GPS For Today

GPS Tracking Jammers: Problems and Uses

Update 4/16/2012:Â GPS jammers are illegal and should not be used.Â After several events in recent years the US government has really began to crack down on GPS jammers since they pose a significant risk to public safety andÂ national infrastructure.Â Consumers should not buy these devices unless they are approved by the FCC.Â Any jammer in use should be retired and an alternative method to ensure location privacy should be employed since penalties for jammer use could exceed $100,000 and include jail time.

To anyone familiar with GPS technology, it is no surprise that GPS tracking jammers can cause all sorts of havoc to tracking systems irregardless of their use. Anti-theft devices, fleet tracking systems, personal navigation devices, and airline navigation systems will all fall victim to small, low power GPS blockers. That is just the nature of the whole tracking system.

Because of this inherent flaw, there are some good uses for GPS tracking blockers, but there are also some rather nefarious uses as well. But before we get into all that, let’s first see how and why tracking systems can be so easily tampered with.

Why GPS Is So Easy To Block

When you rely on satellites that are thousands of miles away (around 12,500 miles to be exact) it becomes very easy to interfere with the signals that the satellites emit. Bob Cockshott, a conference speaker and leader of a government funded technology program in the UK, puts it this way, “The problem is that the signal from the satellites is extremely weak â€“ it’s the equivalent of picking up the light output of a 25-watt bulb on the satellite.” The problem seems to be that the signal from the satellites are so weak that disrupting them would be as easy as preventing someone from seeing a 25-watt light bulb from thousands of miles away.

In other words, the task is a simple one. There are GPS tracking blockers that can be powered by the cigarette lighter in a car that have enough power the not only jam the tracking or navigation in your car but also of a car that is very close to you. According to Wired Magazine, 2 watts of power is enough to disable a car-based GPS device while a blocker powered at 20 watts will be enough to cover the area of an entire airport. In other words, that is not very much effort to bring down a very large amount of GPS relates systems.

The Problem With GPS Tracking Jammers

The potential abuse of this flaw in the system could be used for purposes that do not have the greater good of humanity in mind. While it would be best if no one every took advantage of the flaws in the GPS tracking infrastructure, it is already happening on some level all over the world. Here are some of the more common instances:

Car Theft

When GPS tracking for cars is installed in a vehicle it can be a very formidable way for the police to catch criminals and drastically reduce auto theft. But when a GPS tracking jammer is also installed in the car as it is being stolen, the criminal is able to get away without anyone knowing that the vehicle has been stolen. The owner won’t get an alert letting them know that their vehicle has left their geofence. Even when they wake up to find their car missing, they will not be able to track it because the jammer will have essentially taken the vehicle off the grid in terms of the person’s tracking capabilities.

High Jacking

Another serious concern is the use of GPS blockers by organized crime to boost cargo carriers without being able to be tracked. Most fleets have some sort of GPS monitoring system installed in their vehicles in order to help with fleet administration and improve customer service. These systems also help companies recover stolen vehicles.

But if criminals are using blockers, then no amount of fleet tracking capability is going to help the company figure out where its vehicle is. It will also prevent the police from quickly tracking down the stolen vehicle. The goods will be stolen and that will probably be the end of it.

Attacks Against Humanity

If someone was sick enough, they could also do serious damage to the infrastructure of various public and private services, causing widespread destruction and mayhem. I won’t go into to much detail about this point for fear of somehow encouraging evil, but there are serious risks for certain systems that only use GPS for timing and routing information.

The (Legal) Uses of GPS Tracking Jammers

Despite the many different negative uses of a jammer, there are also some very useful applications for this technology. It is important to note that all technology is essentially amoral. It is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Instead, it is the use of the technology that is either good or bad. This is no different for GPS tracking in general or for GPS tracking blockers specifically.

One of the common themes that you will find below is that the best uses for a GPS jammer is to combat an improper use of a GPS tracker. But this should be expected given the nature of what a jammer/blocker is!

Stop Stalkers

Ninja Stalker Stalking

If you are being stalked by someone who is using GPS to do so you should feel completely within your “rights” to purchase a jamming device and install it in your car. No one should be able to find out exactly where you are so that they can watch your every move so that they can plan some sort of wickedness against your person. Such violations should be blocked. If you are particularly paranoid, think about getting a blocker to place inside your car in addition to occasionally searching the wheel wells of your car.

Escape Illegal Government Tracking

You might be surprised how often a government official has secretly and illegally placed a tracking device on your vehicle. For example, there is currently a case going on right now in Louisiana where police illegally installed a GPS tracking device for a friend. The victim did not buy a jammer, but if he did he would have been able to put an immediate nix on the illegal activity until he eventually found the tracking device. Now I don’t want to imply that there is a great government conspiracy going on where the government is in the business of tracking private citizens without warrant or reason, because I just don’t think that this is the case. But there is some truth to government employees abusing their powers and using GPS tracking for their own ends. This type of thing should be blocked by using GPS tracking jammers.

Prank our Friends

Sometimes there is nothing quite like a good laugh, especially when it is at the expense of a good friend in good fun. To pull off this prank successfully, all you need to do is install a GPS jammer in their car while you travel with them to a destination using GPS navigation to get there. Be sure that you look up how to get to the place and commit them to memory. Then make your friend a bet the you can given them better directions than their GPS can. Make it a big bet, like $100 or more. Once they agree, just turn on your jammer and direct them to your destination like their GPS would have if you weren’t blocking it. When they get ready to pay you for your knowledge, reveal the prank and have a great laugh.

GPS Jammer and Blockers In Review

It is clear that these devices are amoral in nature, but that they can be used for both great evil and great good. Some governments, like that in England, have decided to make them illegal to sell or use. While this may help cut down the trafficking of these device, it will not ultimately end their use – especially by the criminal element. But I guess that is the English way. I hope America keeps GPS tracking jammers legal, but just educates the public about their proper use.

Sources:Wired, Guardian

Image Sources: Alan Vernon, mikemol

Claim Of Using GPS Tracking To Prank Google Street View Car In Berlin Is Prank

According to F.A.T, Free Art and Technology Lab based out of Germany, they have pranked a Google Street View car by installing a GPS tracking device to it while it was parked outside Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. They claim that they were able to somehow attach a tracking device or a GPS cell phone to the car and then receive updates every 2 minutes about the location of the vehicle. They even made a map of the whole think, posting it on their website.

According to some reports, there were even people who used the information displayed on the website to track down the car and perform obscene gestures, shout profanity, or display their private parts in the general direction of the vehicle.

This story has received insane amounts of media attention on the internet and has even gotten a mention of a few TV channels as well, including G4TV:

F.A.T Google Tracking Prank

If one looks carefully at the evidence that is presented on the F.A.T website I think that you will can come to the conclusion that they did not actually track a Google Street View Car with GPS, but instead they merely made a fake one and drove it around like it was from Google and filmed funny and obscene episodes to shame the Internet Giant.

My entire case rests entirely on the their most recent post about how to build a fake Google Street View car. In it, they display the following two pictures (the one on the left is a photo of an actual Google Street View car and the one on the right is of their fake car):


Original Google Street View Car	Fake Google Street View Car

Let me point out some of the major differences between these two cars – it will become very important later. The first difference is the size of the magnet on the side of the door. The real car has a small magnet while the fake one has a large magnet that takes up most of the door.

The second, and probably more important difference between the two is the camera and GPS tracking apparatus on the top of the car. I have highlighted some of the differences in the pictures below:


Top of Original Google Street View Car	Top of Fake Google Street View Car

Hopefully my skillfully crafted circles and arrows highlight the points of difference enough that I won’t have to spend too much time showing how these are different.

Now here is some footage of the people at F.A.T pranking what they claim to be a Google Street View car. This one is supposedly of a driver drinking while driving:

This is supposedly of a driver picking someone up who is urinating in public:

As you can see in these videos, the car is obviously the fake one created by F.A.T. If the sign on the side of the car is not enough evidence then perhaps taking a closer look at the GPS tracking and camera apparatus located on the top will reveal that it is in fact the fake tracker created by the F.A.T group.

Add to this the information found in this post, Pantless Germans Flash Google Street View Car, and I am led strongly to believe that the whole claim of GPS tracking one of these cars was completely false. I did not include this video because it does have some profanity that could be objectionable to some people, but in the post they say this:

Hot off the press. See also Gizmodo, BuzzFeed, CrunchGear, Reddit, BasicThinking, BoingBoing. Stay tuned for more Google Street View car tracking at fffff.at.

That last sentence seems to indicate to me that they are representing this as video taken from the GPS tracking of the car, when it is obviously not. The video is clearly of the fake car that F.A.T created.

Thus, I think it can be clearly seen that their claim is false and that the claim itself is the actual prank. The videos are made in an attempt to ‘eff Google’ and make them look bad.

If you are interested in learning some more about this group, there is a little blurb from their about page:

The Free Art and Technology Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. The entire FAT network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, musicians and Bornas are committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents.

So in the final analysis it seems like F.A.T. just wanted to make Google look bad and advanced their false claim of GPS tracking a Street View Car in an attempt to bring attention to their cause. I certainly don’t blame them for their attempt, but it is important that we all see what they actually accomplished.

Feel free to check the sources yourself at: Free Art and Technology

Lost Cell Phone GPS Tracking Explained

Almost everyone has had the experience of misplacing or losing their cell phone. We also all know what it is like to search and search for our lost cell phone in the hope of finding in some obvious or not so obvious spot. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to leverage a cell phones built in GPS technology to help it “find” itself? Lost cell phone GPS tracking is real and is a very powerful and efficient way for people to recover their mobile phones once thy have misplaced them.

This article is going to attempt to give an introduction to how GPS locates cell phones in the world and how this information can be used by owners to find their lost cell phone.

GPS: What Is It?

The Global Positioning System (of which GPS is the acronym) is a network of satellites that orbit the earth and specialized receivers here on earth that interact with each other. The system was developed by the US military in an effort to get a better understanding of where their forces were at any given moment and has been around fro several decades. It was made available to the public under President Ronald Reagan and since then there has been an explosion in the use of GPS technology by regular citizens. We are all familiar with GPS navigation technology, and this is one of the most prolific uses of GPS in the consumer market.

The way GPS works is through a mathematical principle called trilateration. The simple explanation of trilateration is this – if you know where three things are in the world and you know your distance from each of those things then you can figure out exactly where you are. If that doesn’t make much sense then just take a look at the picture to the right. You can know where Point B is in the world if you know where P1, P2, and P3 are.

The world of the Global Positioning Systems, the satellites that orbit the earth are represented like P1, P2, and P3 in our picture above. These satellites emit a signal through the air the travels at a certain speed. This signal contains information like the time that it was sent and a uniquely identifying id. This information is then process by a GPS receiver, which is the same as point B in the picture above. The receiver takes the information sent by the satellites and finds out its distance from each of P1, P2, and P3. It then does some fancy math and finds out exactly where it is right now.

Some GPS receivers that are used for navigation will then show the user this data in map form so that they can know where they are. GPS tracking devices will take the data and send it out over a cell phone network (GSM tracker) or over a communicate satellite (satellite tracker). Still other devices, known as data loggers will simply store the data on its hard drive for download at a later time. Whatever GPS device you are using, they all work of this same principle of trilateration and all fit into the same category.

GPS In Cell Phones

A few years ago GPS receivers began to find their way into cell phones. Then there was a move by the federal government that required cell phone carriers develop a way to help them find out the location that 9-1-1 phone calls made from cell phone originated. The carriers had the option then of using their own GSM networks to create a tracking system based off of the same principle as the GPS network. Some carriers went with this option. Other carriers decided to go ahead and put GPS in cell phones that they were going to provide to their customers.

There are a lot of different things that people use GPS in cell phones now these days. The first and most obvious is navigation. Almost everyone likes to get turn by turn directions spoken to them, especially when traveling in new and unknown places. Cell phone navigation has become to prevalent that some industry experts suspect that the cell phone is going to surpass the PND (Personal Navigation Device) as the navigation device of choice in just a few years time.

Cell phone GPS is also used for all sorts of fun apps and internet surfing features. If you want to know of good restaurants that are near you right now, there are internet searches and apps for that. If you would love to find out the prices of homes in your neighborhood then there is a real estate GPS tracking app for that too. There are literally tons and tons of different ways that GPS is being used by everyday people for any number of normal activities. It is safe to say that GPS receivers in cell phone are making the world a thoroughly more navigable place.

GPS Tracking of Cell Phones

But this article is about lost cell phone GPS tracking, not about all the cool things that GPS is doing for cell phone technology. So to help us understand how GPS can help us find lost cell phones a quick word needs to be said about the GPS tracking of cell phones. A brief definition of GPS tracking should be given: GPS tracking is the ability to track the location of a person, vehicle, or object as it moves throughout the world. There are two types of GPS tracking, passive and active. Active tracking occurs in real time and lets you find out where something is right now. Passive GPS tracking has to do with data loggers, which find out your position and then store it on the device for use later when you can download the information into some tracking software.

Anyway, the tracking available in cell phones is real time GPS tracking – and this is important because it will allow you to use it in order to find a lost cell phone. It would work something like this. You download a GPS tracking application onto your cell phone from among one of the many different free GPS tracking applications or software available. Once it is downloaded and installed you just keep it running on your phone so that you will have a running GPS log of your location. If you ever lose your cell phone, you can find out the last place it was when the battery still had a charge.

In order to use your GPS to help find your lost cell phone you need to have the following conditions met:

Your cell phone must be turned on.
You must have a GPS tracking application installed on your phone.
The tracking app must be running. This will ensure that the GPS is actively reading signals from the satellites in order to find out its location. It will also then send that information over the cell phone network so that you can view it on the internet.
Your cell phone must be receiving signals from satellites. If your phone is buried beneath 100 feet of concrete then there is no hope of finding it!
Your cell phone must be getting a signal from cell phone towers. If it is not then you will not have a method of sending information to the Internet for you to look at it.

If you meet all of these criteria then you should be able to find a lost cell phone with GPS tracking.

We have also included a larger list of apps that you can download to smart phones of several different varieties. Just check out our post about free GPS cell phone trackers.

Ways to Use It

One of the most important ways that this technology can be used is to help children keep track of their cell phones. GPS cell phones for kids are great because they provide excellent safety for our children, but they are no good to use or to them if they lose them. If you need to know where their lost mobile phone is just log onto the computer and figure it out.

The same is true for businessmen who have a cell phone with all their work contacts and email on it. If they were to lose this device it could disastrous for their next sales call if not for their entire career. If they have GPS tracking installed on their Blackberry then they should have no problem finding their phone and avoiding certain disaster.

If you would like more information on how to use your cell phone to find itself, please check out How to Find a Lost Cell Phone with GPS Tracking. It should provide you with some helpful tips on what you should do and give you some ideas of the different programs available for use in this type of tracking.

GPS tracking works great in cell phones. Their small, light-weight nature makes them a perfect fit for the way that most people live their lives. It also is the perfect vehicle for tracking because it is connected to GSM cell phone networks, giving them the ability to send large amounts of information long distances almost instantly. This could not be done with standard telephones. Telephone GPS tracking wouldn’t even make any sense since they are static and do not move anywhere.

Do you have any helpful tips for people trying to utilize lost cell phone GPS tracking?