Box Car is not the only one who takes exception to incorrect information,incorrect information is incorrect information.And you wrote you know what I mean no nobody would know what you ment because you stated it incorrectly.Secondly if a doctor gave you incorrect information and he said to you you know what I ment you would be pretty mad.Know how to write what you mean.And Making threats is not what this site is all about,that comment sounds childish.

alright guys that is enough, keep the tone friendly

Miss POI

With the hope that Miss POI doesn't consider this post as something being not within the guide lines..

mdh31951 and Box Car..

If you notice I said "With NexTel buying up the licenses from all the companies that were on those freqs.." it was obvious (to me at least), that I was referencing those companies to being the businesses (and the purchased licenses), per Box Car's statements of..

At NO time in any of my posts did I mention that NexTel "Owned" PSF's.. so I am at a loss as to figure out how one would consider my statements as being conjecture and incorrect. Once again, what I did say was..

I am more than willing to listen to your explanation of the above where I said differently.. and to publicly apologize if I am wrong.

Thank You for your responses.

Nuvi1300WTGPS

P.S. Miss POI..

In no way am I trying to harp on the subject or cause any undue stress, but in fact am only trying to clarify the misunderstanding of the misunderstanding.

Thanks..

It appears as if I owe you an apology for stating it was your argument about Nextel using public safety frequencies.

Reviewing the thread shows it was another user that made the statement about Nextel operating on channels assigned to public safety.

Apology accepted.. and I hope we can still be friends here. I understand what you said in your previous previous post (no, that wasn't a mis-wording on my part).. and I totally agree with you.

Have a good weekend..

Nuvi1300WTGPS

Actually no oine said anything ever about Nextel 'owing' public safety frequencies - but they sure did interfere with them.

Glad I saved my paper maps!! The whole government is full of corruption!!

Who do you think created those paper maps?????

If you recall, FEMA made a statement against BPL after their field tests and analysis showed that it would interfere with their communications, as well as other HF band communications from government and other public safety-oriented organizations.

Shortly after that report came out, President George W. Bush called FEMA's director at the time and said something to the effect of "Do you like your job?" FEMA then actually retracted the statement, backpedaling with a number of non-specific statements unsupported by any analysis or testing, stating that they thought it would probably be ok.

To me, that pretty much says it all.

- Phil

Thankfully, my old car atlas cannot be jammed, though updating it is hard!

So have you updated it lately? Route 66 is no longer there!

....I can see a new fee in the making!

Will be one more reason to buy a new model. All sides have to much to lose to not find a fix

Military and public safety depend on GPS more than we stupid drivers. And, most of their GPS equipment is not newer than ours. I am sure those "smart axx" will figure something out before this can happen.

While what you state is more than likely true, think of the entire proceeding in this possible light:

The government has to pay for the "Stimulus Package" somehow and the thinking in the White House is if Bill Clinton could go from a deficit to a surplus by auctioning radio spectrum, we should be able to duplicate that success.

Additionally, we all know we need more spectrum for cellular devices and to provide wireless broadband connections to every corner of the country. By making the suggestion we could take this swath of radio frequencies and make it available for "broadband" we can help meet the goals of the National Broadband Plan and announce "We have met our goal of making 500 MHz of spectrum available."

The signals from GPS satellites does much, much more than allow us to be routed from point A to point B. The satellites provide a high accuracy timing signal used in a great many devices besides a GPS. Nearly all credit card transactions - indeed, most banking transactions require a certifiable time stamp - and guess where it comes from. The technology allowing cellular telephones to operate and transfer calls between cell towers requires a precise and stable timing source - and guess where it comes from.

Want to buy property and you need it surveyed to establish the borders? GPS again. There are just so many things that rely on the data from GPS satellites that we can't even begin to realize how our lives would be affected if the constellation was suddenly knocked out due to interference.

The key point is with the stroke of a pen, the FCC has greatly increased the perceived value of spectrum held by the hedge fund behind LightSquared. Those licenses will be sold off to other speculators long before any solution to the interference caused could be found, tested and proven.

The key point is it is up to the proponent of the network to fix any interference issues BEFORE they can build even their first ground station. There's just no way it would be possible to change the internal construction of the hundreds of millions of devices using GPS for reference signals. Can you imagine being told YOU would have to put an external filter on your cell phone in order to continue using it?

If 4G will interfere with GPS, can GPS interfere with 4G?

Yeap, and it starts in Washington D.C. and goes out to each and every state capital, county seat, and city council across the nation. They all just seem to thrive on it.