As someone who was recently a delivery driver, the recent addition of GPS tracking is one of the most annoying things about a delivery job. Far worse than drug testing. Driving can be difficult and sometimes you need to park and stretch your legs. I was called into the office for this and queried about each of my stops. GPS is going to become more prevalent as people like me are highly motivated to defeat the system, especially working in teams with other drivers. Of course there are work-arounds. Park at a legit spot on an approved break and leave all your electronic devices in the vehicle and walk to where you want to be but don't want them to know about, etc...<p>However, it is highly doubtful this was done by a delivery driver. There is no point in jamming the signal for 10 minutes. What could it accomplish? If the purpose is to take an illegal detour (going against a one way street) the company has logs of all your trips and will soon figure why you have a 10 minute gap everyday.
That reminds me of another Economist article about GPS jamming from 2011:<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18304246" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/node/18304246</a><p>That article was inspired by a trucker who drove by Newark Airport every day, disrupting GPS service there.
> surprisingly<p>GPS signals come from satellites. AFAIK there are about 20-40 GPS satellites. Let's say each covers at least 1/50 of the Earth's surface area, about 500 million km^2. That's 10 million km^2 per satellite.<p>What's the max power generation you can fit on reasonable-sized satellite that's going to be in orbit for decades? I'm guessing not more than 10 kW. So 10 kW / 10 million km^2 means you have .001 watt per km^2.<p>GPS signals being easy to jam isn't surprising. What's surprising is that you can detect them with equipment that's small and cheap enough to fit in a cellphone!
The article mentions North Korea's frequent GPS jamming, but doesn't mention that it's suspected as a cause of the fatal drone accident last May: <a href="http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked-off-fatal-drone-crash" rel="nofollow">http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked...</a><p>I haven't been able to find any more recent info about the incident.
Should it not be possible to track the vehicle (if it is only one) by installing GPS receivers in the area and noticing when the disruption begins and ends for each receiver?<p>That, coupled with license plate scanners at those locations, ought to find the culprit.<p>(And then they can launch an armed drone to take him/her out...)
GPS signals are <i>unsurprisingly</i> easy to disrupt. It's a location mechanism that depends on one-way communications and triangulating an extremely precisely-timed signal between at least three far away satellites. Position fixes don't rain down like mana from heaven.
A paper on GPS jamming countermeasures<p><a href="http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/mil/gps4/GPS-Vulnerability-LosAlamos.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/mil/gps4/GPS-...</a><p>Ultimiately, the lack of MAC and encryption makes civilian GPS MITMable.<p>(Discliaimer: I worked at Trimble.)
Many many years ago I was a specialist in satellites for a major European broadcasting company. We had a problem with couriers who used radar speed trap jamming devices. They had really noisy oscillators which leaked huge quantities of out of band noise into the dished which were located near the courier drop off point.<p>We initially used an expensive spectrum analyser attached to a spare LNB (pointed at the parking area) but that needed you to notice the noise. So I used a USB enabled RF power meter interfaced to Excel (so sue me, it was a rush job and we weren't equipped for development). A script ran which fetched values, when there was a spike in received power it played an alarm and flashed the screen.<p>The next step was to ask security to hold anyone in the carpark while a large angry engineer went to give the courier a piece of his mind. It worked, courier companies were informed, people were shouted at and I believe it stopped.<p>There are probably better ways of doing this, but it was effective and built from spare parts.
I guess we should migrate towards non GPS position tracking faster: <a href="http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2013/04/10.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2013/04/10.aspx</a>
There's an Australian company who's got a land based positioning technology. It does not rely on satellites and I think it holds a lot of promises especially for airports.
Interestingly, Google's successor to BigTable -- Spanner -- utilizes GPS clocks and atomic clocks to maintain consistency of their data across globally-distributed data stores.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)</a>
"receivers cost £2,000 per vessel"<p>Hmm, yes kind of like how a new GPS costs $5K, because the first .mil model did cost that much. Or all computers currently cost millions of dollars because the first ones did.