Limo Driver jams airport gps

I don't understand; I know of these portable jammers, I am aware they are a huge no-no in the USA, but these are supposed to be small immediate area jammers. This $100 gadget took out the entire airport. VERY interesting.

oh obviously, not that they were going to go up to him and say 'can you turn that off'.

 

It didn't say the airport got taken out, only that it interfered. Probably nothing that could bring down an airport, but just enough to getting a funky reading from wherever the jammer is.

 

The article says the jammer interfered with a specific GPS system called SmartPath. SmartPath is a differential GPS system (DGPS) or also called a Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS). These are used to provide 0.1 to 1 meter accuracy from GPS, which without augmentation, is good for just 10-100 meters. Differential GPS works by broadcasting the difference between the position error of a received signal at the actual surveyed location of a fixed reference receiver to a nearby mobile receiver, such as on an aircraft. Since the GPS errors at two receivers within a few miles of each other are similar, the broadcast correction can be applied at the mobile receiver to gain much better positional accuracy than with regular GPS. With this level of precision, you can conduct Precision Approaches, down to CAT III levels.

Because of this ground based architecture, the jammer only has to be near enough to one of the fixed reference receivers to take that out and affect the sub-1-meter precision that the system is intended to achieve. Because this would be a critical Nav system, there are probably autonomous signal integrity monitors/alarms on the fixed reference receivers that provide alerts when the received signal isn't within acceptable parameters.

 

Depends on the jammer I guess (blocking only GPS vs 3 spectrums). But yea, to block more than 1 spectrum requires a few hundred dollars for an actively cooled unit.

Not very smart of him, but that's life