NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS 260
judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"
But (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Weird? (Score:5, Interesting)
1, There are are a whole lot of GPSes involved. It's a lot more than a nav unit on the bridge, and they don't all share a single off-switch.
2, You don't want to practice "OK, everyone turn off your GPS now and switch to plan B!". You want to practice "Why are we drifting to starboard? Is this an instrumentation failure? WTF is ERROR 7505?", because that's how it happens when you're doing it for real and you need to learn to work through that kind of confusion.
Re:fake it (Score:4, Interesting)
a) Lots of soldiers have civilian gear as well. E.g. iPhones. You don't want them to have the opportunity to cheat. You do want them to use the gear in the way that they might without GPS so they have the feel for how it would be.
b) Lots of systems are doing automated switch over; it may not be possible to properly activate that mode in the presence of GPS. E.g. if you have a system which does GPS navigation normally and then switches over to inertial navigation, you want to act as if there was a real GPS jamming.
To be frank, anybody, military or otherwise who's operating GPS gear without a working fallback is irresponsible. What they should do is introduce safety regulations which say so and then give a very large fine to fishermen who complain next time. That will reduce the discussion.