Fairway 30 - Royal Institute of Navigation

Car thieves using GPS jammers
Criminal gangs have begun using GPS jammers to help steal expensive cars and lorries
carrying valuable loads. So a tracker device in a lorry with a valuable load, or a car with
an anti-theft GPS device which should report its position if stolen, cannot locate itself -
so says The Guardian newspaper.
The paper quotes the Institute’s Past-President, Prof. David Last, and Digital Systems
Knowledge Transfer Network’s Bob Cockshot prior to today’s joint meeting ‘GPS
Jamming & Interference - A Clear and Present Danger’.
The jammers are also said to be used by some German drivers to evade GPS-based road
charging, which was introduced for trucks in 2005 - and is proposed for elsewhere in
Europe. There have also been robberies where such jammers have been used against
both GPS systems and mobile phones on lorries to prevent the driver from contacting the
authorities.
In Europe it appears to be legal to import or own a jammer - but not to use it.
The very weak jammers are effective against GPS because the satellites are so far away -
in orbits at over 20,000 km. Jammers could be built by a competent electronics expert,
though the gangs appear to prefer to import them from China.
Charles Curry, of Chronos Technology - who heads a consortium which is building a
GPS-jamming detection system with a £2.2m UK government grant - says that the
biggest fear is that a powerful GPS jammer with an output of 20W or more might be
used by terrorists near an airport.
From the Institute’s web site.
London Boat Show
The Small Craft Group set up the Institute’s stand at the London Boat Show and, with
help from the Marine Traffic and Navigation Group and a few airmen, manned it for the
duration. The weather didn’t help with snow hampering transport. It was probably
responsible also for the reduced attendance during the Show. Not only were visitor
numbers down, several exhibitors were absent. This became apparent when entering
ExCeL by the west entrance; part of the South Exhibition Hall had been emptied of
exhibitors and turned into ticket sales booths.
Our stand, kindly funded from a donation given by Trinity House, was this time in the
North Hall amongst chandlery and electronics stands. One of the principal messages on
the stand was the vulnerability of GPS. “Have you a back-up?”, we asked. Sadly, on the
day that the stand was being set up we heard the news that the USA was going to switch
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