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United States IT Technology

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests On the West Coast (gizmodo.com) 170

Posted by msmash 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.
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FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests On the West Coast More

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests On the West Coast

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  • Redundant Systems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:42PM (#52270077)

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

    • Good thing they're trying so hard to eliminate VOR, LORAN, NDB, etc,

      [Loran - shudder] When doing things the hard way half measures are no way to go. Don't worry, grandpa, your astrolabe will function perfectly.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You know, the Loran I had in my airplane just worked. Plug in lat/long and it would steer a straight enough line there. GPS, on the other hand, needs a $500/yr jeppersen subscription, courtesy of a Garmin's vendor lock-in.

        • GPS, on the other hand, needs a $500/yr jeppersen subscription, courtesy of a Garmin's vendor lock-in.

          Why can't you just use your cellphone? Isn't there an app for that?

        • Re:Redundant Systems (Score:4, Interesting)

          by SCPaPaJoe ( 767952 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @06:57PM (#52271327)
          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...

          • Re:Redundant Systems (Score:5, Funny)

            by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @09:59PM (#52272159)

            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.

            Let me guess... you actually mean early 1490s, and your dad was Christopher Columbus.

          • Re:Redundant Systems (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @10:39PM (#52272303)

            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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        When a war between first world powers happens and the GPS satellites are destroyed on the first day, my sextant will continue to function. Good luck with your now useless GPS unit though.

        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

      • Knew a lobsterman who used loran - he said he'd cut his throttle coming up on a waypoint, and stick his gaff out the port side and grab his trawl in the dark. Pretty damn accurate, without a GUI.

    • Eliminating VOR and LORAN was dumb... because the first major solar storm we see on the scale of the Solar Storm of 1859 will wipe out most if not all of the GPS constellation. GPS should have been designed to integrate LORAN and VOR from the beginning.

      • Re:Redundant Systems (Score:4, Insightful)

        by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer.earthlink@net> on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:12PM (#52271701)

        I agree. The US GPS, Navstar, is quite durable but it still requires a very extensive system to keep functional. It's also quite likely very expensive too but given it's capability the cost to benefit likely still falls in Navstar's favor over any ground based system.

        The problem with a satellite navigation system is that if anything goes wrong that can affect many satellites, like the solar storm you mention, the means to repair or replace it is limited. We cannot simply fly up to a satellite and fix it. The only thing we can do is launch a replacement. If the satellite is truly dead then we'd lack the ability to re-orbit or de-orbit it and get it out of the way of the replacement satellite. It will be a hazard to subsequent satellites for 10,000 years. Launching satellites is limited to the number of spares on the ground and/or the rate in which they can be manufactured, as well as the rate in which they can be launched.

        There are a number of ground based systems that augment or assist satellite navigation, WAAS is one that comes to mind, but they rely on satellite signals to operate. I assume it would be relatively trivial to allow these systems to operate autonomously but I've seen no effort to do so.

        LORAN, VOR, and other ground based navigation aids are quite valuable in that being land based they can be repaired and replaced with much greater ease than anything in orbit. If there is an extended outage of satellite navigation then I'd expect ground based systems to get put into use relatively quickly but when talking about replacing an entire constellation of satellite navigation aids "relatively quickly" can still mean months, or even years. In the mean time we'd likely see many flights cancelled or put on longer routes because of reduced navigation capability. This would no doubt come at great expense and inconvenience. Had the US designed Navstar to integrate with ground based systems from the start then we'd never see this threat since the value of ground based navigation would be much more obvious and we'd not see systems like LORAN lose interest, and then funding, and then get destroyed.

        Given the way that governments operate we'll see funding for ground based navigation fade to nothing until something happens to the satellites. At which point large sums of money will be allocated quickly with all the waste and corruption inherent with that panic. At which point, if we are lucky enough to have some smart people get paired up with some politically connected people, we just might get a very durable navigation system that integrates ground and satellite navigation seamlessly.

        I doubt we'll be so lucky.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      Well, those are more difficult for the US to jam so of course they want to eliminate them.

  • 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?

    • Re:Why not press the switch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Aqualung812 ( 959532 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:00PM (#52270213)

      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.

      • Almost certainly the US military wants a plan to shut down GLONASS and Galileo during operations. If the US can shut down any other positioning system at will, then sharing GPS becomes less controversial in other countries because then the other systems may offer no real defense advantage.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Agripa ( 139780 )

          I have always assumed that the big push for "interoperability" included the ability to jam all of the satellite positioning services within a given area.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What about telling the satellites directly to not send positional data anymore?

      The NOTAM linked stated that they were "testing" GPS systems. It's anybody's guess what the testing consists of, but I would interpret the word to consist of tests like "if we did THIS, what result would it have on the GPS signal? What about THAT, how does THAT affect the GPS?"

      Turning of the satellites doesn't really test anything except the "off" switch.

    • What about telling the satellites directly to not send positional data anymore?

      because it's a Global Positioning System.

      • They could most certainly turn off civilian GPS on select parts of the planet, like a over a continent. A GPS satellite only serves a given cone below its current position, by turning a satellite off when the cone enters an area you want to block it in, and on again if it leaves it you can block the whole area. It of course only works on bigger "resolutions" like per-continent, but it works.

        Dunno if there is even more precise control. Maybe they have a trick I haven't thought of.

        • They could most certainly turn off civilian GPS on select parts of the planet, like a over a continent. A GPS satellite only serves a given cone below its current position, by turning a satellite off when the cone enters an area you want to block it in, and on again if it leaves it you can block the whole area.

          your ignorance of GPS technology has been exposed. i suggest you take care of that.

          • Tell me what's wrong about my post.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rtb61 ( 674572 )

              The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. So more complex and there is a great visual diagram of the 24 satellites. So you can not really cut off one region without harming all surrounding regions. Of course using GPS as a weapon only works once because from there on i

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AK Marc ( 707885 )

                So you can not really cut off one region without harming all surrounding regions.

                Obviously. Who said you wouldn't be harming the surrounding areas? If it's easy to turn them off and on individually, it should be trivial to black out a single location. Yes, the accuracy of the block is not very granular, and it will affect surrounding areas. Nobody said otherwise.

        • They could most certainly turn off civilian GPS on select parts of the planet, like a over a continent. A GPS satellite only serves a given cone below its current position, by turning a satellite off when the cone enters an area you want to block it in, and on again if it leaves it you can block the whole area. It of course only works on bigger "resolutions" like per-continent, but it works.

          Not sure about the current satellites, but the earlier satellites didn't have this capability (or at least the governm

    • What about telling the satellites directly to not send positional data anymore?

      Or even better, send plausible but incorrect data. Then the terrorist drone will impact 100 meters off target. If the data is shut off completely, the terrorists will just delay their launch.

    • It could also be a test of GPS v2, or something else that uses similar frequencies. In other words, things that happen to interfere, as opposed to things designed to interfere.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by heypete ( 60671 )

      It's easy to know how a GPS receiver will work if there's no signal: it simply doesn't function.

      But how does it function in the presence of strong jamming signals of different types? Does it produce spurious errors? False position or timing data? Does it have other issues? Can very strong signals cause damage to various components like amplifiers and the exquisitely sensitive receiver circuits?

      I'm just speculating, but I suspect that they'll be doing tests of that type.

    • It is only conjecture that the purpose of the devices being tested are to jam GPS. It may very well be, but it might not. The GPS interruption may just be a side effect.
  • This testing actually started last month. We got notification through several DHS related channels.
    • It just wasn't in California so no one cared.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Well they shouldn't be testing GPS in California. GPS is known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

        • Well they shouldn't be testing GPS in California.

          They are doing to interfere with voters driving to the polls today. It is part of the anti-Bernie conspiracy.

  • Mysterious ways of the government (Score:4, Funny)

    by jovius ( 974690 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:55PM (#52270171)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      There are actually two types of GPS signals one for US military use and one for civilian use. The civilian GPS system is capable of sending 'bad' information and actually was built with artificial precision issues.

      • Selective Availability (the system you're talking about) was turned off permanently in the year 2000 by Clinton, and the new satellites don't have the capability.

        The rationale was that GPS is too useful and too important to screw it up globally, and that it was easier to just deny adversaries the capability on an area basis rather than a global basis. Like, say, what they're doing now as a test.

        SA didn't even work that well since people were working around it - basically discovering the error and broadcasti

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          The same link also says that in 2000 they had a system in place that allowed hostile forces to be denied service. So what's this 'new tech' necessary for?

  • Sonic booms (Score:3)

    by fremsley471 ( 792813 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:57PM (#52270195)

    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?

    • http://earthsky.org/space/whoo... [earthsky.org]

      During the leonid storm (2000? 2001?) I heard sounds which sounded like the sizzling sound described in that article but I thought i was imagining it because the metors were 100km or more over my head - way too far for any sound to be heard, let alone simultaneously with the event. It turns out that the sound is real and explainable. :)

    • People think the USAF has a shiny toy with a pulse detonation engine [wikipedia.org]. The sound has also been heard over Texas, New York, and the UK. I know the Daily Mail is a tabloid site, but in true MIB style they've got pretty comprehensive coverage of the topic [dailymail.co.uk], including an audio recording and pics of the contrail. The contrail pic is from Texas if I remember. There used to be a good article on that in AvWeek, but they put up a paywall.

      If I remember, the sounds heard in Southern California in the late 1980s,

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:57PM (#52270201)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • my flight to Phoenix is now a flight to Scotland.

      That would justify a thank you note to DHS, not a complaint.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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?

    • Re:Ground will still notice. What about time sourc (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:28PM (#52270423)

      How would you ever notice a 250 nanometer region of interference?

    • 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" a

    • 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.

    • 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.

      Aha! Solid evidence that the US military is building a time machine! I knew it!

  • In unrelated news (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sightings of U.S.S. Eldridge have been seen moving towards the west coast.

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:09PM (#52270273)

    I gotta say - those Waze Warriors are getting pretty darn serious!

  • Wait, that's a legitimate question.

    • 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 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 particip

  • 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. ;)

  • >"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?

    • Technicians charge extra for after hour calls?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      >"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?

      So you want to take away GPS and the sun?

    • They're not trying to make sense (to you), they're trying to test something that we don't have full details on. Perhaps what they're testing requires that time frame. I'm sure that if they could do the test in such a way that nobody knew it was even happening, they would.
  • 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.
    • “Due to GPS Interference impacts potentially affecting Embraer 300 aircraft flight stability controls, FAA recommends EMB Phenom pilots avoid the testing area and closely monitor flight control systems,” the Notam reads. http://www.avweb.com/avwebflas... [avweb.com]

    • Obviously this plane relies directly on GPS signals for the flight stability controls. In what way exactly? Well unless someone at Embraer will tell you, there's only one way to find out...

  • 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 fro

  • Drones (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:03PM (#52270693)
    Testing their drone jammer?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Maybe testing the anti-drone-jammer. Presumably the military would like to use GPS when jamming is in effect, and Iran claims to have captured a US drone by some combination of jamming and false GPS signals.

  • Just a few notes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Caerdwyn ( 829058 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:06PM (#52270715) Journal

    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... [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.

    • Yeah the Phenom thing is a good one, we were trying to figure that out earlier in hangar flying. (Also a PPL.)

      This is certainly a military "area denial" test, with the secondary effect of "aviation users, let us know if there's any gotchas we didn't know about as we move to GPS-only" (NextGen). Probably there will be no actual impact, and if there is, between pilotage, dead-reckoning, and VORs pilots should be just fine. If they aren't, they really shouldn't be flying anyway. IFR makes things slightly more

  • An uneducated guess (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @06:32PM (#52271191)

    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 :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by afidel ( 530433 )

      Probably not live fire, as someone posted up-thread the center of the cone is adjacent to the second longest rocket sled test track in the world, they're probably doing a test on the receivers as they travel down the track near the jammer.

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by meglon ( 1001833 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:15PM (#52271717)
    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.

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