GPS System Failure Imminent

I think calling oneself an "avionics expert" in modern times, and not understanding GPS, might be a bit of a sign someone is really pulling your chain, hard. He might be more of a "former avionics expert", perhaps... if he's older. Folks hate to admit they're out of date on stuff they once WERE an expert on... or he's just lying. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Besides being a WAAS transponder-carrying bird, Galaxy 15 brings you all of this ... uh... crap...

http://www.lyngsat.com/Galaxy-15.html

:)
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Boy have they come a LONG way from the old C band 3.7 -4.2 gig days... In a previous life I had a thriving C band sales and install business.. I mean the good old days when setting up and tracking a new install always lead to the West Star 5, transponder 2 to find Gene Scott smoking his cigar and preaching for more money. Or the early days of the Weather channel on Satcom 3 trans 17.... Oh, and I REALLY miss those backdoor feeds for all the car races too..:yes:
 
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Jim_R said:
Plenty of smart people say stupid things all the time. Just because you're bright in one area doesn't mean you can't be full of $#!+ in the field right next door.

It's the ol' "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull$#!+". Some folks have improved on that technique by starting off with the dazzle, then segueing smoothly into the baffle.
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No kidding....this reminds me of the whole Y2K thing. There was an entire industry built in the 90's to address what turned out to be pretty much a non-event.
 
Anyone bragging about their number of patents is a red flag on the BS meter. I have at least 2 dozen with my name on them on them. Want to guess how many turned out to be relevant to a marketable product?
 
wsuffa said:
The financial system, too: banking, stock trading (especially the high-frequency computer drive stuff) and so forth. Hedge funds and Wall Street types would be in a world of hurt without GPS.

...
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So, there would at least be a silver lining. :D

I have a general distrust of things electronic, probably as a side-effect of spending most of my adolescence and adulthood dealing with electronic devices that were misbehaving.

My first "formal" electronics training was in avionics (although it was so long ago that we might as well be talking horses and buggies by way of analogy), but I've been farting around with electronics in general since I was 6 years old. I've always been impressed by the variety of ways in which electronic devices can go bad, and the advent of digital processing has added a whole 'nuther set of opportunities for failure in addition to the old-fashioned ones that afflicted the analog devices that dominated when I was trained.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that the GPS system in general is one of the better-behaved clans of electronic devices. That it's administered by the government makes it all that more amazing that it works as well as it does, as consistently as it does.

Still, I find it a bit disconcerting that so many pilots (both aeronauts and mariners) have come to depend on GPS as much as they do, considering that it's a relatively recent technology that didn't even exist (except in a seminal, theoretical sort of way) when I took my first flying lesson, or when I sailed the seas.

Just as an aside, does anyone know if mariners even have to know celestial navigation any more?

All of this has become pretty much a moot issue for me since I went rogue. Most of my flying is in ultralights these days, and they just don't have the range for me to need much in the way of navaids. I'm familiar enough with these hills and the rivers, streams and highways that criss-cross them that eyeballs and a sectional are enough for me to find my way around just fine.

But even before I went rogue, I shunned glass cockpits and pretty much ignored the GPS (along with anything else that the J3 Cub that I first flew didn't have). I find it a bit disconcerting that so many pilots have come to depend upon GPS as much as they do.

-Rich
 
olasek said:
Agree. Like Clint Eastwood said in his movie "A man should know his limitations". An avionics expert can be a complete dork in the intricacies of GPS. Specially GPS is mentally challenging for many who grew up around VORs and anything that is hard to grasp is so much easier to demonize and poke fun at.
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I don't think he was demonizing GPS. He is honestly worried about its future reliability.

He was the "tech in charge" at Trimble when they finally got the first GPS approved for aviation usage. Supposedly, after 18 months of getting nowhere with the FAA's approval process, it took a tidy $1 million in an offshore bank account, given to the right bureaucrat, to get the job done.
 
Jay Honeck said:
I don't think he was demonizing GPS. He is honestly worried about its future reliability.

He was the "tech in charge" at Trimble when they finally got the first GPS approved for aviation usage. Supposedly, after 18 months of getting nowhere with the FAA's approval process, it took a tidy $1 million in an offshore bank account, given to the right bureaucrat, to get the job done.
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So he admitted to you that he participated in bribery too?
 
Jay Honeck said:
I don't think he was demonizing GPS. He is honestly worried about its future reliability.

He was the "tech in charge" at Trimble when they finally got the first GPS approved for aviation usage. Supposedly, after 18 months of getting nowhere with the FAA's approval process, it took a tidy $1 million in an offshore bank account, given to the right bureaucrat, to get the job done.
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Was he a "tech" or an "avionics engineer?"
 
I was going to come in here to debunk GPS myths, but it seems I've been beaten to the punch by everyone, lol.
 
e.pie said:
I was going to come in here to debunk GPS myths, but it seems I've been beaten to the punch by everyone, lol.
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Proof positive that it's not that difficult to understand the basics of how stuff works.

There's soooooo many people who don't even realize they need to change the oil in their cars once in a while, we have to engineer in reminder messages nowadays... but pilots do tend to pay more attention to detail than the left side of the bell-curve... :)
 
This has absolutely nothing to do with imminent GPS system failure, but the fact that the system is vulnerable to interference is something folks flying from, into, and around PTK are all too familiar with. There is an ongoing NOTAM to the effect that GPS is unreliable in the vicinity, and the RNAV 27L was completely NA for a while because of it, and is still NA when the tower is closed. In fact it isn't just PTK; I frequently see a complete loss of all satellites between PTK and VLL, in the pattern at VLL, and it's happened as far away as DET. It isn't just me seeing complete loss of satellites either; other pilots have reported the same thing. Rumor has it there is some kind of intermittent ground-based interference affecting satellite reception, but so far there doesn't seem to be any official confirmation of that, nor progress toward resolving the problem.
 
azure said:
Rumor has it there is some kind of intermittent ground-based interference affecting satellite reception, but so far there doesn't seem to be any official confirmation of that, nor progress toward resolving the problem.
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FCC has some incredible resources to find such things. It's likely FAA and others haven't bothered to engage them, however.

Depending on your desire to get stuck involved in the process, gathering up locations, times, and symptoms in suspected interference problems, is always the beginning, and then knowing the right phone number to the local FCC engineer who actually cares (because some really don't...) and has the keys to the really really expensive vehicle, is invaluable.

Sometimes it just takes letting them know there's a problem, if you're talking to the right folks. The good ones, don't have any way of knowing unless someone calls...
 
denverpilot said:
FCC has some incredible resources to find such things. It's likely FAA and others haven't bothered to engage them, however.

Depending on your desire to get stuck involved in the process, gathering up locations, times, and symptoms in suspected interference problems, is always the beginning, and then knowing the right phone number to the local FCC engineer who actually cares (because some really don't...) and has the keys to the really really expensive vehicle, is invaluable.

Sometimes it just takes letting them know there's a problem, if you're talking to the right folks. The good ones, don't have any way of knowing unless someone calls...
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It depends. Locating and snuffing out IX to GPS satellite signals is not trivial due to the nature of the signal. Most FCC assets are ground-based, which makes it difficult to locate, ID, and shut down IX sources that project upward.

Even back in the days before "spread spectrum", the FCC had it's share of issues trying to locate and zap interference sources ranging from TV antenna boosters to ISM machines to pirate radio stations w/spurious emissions. While the technology has improved, it's still not easy to locate a GPS jammer with an directional antenna that nulls on the horizon.
 
RJM62 said:
. I find it a bit disconcerting that so many pilots have come to depend upon GPS as much as they do.

-Rich
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Why? Don't get me wrong, I understand that things can fail and we should have a back up plan, including the use of ground based navaids, but why not rely heavily on modern technology. How often do we have a complete failure of the GPS network? My plane has a GPS, I carry an Ipad and I have foreflight on my phone. GPS has worked 100% of the time I have tried to use it.

I would not run a business without a computer and I will not fly cross country trips without a gps. Yes, both can fail, and yes I can do both without, but why would I not rely on both.

Jim
 
Topper said:
Why? Don't get me wrong, I understand that things can fail and we should have a back up plan, including the use of ground based navaids, but why not rely heavily on modern technology.
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The problem isn't necessarily relying heavily on GPS or technology in general as it is about becoming so dependent on it that you can't function without it.

GPS is an extremely reliable system, but it isn't infallible - I have personally seen it fail.
 
Fearless Tower said:
The problem isn't necessarily relying heavily on GPS or technology in general as it is about becoming so dependent on it that you can't function without it.

GPS is an extremely reliable system, but it isn't infallible - I have personally seen it fail.
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It's like the cashiers who can't make change if the register isn't working.
 
Jay Honeck said:
He was the "tech in charge" at Trimble when they finally got the first GPS approved for aviation usage. Supposedly, after 18 months of getting nowhere with the FAA's approval process, it took a tidy $1 million in an offshore bank account, given to the right bureaucrat, to get the job done.
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Jay Honeck said:
Nope, but the owner of Trimble did. It was the only way to get past the FAA's stonewalling.
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Have any "facts" to back up any of this nonsense? :rolleyes2:
 
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wsuffa said:
It depends. Locating and snuffing out IX to GPS satellite signals is not trivial due to the nature of the signal. Most FCC assets are ground-based, which makes it difficult to locate, ID, and shut down IX sources that project upward.

Even back in the days before "spread spectrum", the FCC had it's share of issues trying to locate and zap interference sources ranging from TV antenna boosters to ISM machines to pirate radio stations w/spurious emissions. While the technology has improved, it's still not easy to locate a GPS jammer with an directional antenna that nulls on the horizon.
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You definitely need to be mobile and in the area. It's relatively hard to make a "perfect" antenna that only radiates upward. The more power used, the further away it can be found. (And NRO has some nifty toys in this regard also, from what I hear... the transponders above retransmit the jammer's signal back down, of course, and there's some interesting analysis that can be done to triangulate the jammer's location if you have a really really good timestamp on key/unkey and other "signature" items in the downlinks of the affected transponders...)

A really really bright bad guy might think about all this stuff, but more than likely, if the right assets already owned by the People (grin) are utilized... in the right way... even low-power point-sources can get caught. A smart bad guy would move around. Or even coordinate multiple jamming transmitters a LONG way apart.

I wish I had the cash for a gadget a friend built and then various agencies decided to buy... five spectrum analyzers and a full FCC DB in a box... totally cool interference-source hunting device... feed more than one of them to special software on a central computer... totally wicked.
 
Topper said:
Why? Don't get me wrong, I understand that things can fail and we should have a back up plan, including the use of ground based navaids, but why not rely heavily on modern technology. How often do we have a complete failure of the GPS network? My plane has a GPS, I carry an Ipad and I have foreflight on my phone. GPS has worked 100% of the time I have tried to use it.

I would not run a business without a computer and I will not fly cross country trips without a gps. Yes, both can fail, and yes I can do both without, but why would I not rely on both.

Jim
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As I said, it's just because up until recently, I'd spent the better part of my life counseling misbehaving electronic devices. It's the awareness of how many different things can cause a device to fail -- either spectacularly (bad), or in subtle ways that you don't notice (much, much worse).

-Rich
 
More stuff that doesn't pass the smell test. Do you believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, too, Jay?
 
Jim_R said:
More stuff that doesn't pass the smell test. Do you believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, too, Jay?
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What, are you saying that you don't believe that a government official would accept a bribe?

Talk about believing in the tooth fairy! :rolleyes:

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3...
 
If all it took was a bribe to one person to make things go smoothly in the federal gov't, it'd happen all the time. (Maybe it does...but if so, it's not common knowledge and people don't just go around talking about it casually.)

That might work at the DMV to get out of waiting in line all day. FAA certifications are complicated processes involving dozens of people and tons of paperwork. The process is what the process is. I seriously doubt that even "the right bureaucrat" could magically make all the paperwork get processed lickety-split, no matter how much money you put into an offshore bank account for him/her.

And if that did actually happen, I would not expect that random joes throughout the Trimble organization would know about it, or casually mention it to random strangers while on vacation...never know who might be buddies with or related to a federal investigator. People on both sides of that transaction could get locked up for a long time if it were proven. Even if the statute of limitations has run out, that's attention you just don't want.

Have you seen this guy's patents, or did you just take his word for it on that topic, too? Sounds to me like this is a guy who likes to talk to people who like to listen, and you guys were just made for each other.
 
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Jim_R said:
Have you seen this guy's patents, or did you just take his word for it on that topic, too? Sounds to me like this is a guy who likes to talk to people who like to listen, and you guys were just made for each other.
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In addition, patents are awarded to anyone who asks, and making a comfortable living off patents means one thing only: suing people who actually bring products to market and extracting a racket. It hardly requires expertise in GPS, only expertise in government-backed rent-seeking.
 
RJM62 said:
But even before I went rogue, I shunned glass cockpits and pretty much ignored the GPS (along with anything else that the J3 Cub that I first flew didn't have).
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That's just silly. The purpose of our airplane is to get us from A to B as quickly as possible. GPS makes that possible without detouring to C,D, and E. In an age of $6+ gas I'm going to use every tool available to shave off a few minutes wherever I can.

the J3 also doesn't have an electric starter, does that mean that you always hand prop a piper warrior because the starter might fail someday ?
 
ColoPilot said:
It's like the cashiers who can't make change if the register isn't working.
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denverpilot said:
You definitely need to be mobile and in the area. It's relatively hard to make a "perfect" antenna that only radiates upward. The more power used, the further away it can be found. (And NRO has some nifty toys in this regard also, from what I hear... the transponders above retransmit the jammer's signal back down, of course, and there's some interesting analysis that can be done to triangulate the jammer's location if you have a really really good timestamp on key/unkey and other "signature" items in the downlinks of the affected transponders...)

A really really bright bad guy might think about all this stuff, but more than likely, if the right assets already owned by the People (grin) are utilized... in the right way... even low-power point-sources can get caught. A smart bad guy would move around. Or even coordinate multiple jamming transmitters a LONG way apart.

I wish I had the cash for a gadget a friend built and then various agencies decided to buy... five spectrum analyzers and a full FCC DB in a box... totally cool interference-source hunting device... feed more than one of them to special software on a central computer... totally wicked.
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I can't tell you even whether I can tell you what I know or not... ;) As you note, there's some nifty stuff out there available to the "right" parties..... The FCC has limited ability to hunt down jammers that use appropriate countermeasures......

Let's just say this: because of the low power nature of the GPS signal it really doesn't take a lot of power to jam it ("GPS denied"). GPS spoofing is a different matter.
 
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JHW said:
That's just silly. The purpose of our airplane is to get us from A to B as quickly as possible. GPS makes that possible without detouring to C,D, and E. In an age of $6+ gas I'm going to use every tool available to shave off a few minutes wherever I can.

the J3 also doesn't have an electric starter, does that mean that you always hand prop a piper warrior because the starter might fail someday ?
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For your mission, it makes perfect sense to shave minutes.

My mission, on the other hand, is just to have fun. There is no other purpose. Shaving minutes would therefore be counter to my mission. I've spent my whole life facing deadlines and rushing to get things done. Now I just want to squeeze in as many hoots as I can.

In fact, I'm seriously considering hang gliding as my next aerial pursuit. I keep watching the hawks circling around the mountain from my office window, and I think I'd like to learn from them. I plan to talk to a human instructor about it this weekend or next, however, which I have to do before I can get up there to talk to the hawks. (You're not allowed to hang glide from most launch sites around here without training.)

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
For your mission, it makes perfect sense to shave minutes.

My mission, on the other hand, is just to have fun. There is no other purpose. Shaving minutes would therefore be counter to my mission. I've spent my whole life facing deadlines and rushing to get things done. Now I just want to squeeze in as many hoots as I can.

In fact, I'm seriously considering hang gliding as my next aerial pursuit. I keep watching the hawks circling around the mountain from my office window, and I think I'd like to learn from them. I plan to talk to a human instructor about it this weekend or next, however, which I have to do before I can get up there to talk to the hawks. (You're not allowed to hang glide from most launch sites around here without training.)

-Rich
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Have you thought about powered parachutes as a more-flexible middle ground ?
 
Buzzards circle too. Don't be the reason why.

RJM62 said:
For your mission, it makes perfect sense to shave minutes.

My mission, on the other hand, is just to have fun. There is no other purpose. Shaving minutes would therefore be counter to my mission. I've spent my whole life facing deadlines and rushing to get things done. Now I just want to squeeze in as many hoots as I can.

In fact, I'm seriously considering hang gliding as my next aerial pursuit. I keep watching the hawks circling around the mountain from my office window, and I think I'd like to learn from them. I plan to talk to a human instructor about it this weekend or next, however, which I have to do before I can get up there to talk to the hawks. (You're not allowed to hang glide from most launch sites around here without training.)

-Rich
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wsuffa said:
Let's just say this: because of the low power nature of the GPS signal it really doesn't take a lot of power to jam it ("GPS denied"). GPS spoofing is a different matter.
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By way of confirmation, and although they don't say what power was being used, and their radius of possible impact is no doubt conservatively large, there is nothing localized about this testing when the 50 ft AGL radius is 246 nm (testing ended today and described here: http://www.alpa.org/portals/alpa/fastread/2013/docs/NSAWC13-02_GPSFlightAdvisory.pdf)

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Yeah, they warn about those types of tests in NM and Southern CO all the time, too. Locals get the NOTAMs via email. About once a month.
 
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