UK 'over-reliant' On GPS Signals

The UK may have turn dangerously over-reliant on satellite-navigation signals, according to a inform from the Royal Academy of Engineering .

Use of space-borne positioning and timing information is right away widespread, in all from burden transformation to synchronisation of P.C. networks.

The academy fears that as well many applications have small or no fill-in were these signals to go down.

Receivers must be able of using a accumulation of information sources, it says.

Dr Martyn Thomas, who chaired the organisation that wrote the report, told BBC News: "We're not adage that the sky is about to drop in; we're not adage there's a catastrophe around the corner.

"What we're adage is that there is a flourishing independence between systems that people regard are subsidy any other up. And it might well be that if a number these systems flop simultaneously, it will result in blurb damage or only feasible loss of life. This is unconditionally avoidable."

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) are hugely renouned and are anticipating more and more uses daily.

As well as the automobile dashboard device that provides directions, sat-nav systems are used by mobile and information networks, financial systems, shipping and air transport, agriculture, railways and the crisis services.

It is not only the glorious positioning that GNSS affords but the really correct timing information these systems broach that has done them so popular.

The European Commission, in a new refurbish on its stirring Galileo sat-nav network, estimated that about 6-7% of Europe's GDP, roughly 800bn euros (690bn) annually, was right away contingent in a few way on GNSS data.

The RAEng inform claims to be the initial evaluation of only how many applications in the UK right away use GPS signals and their like, and their illusive disadvantage to an outage of a few kind.

It says sat-nav signals are comparatively feeble - homogeneous to reception the light from a splendid tuber at a stretch of 20,000km - and this leaves them open to interference or corruption.

Possible sources add artificial ones, such as think over jamming, and innate hazards, such as solar activity. Both can introduce errors in to the information or simply take it out altogether.

"The key thing for us is the idea of gush failures," mentioned inform co-author Prof Jim Norton, the president-elect of BCS - the Chartered Institute for IT.

"This is what you characterize as unexpected, systems - systems that exist, but people do not recognize they exist since they do not comprehend the interdependencies. There will be a singular familiar indicate of disadvantage and failure, but it's not obvious."

Dr Thomas added: "We resolved that the UK was already dangerously contingent on GPS as a singular source of position, navigation and timing (PNT) data.

"[We concluded] that the fill-in systems are frequently unsound or un-tested; that the jammers are far as well simply existing and that the risks from them are increasing; that nobody has a full photo of the dependencies on GPS and identical systems; and that these risks could be managed and marked down if supervision and attention worked together."

The inform creates 10 recommendations. Three describe to raising recognition of the problems and getting users to evaluate their own specific vulnerabilities and possible fill-in solutions.

Two casing hardware solutions, inclusive the suggestion of a government-sponsored RD programme to look for improved receiver and receiver technologies to complement the essential element of systems. The inform moreover lauds the land-based eLoran air wave navigation network as a really estimable fill-in technology.

And 5 recommendations drop in to the process domain. Chief amid these is the obligatory suggestion that mere receive of jamming apparatus be done illegal.

Criminal gangs use this apparatus to conseal their activity, for e.g. restraint the GPS tracking systems in the lorries or high-performance cars they look for to steal.

These jammers may be paid for off the internet for as small 20. Some are able of swamping all receivers over a far-reaching area.

"It's already unlawful to put GNSS jamming apparatus on the marketplace in the UK," mentioned Prof Jim Norton. "The complaint is it's not indispensably unlawful to grip it, to import or even to publicize it. It doesn't require legislation; it only requires [the telecoms regulator] Ofcom to place a banning order, and you would strongly suggest they do that."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk