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

[Purveyor]

Source: Gizmodo

Starting today, it appears the US 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 US Navy’s largest installation 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 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.

The testing will be centered on China Lake, California—home to the Navy’s 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. The potentially lost signals will stretch hundreds of miles in each direction and will affect various types of GPS, reaching the furthest at higher altitudes. But the jamming will only affect aircraft above 5,000 feet. As you can see from the FAA map below, the jamming will almost reach the California-Oregon border at 4o,000 feet above sea level and 505 nautical miles at its greatest range.
Map released by the FAA showing the GPS jamming that will occur at different altitudes this month (FAA)

I gave the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division a call yesterday, but they couldn’t tell me much.

Read more: http://gizmodo.com/faa-warns-of-gps-outages-this-month-during-mysterious-t-1780866590

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[phazed0]

2. Weird. Doesn't really make sense to me.

GLONASS is another 'GPS like' technology out of Russia (Which most GPS receivers can use too).. is worldwide and virtually just as accurate. Looking at the Frequency spread on GLONASS and GPS, well, that's a lot of bandwidth to jam.. maybe some HAMs can weigh in.

[James48]

3. Only some GPS's also have GLONASS.

Many do not have a second system, some had LORAN has the second system.

Some aircraft are especially sensitive- see the wording about Embraer PHENOM-300:

"DUE TO GPS INTERFERENCE IMPACTS POTENTIALLY AFFECTING EMBRAER PHENOM 300 AIRCRAFT FLIGHT STABILITY CONTROLS, FAA RECOMMENDS EMBRAER PHENOM PILOTS AVOID THE ABOVE TESTING AREA AND CLOSELY MONITOR FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS DUE TO POTENTIAL LOSS OF GPS SIGNAL. "

More:
https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/noticesAction.do?queryType=ALLGPS&formatType=DOMESTIC

[phazed0]

5. Good info, thanks!

[underpants]

4. Weird

[NotHardly]

6. Effects more than flight issues ...

You may find it interesting to go to
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J_DPx_eUclMJ:www.nerc.com/docs/escc/PNT%2520-%2520Power%2520Systems%2520V19.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

It is a cashed link to a white paper regarding Preliminary Special Reliability Assessment Whitepaper: Extended loss of GPS Impact on Reliability

PDF]Extended loss of GPS Impact on Reliability - NERC
www.nerc.com/.../PNT%...
North American Electric Reliability Corporation
Preliminary Special Reliability Assessment Whitepaper: Extended loss of GPS Impact on Reliability. Findings: The U.S. Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system ...

such outage effects transportation tracking, cell phones, shipping, agriculture, etc. particularly if they do not know about it. As I understand it here, the mention is only being provided for airlines and piloting use. The extent and impact of the outage is not just the southwest, if one looks to the broadcast, it extends to Kansas City, Mo.

[KT2000]

7. The Navy is very busy

is very busy on the West Coast. They are not forthcoming with information either.

[Adrahil]

8. Most likely this is due to....

either testing related to technologies being developed to harden GPS receivers against jamming, or it is a broad-spectrum defense EW system, though those are usually testing at Holloman AFB.

[phazed0]

10. Sorry, no. Not sure where you are getting that thought from...

Jamming is easy to do and hard/impossible to combat. Remedies for a truly "jammed" signal basically include moving to another frequency(GPS frequencies are defined/hard-set) or physically blocking/reflecting said 'bad' signal while maintaining the correct signal at the antenna (Not feasible in the case of GPS).

Not sure how disabling GPS would provide early warning considering you basically kill location tracking for such devices (Drones, military hardware) that would provide info to the EW system. GPS isn't the only satellite-based location service (Others using different frequencies), either, and you can be sure that military hardware uses all of them including the ones we don't know about... so killing GPS seems a moot point unless you plan on killing large parts of the RF spectrum

So, no, it would most likely not be due to what you say. It is fully likely this is a test of DARPA's ASPN, "end-to-end system demonstration of GPS-independent PNT planned for FY15".

http://www.darpa.mil/program/adaptable-navigation-systems

[awoke_in_2003]

9. This is why

My principal driving tool is an atlas- have to keep the map reading skills up.