PTC may be vunerable to jamming

[blue streak 1]

Just read a disturbing article in Business and commercial aviation magazine march 2019 issue.  Essentially it said that the GPS signals may be subject to either interntial or unintentional interferrrence especially in the L1 band.  Additionally spoofing or jamming by regular persons is also possible.  

Some listed jamming.  Is being done by truckers who want to fool some toll both receivers and trucking company monitors.  ( shadow take note ) Pokemon players have used jammers to spoof other players.  Some taxi cabs have had jammers to confuse Uber.  Drone operators have used jammers as well to fly into restricted areas.   Can't you imagine a RR line running along a highway along side a jaming truck?  Or a parked truck along side any major rail line.  But the FCC has also found some fixed location jamers.  Makes one wonder if that could have been a problem for the Denver "A" line.

To top it off the US government is required by executive order to conduct periodic tests of jamming.  I receive 2 - 3  notams a month of such tests. Usually they are near Wllops, CHS, Cape canaveral, Ft. walton beach, or west coast but a couple in the middle of the US.  

Do the RRs even get copies of these notams of these gamming events ?  All in all make me wonder about putting all our eggs for anything pertaining to GPS in one basket

[rdamon]

GPS is also used for timing celluar and fiber networks as well as power line monitoring.

This is a big risk that has been ignored

[mudchicken]

Surveyors knew about it. Deal with it regularly. (if you look at the old PTC threads, it will show up in comments from several of us on the forum)

Signals don't have to be jammed, just delayed or distorted in order to screw things up. (MultiPath) Now you know why the surveying community is so frustrated with LightSquared/Ligado trying to steal bandwidth from GPS applications that had that dedicated bandwidth. Enough problems trying to make sure the locomotives are properly shielded from emmitting EMF forces disrupting the signal. The older the locomotive, the worse it gets, generally.)

[BaltACD]

rdamon

GPS is also used for timing celluar and fiber networks as well as power line monitoring.

This is a big risk that has been ignored

The military's smart weapons in many cases also rely on GPS signals.

[CMStPnP]

BaltACD

The military's smart weapons in many cases also rely on GPS signals.

Military GPS system for targeting is seperate from civilian GPS and also more accurate.   Also, only some smart weapons use GPS, enough weapons do not use GPS that an opposing force is still screwed if they figure out a way to jam the military GPS system.   The coolest guidance system in my opinion is that used by Cruise Missiles which uses digitized terrain maps captured by satellite photography.    They use those instead because the Cruise Missile uses terrain as part of cover on it's low and slow flight to avoid shoot down.