The cumulative effects of daily low power jamming by thousands of criminals and privacy seekers, and the threat of high power jamming by terrorist and other nations, pose the greatest GPS-related dangers to the United States, according to an RNT Foundation white paper presented last week at the US National PNT Advisory Board.
RNT Foundation President, Dana Goward, explained that “GPS is America’s single point of failure. Lots of people are beginning to focus on efforts to protect GPS and the nation, but not all solutions are equal. We wanted to take a systematic look at the threats to GPS, which are the most important, and the effectiveness of various solutions.”
The two most effective ways to protect the nation from all GPS-related dangers, according the paper, are requiring owners of critical infrastructure to be able to operate without signals from space for 30 days, and establishing a second wide area PNT signal that has much different characteristics than GPS and can be used by anyone for free.
The white paper examined the danger to the nation of 22 different threats to GPS. It also evaluated how well nine different initiatives that have been funded or proposed would protect the nation against those threats.
Link to “Prioritizing Dangers to the United States from Threats to GPS”
