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by BeeOnRope 2339 days ago
Why do truckers have GPS jammers?
5 comments

https://gizmodo.com/jamming-gps-signals-is-illegal-dangerous...

> he’s seen truckers trying to avoid paying highway tolls, employees blocking their bosses from tracking their cars, high school kids using them to fly drones in a restricted area, and even, he believes, undercover police officers using them to avoid tails

Don't forget the Kremlin spoofing the local airport to try to keep drones from flying near their government buildings!
Beating DOT legalities, hiding things like side trips to casinos/mistresses/bars from the boss, general dislike for big brother, etc.
It should be straightforward to have GPS jammer detectors along the road. Throw in a giant federally enforced fine and people will stop using them.
In fact these do exist. I saw a demo a few years back from a company that tracked bogus GPS signals and how they could watch jammers drive around the streets of London all day long.

These guys were doing it because they were tasked with keeping LTE towers synchronized and they did it with GPS time so they were building in resilience to their time sources by measuring the signal level and rejecting anything that came in too strong. Spotting jammers was a side benefit.

The GPS antenna on the LTE tower should only be picking up signals from the sky. Transmitters on trucks would need to reflect off of aircraft in order to cause trouble, which would greatly weaken the signal.
Yes the antenna pattern will attenuate the signal coming from the ground somewhat, but it also doesn't suffer from 182 dB of freespace attenuation like the real signal. It doesn't have to bounce off of an airplane either, the Earth has a layer of atmosphere around it that gets ionized by the sun and is also full of water vapor. We also don't have the ability to build perfect antennas, especially since it has to cover the entire sky (GPS antennas do not physically track the individual satellites).
To defeat "the Qualcomm", which records hours. This may let them drive longer than the DOT allows.
So their corporate telemetry system doesn't document their long lunch at the strip club which, for other reasons, happens to be located just around the corner from the airport.
You either didn't see the comma or you're joking
Don’t think they’re wrong in their interpretation. Why would a trucker without a GPS jammer driving by an airport cause an issue?
I'm pretty sure I parsed it correctly. It's "Truckers (with GPS jammers) who drive my airports...". Parsing it as a list means it no longer makes sense.