So you’re pretty impressed with that GPS system that will help pinpoint your car’s position should it be stolen? Well, it appears that some criminals may just have found a way through that master-plan via imported GPS ‘jammers’. Already popular in the UK and pretty certain to make their way over here if they haven’t already; expensive cars and lorries with valuable loads have been targeted by some rapscallions who use the ‘jammers’ to send out radio signals at the same frequency at the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, overwhelming the timing signal that in-car devices use to plot their position.

A Guardian report this morning tells how this means “a tracker device built into a lorry with a valuable load, or a car with an anti-theft GPS device which should report its position if stolen, cannot distinguish the correct GPS signal”. Muddying the waters even further, it’s not actually illegal to import or own such a ‘jammer’ in the UK, just to use or sell them. Nice watertight laws there eh.

Continues the report, “Satnav devices rely on being able to “see” at least four of the 30 satellites orbiting about 20,200km (12,550 miles) above the earth: by correlating the very precise timing and identification signals they transmit, a ground-based device can calculate its own location to within about 1 metre. However, the jamming devices do not have to put out a strong signal to disrupt GPS reception.”
Bob Cockshott, who heads the location and timing program for the Technology Strategy Board, funded by the UK government’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills fears that much more powerful jammers could have multiple uses for criminal gangs. “They would work over tens of kilometres, so drugs gangs might use them to disrupt navigation in the Thames estuary if they were taking a delivery and didn’t want rivals to be able to trace them.”
Charles Curry, the managing director of Chronos Technology, who also heads a consortium which is building a GPS-jamming detection system with a £2.2m UK government grant, said that the biggest fear was that a powerful GPS jammer might be used by terrorists near an airport.
“If you lost GPS capability on planes or other things that rely on accurate timing, such as the emergency networks or power stations, then if they don’t build in the ability to mitigate against such attacks there could be very serious consequences.” The detection system is now in its prototype stages and would be used at airports, harbours and other locations which rely on the nanosecond accuracy of GPS outputs.