GPS Archives

Here's another thing to worry about: It looks like we're due for massive solar flares in 2013 and while that may not seem like much of a problem compared to this year's floods and tornadoes, the space weather folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say all kinds of systems and gadgets we take for granted, such as GPS, face potential disruption and outages.

The National Space Weather Program Council, a multi-agency group that includes NOAA, NASA, and even the Homeland Security Department (I guess they are in charge of the Homeland part of space, whatever that means) plan a day long space weather forum on June 21 at the National Press Club.

Thanks to the Marine Corps, I first learned about solar flares as a young radio operator in 1963, and as the tired phrase goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

That's how David Last, a consultant to the outfit which operates all the aids to navigation in the United Kingdom, described the effects of jamming on GPS and related systems in tests last December conducted on a buoy tender offshore Newcastle, England.

The General Lighthouse Authorities of the U.K. and Ireland ran the tests to determine the effects a cheap GPS jammer anyone can buy over the Internet would have on the GPS navigation system installed on its THV Galatea buoy tender. The results, Last said, were "literally all over the map."

The jammer, which output a signal measured in milliwatts (one thousandth of a watt; by comparison, radio station WETA in Washington transmits 75,000 watts) skewed position results so much that over the course of the tests, the GPS receiver reported that Galatea -- which did not stray far from its position offshore Newcastle -- was anywhere from the northwest coast of Ireland, a distance of about 250 miles, to St. Petersburg, Russia, some 1,200 miles away.

Last told me that the most dramatic results of the Galatea tests showed the jamming crippled not just the ship's main GPS receiver, but multiple systems on the ship, all of which use GPS. It affected the radar system on board the Galatea, which included both a signal from the radar and a signal from an Automatic Identification System. The results were two different locations for nearby ships displayed on the Galatea's screens, Last said. Last reported those results last week at a meeting of the multi-agency U.S. Space Based Position, Timing and Navigation National Executive Committee in Washington.

Other systems on the Galatea crippled by the jamming that depend on GPS included the electronic chart display system, satellite communications systems and emergency distress systems, which rely on GPS for either location or timing, Last told me.

The Galatea was able to get an accurate position from a ground transmitter located 80 miles away in Anthon, using a technology called eLoran, not susceptible to GPS jamming and all but abandoned by the United States.

The Coast Guard started shutting down the Loran stations that transmit the eLoran signal last year, but then-Coast Guard commandant Thad Allen said the service would continue discussions to use eLoran as a backup to GPS. Last said the Newcastle tests proved both the vulnerability of GPS and the need for eLoran as a backup.

And it looks like eLoran is not dead. The 2010 Coast Guard Authorization Act signed by President Obama last Friday directs the Homeland Security Department to establish eLoran as the supplemental navigation system for the United States and the Coast Guard to modernize its Loran stations to transmit the eLoran signal.

At the very least, this should keep the Coast Guard from blowing up any more Loran stations, though I think it still will be a tough fight to make eLoran a reality.

I reported on Aug. 20 that the folks over at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency determined only Google had the smarts to handle visualization of the planet.

NGA said in a FedBizOps announcement last week that it planned to award Google a sole-source contract for Web-based access to geospatial visualization services because the company was the only outfit on Earth that could meet the viewing requirements.

Not so fast, said Microsoft, which told me that the MS Bing Map Server could do the job, too.

Now it appears NGA has re-thought, at least, the wording of the Google sole-source contract.

Karen Finn, the amazingly responsive NGA public affairs chief, told me in an e-mail that the agency is going to post a revised Earth visualization notice on Wednesday that will be more "technically specific on the requirements for support and license. NGA appreciates all interest and believes the revised synopsis will explain NGA's requirement with more specificity. Interested parties may still respond to the revised synopsis."

Watch this space on Wednesday for another planetary update.

The Coast Guard is making sure that its LORAN stations will never serve as a backup to GPS. Yes, it's simply closing some. But in the case of the facility at Port Clarence, Alaska, the Guard decided to literally blow up the tower, the Associated Press reported.

The Port Clarence LORAN station, about 70 miles northwest of Nome and 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle, had a 1,350-foot tower -- 100 feet taller than the Empire State building -- and the Coast Guard said it blew it up on Thursday because they believed it would collapse soon.

I think that also is a good excuse to ensure that LORAN, which for some reason the Coast Guard hates, is never used as an alternative to GPS in case it fails for some reason. At the moment, there is no such backup.

I learned 40 years ago as a Marine radio operator that all systems sooner or later don't work, and you better have a backup. Evidently that maxim does not apply to GPS.

While researching a What's Brewin' item I posted this week on backups to the GPS system, I conducted a Google search on GPS jammers. The results of the search staggered me -- by both the number of hits and the fact that Google also carried ads for gizmos that have no legitimate use.

I don't know why anyone would need a $49 GPS jammer that plugs into a car cigarette lighter outlet, except maybe to evade being tracked by the police. In a worst case scenario, a GPS jammer could cause a plane to go off course and crash.

Taking ads for the jammers does not seem to fit in with Google's slogan, "Do no harm." So, I sent Jim Young, Google's Defense Department sales manager, a note at about 7 pm EDT on Monday asking him what the company's policy was on accepting ads for these nefarious devices, most of which seem to be hatched in China, a country that Google has had a tiff with lately.

At 3:42 pm EDT on Tuesday, I received an e-mail from Deanna Yick, who works in Google's public relations department, which said that ads for GPS jammers violate the company's policy that prohibits the promotion of hacking and similar tools.

In a follow-up e-mail, Yick added:

Ads that violate the policy will be disapproved. We're constantly using both automated and manual means to monitor the system, so please let us know if there are additional ads you're seeing for these products on Google.com.

I did a search for GPS jammers at 10 pm EDT Tuesday night, and all the ads for GPS jammers that had popped on searches earlier in the day had disappeared.

But I think Google needs to tweak the algorithm that zapped ads for GPS jammers, because a search this morning resulted in an ad for a company selling GPS blocking gear and a search for GPS jamming came back with ads for GPS jamming equipment.

Kudos to Google for such a fast response, even though the search engine still returns multiple results for GPS jammer Web pages. But that's a free speech issue I'll have live with.

The folks over at the multiagency National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing posted a notice reminding us that the "U.S. government strongly encourages all GPS users to maintain backup capabilities for positioning, navigation and timing" in case of jamming or other outages.

Well, President Obama zeroed out in his fiscal 2010 budget funding for the only 99 percent reliable electronic GPS back-up that I know of -- the e-Loran system. The Coast Guard merrily went along, so it did not have to staff Loran stations in decidedly noncoastal places such as Boise City, Okla.

The Federal Railroad Admininistration is eyeing GPS as the core technology for a Positive Train Control System for all railroads within the next five years.

What is the engineer of the Amtrak Super Chief supposed to do if his GPS signal is knocked out by a $94.99 GPS jammer as he rolls through What's Central in Las Vegas, N.M., five years hence? Use a sextant?

The executive committee wants all of us out here in GPS-land to know that the Air Force is working on an unspecified GPS back up.

I bet it will cost more than the $190 million the Coasties expect to save over five years from shutting down the 24 Loran stations.

I'm obsessed with GPS, which I consider a Defense Department invention and gift to the world equal to the Internet. Today the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, inducted the man who invented the basic technology behind the system now used for applications ranging from aircraft navigation to precision farming.

GPS allows folks to determine their location anywhere on earth by using a receiver which calculates the time it takes to receive signals from at least three of the 24 GPS satellites orbiting the earth.

In 1964, Roger Easton, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, hatched the basic idea behind GPS -- fly atomic clocks in a constellation of satellites around earth in a racetrack orbit to provide precise location information. He called the concept TIMATION, short for time-navigation.

NRL launched the first TIMATION satellite in 1967, followed by three others between 1969 and 1977, which proved Easton's concept. The Air Force launched the first experimental GPS satellite in 1978.

If anyone doubts the value of basic research, Easton's work definitely has proven monetary value. The GPS market worldwide is expected to be worth $70 billion in gadgets, software and services by 2013.

But, despite the precision of GPS -- which today can pinpoint location within feet -- it's still a good idea pack a map and a compass when you go for a hike in the woods with your GPS-equipped cell phone.

That's been a hot question and topic of conversation in the Washington area for the past week, and in Howard County, Md., the answer to that question is easy thanks to GPS technology.

All 120 of the county's plows are equipped with GPS receivers that broadcast the trucks' positions and routes plowed onto a nifty graphic on the county's Web site.

Of course, the plows can do nothing about the snow removal problem, which could be solved by a GPS-equipped Japanese snow-eating robot, which compresses snow into bricks and then excretes them out its backend.

Alas, this gizmo does not seem to have moved beyond the prototype stage.

I consider GPS, along with the Internet, the Defense Department's two greatest gifts to the planet, and I continue to be amazed at the uses folks way outside Defense find for it. That includes a project by the Wildlife Conservation Society to map South America's Patagonian Sea.

The wildlife group, working in cooperation with the conversation group Birdlife International, fitted seals, penguins and albatrosses with GPS collars, which took location readings as they roamed the Patagonian Sea, which runs from Brazil to the tip of South America.

The GPS-packing critters uplinked more than 280,000 data points during a 10-year period, all of which were used to create The Atlas of the Patagonian Sea: Species and Spaces, which was published last week.

Dr. Claudio Campagna, who runs the Wildlife Conservation Society's Sea and Sky project, said the atlas was essentially written by the animals that live in the sea and will be used to develop conservation policies that will ensure their survival.

I just love doing heartwarming GPS stories.

The Coast Guard-operated Long Range Navigation system (Loran) managed to survive the Obama administration's cancellation attempts until at least January thanks to language in the final version of the Homeland Security Department Appropriations bill, which awaits the president's signature.

The conference report on the bill, which the House and Senate approved on Oct. 20, provides $12 million to operate the Coast Guard's 24 Loran stations through Jan. 10, 2010.

The report said operations shall continue beyond that date unless Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen certifies that the termination of the Loran signal will not adversely impact the safety of maritime navigation and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano certifies Loran is not needed as a backup to GPS.

This, in my view, does not offer much hope for continued operation of Loran, and its enhanced version, eLoran, which provide a terrestrial jam and missile proof backup to GPS satellites.

eLoran provides position accuracy to between 8 feet and 65 feet, with availability measured at 99.9 percent and integrity at 99.99 percent, according to the International Loran Association. GPS offers position accuracy between 8 feet and 25 feet for civilian users, but its high-frequency, low-power signal can be jammed more easily than the low-frequency, high-power eLoran signals.

So why has the Obama administration decided to balance a $3.5 trillion federal budget by killing eLoran, which offers a GPS backup for just $40 million to $50 million a year?

Simple. The Coast Guard hates Loran, because it requires a lot of bodies to operate and maintain stations quite far from the sea, in places like Boise City, Okla., and Las Cruces, N.M.

Oh well, when GPS gets knocked out, there will be a lot of money to be made teaching folks how to use maps and compasses.