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Old 20th April 2004 | 18:34
  #33 (permalink)  
IO540
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Joined: Jun 2003
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From: EuroGA.org
No matter what one does, GPS can always be jammed eventually.

But one can make it very hard to do.

Rooftop aerials (essential for a decent reliable signal, anyway) help a lot from ground-based sources and also with interfering sources on the same metal aircraft (e.g. DME aerials being on the bottom). Anybody can do this, and everybody should. If I was the CAA, and I wanted to formalise GPS somehow, I would make rooftop aerials mandatory. It's relatively cheap. Anyone using a handheld with an integral aerial, inside an all-metal cockpit, is asking for trouble. Unfortunately these units do work 99% of the time

Introducing IRS data into the GPS receiver enables one to make it far more resistant to jamming - even if the IRS gyro has poor long term accuracy. Reasonably priced FOG-gyro attitude instruments already exist so this isn't far away.

Aerial polarisation is another technology not yet available to civilian users.

Other anti-jam technologies require more processing power but you bet the military have them. It's pretty easy to work out how to do that, too.

One essential point is that if a modern GPS is unable to compute a good solution, it says so. Identing a VOR or NDB or DME just tells you you've got the right frequency tuned; it says nothing about the instrument being useful. I've flown with VOR and DME kit which could be made to read anything, and yes they were within the DOC.

But I bet ILS will be with us for decades to come

What I don't get is why so many people keep assuming that GPS usage implies using it as a sole nav reference....
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