NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Astronomy and Celestial Navigation
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 4, 16:31 -0400
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 4, 16:31 -0400
Bill, there is some question of exactly how easily the military signals (admittedly weak) can be jammed, but if you wanted to remove precision navigation capability from a radius of two or three thousand miles (say, over the Pacific and western Pacific Rim) it would require an awful lot of local jamming stations. If you wanted to take out a five thousand mile range (a penny in the bucket compared to the size of China) I suspect it would be cheaper and simpler to knock out the satellites. Or, build a clandestine GPS jammer into every cell phone made in Korea and China. Lest you think that's unlikely...Furbies were banned from the NSA facilities, and Lenovo (ex-IBM thinkpad) computers were almost banned from DoD contracts a week ago, for the same reason: No one knows what a gizmo really does, until you've taken it apart. But for sailors that's no problem, any event large enough to take down the GPS systems (plural) will probably assure vessels of a military escort once they come within a hundred miles of any coast. With solid-state accelerometers and optical gyros bringing inertial nav into the size of paperback books, that will only be an inconvenience for military users though. The civilians with no budget will have to rely on celestial, or their compasses, until they acquire an escort. No big deal, just an "inconvenience".
