Whats really sad for aviation is there was already an extensive network of ground based navaids. As GPS has proliferated, they've slowly been decommissioned as they age out to save on cost. I'm specifically referring to VORs which provide azimuth and range to station.
GPS is fantastic and as a primary source everyone loves the benefits it brings. However, in a century of aviation, everyone has kinda sorted out that you can't have too many backups to critical items... unless you let the accountants and bureaucrats run the show.
VOR is extremely short range and requires an extraordinary number of transmitters to provide any volume of coverage. Additionally it cannot provide coverage over oceanic areas. We USED TO have a nearly global long-range land based navigation system called LORAN, which only required one master station and a few remote stations to provide continent-scale coverage. But it was decommissioned in a cost savings move after it was determined that it could be replaced by GPS. It worked perfectly fine until it was decommissioned in 2010, not that long ago.
In the '90s I used to fly light aircraft back and forth between Seattle and Alaska. You were frequently out of range of any VOR transmitters, but that LORAN always worked.
NDBs? That didn't work so great for Ron Brown.
On VOR: It's also a PITA to use, and for inexperienced people, or someone who rarely uses it, they can confuse flying towards and away from the station.
I'm sorry, but a multi-kilogram (at a guess), five-figure-priced (at a conservative guess) device with kilometer-scale error (per their actual press release) is not a substitute for a GPS.
And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too.
The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation.
Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.
The systems jamming in Hormuz and Ukraine aren't exactly cheap and low powered, nor are those used by the US military in one of their many jamming exercises every year. Cheap GPS jammers fit in a cigarette lighter and are used by truckers who don't want their boss snooping on them, but they don't quite threaten aviation.
That aside, you don't need to give up on GPS just yet. As expensive as airplanes are, there is no reason not to have at least 8 element CRPA receivers in them. Mostly a military niche product in the past they are rapidly proliferating, and most fuselages make for a great ground plane.
Not so simple. For one the distances to the transmitter are much smaller, for another the amount of power available to the transmitters is pretty much whatever you want to hook it up to, whereas GPS satellites are on a pretty strict power budget. On the reception side the power levels are many orders of magnitude apart.
Well certainly, no one thing is impervious. But if you have GPS, LORAN, VORs, NDBs, astronavigation, etc. you have many more options at your disposal and present a much more complex attack target.
Not really. It uses 2MHz band, with the wavelength of around 160m.
This means that it's easy to receive via a ferrite bar antenna but hard to transmit. You need an antenna of at least around 40m size for that to be efficient.
I feel like gps nav software should start considering the jamming and spoofing cases as real conditions they will encounter that should throw up an INOP warning.
It wouldn't take much smarts for it to consider the type of vessel it's in and the max and current speeds. If the calculated position of a 10 knot vessel suddenly jumps 100 km away in seconds, that sure seems like a spoof. And if you had 10 satellites locked and then you have none, that sure seems like jamming, or you're in a tunnel; INOP either way.
GPS is fantastic and as a primary source everyone loves the benefits it brings. However, in a century of aviation, everyone has kinda sorted out that you can't have too many backups to critical items... unless you let the accountants and bureaucrats run the show.
In the '90s I used to fly light aircraft back and forth between Seattle and Alaska. You were frequently out of range of any VOR transmitters, but that LORAN always worked. NDBs? That didn't work so great for Ron Brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C
GPS signals are just incredibly weak so it takes next to nothing to drown them out, easier still if you are above the receiver.
Quantum Compass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass
Also see: https://www.sandboxaq.com/post/sandboxaq-and-acubed-achieve-...
And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too.
The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation.
Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.
That aside, you don't need to give up on GPS just yet. As expensive as airplanes are, there is no reason not to have at least 8 element CRPA receivers in them. Mostly a military niche product in the past they are rapidly proliferating, and most fuselages make for a great ground plane.
* https://insidegnss.com/uk-and-france-renew-ties-resilient-pn...
This means that it's easy to receive via a ferrite bar antenna but hard to transmit. You need an antenna of at least around 40m size for that to be efficient.
It wouldn't take much smarts for it to consider the type of vessel it's in and the max and current speeds. If the calculated position of a 10 knot vessel suddenly jumps 100 km away in seconds, that sure seems like a spoof. And if you had 10 satellites locked and then you have none, that sure seems like jamming, or you're in a tunnel; INOP either way.