Redondo Beach, Calif. (InvestigateTV) – The U.S. economy depends on 31 satellites orbiting the Earth that form the global positioning system (GPS).
Developed half a century ago for the military, GPS is now used daily by more than seven billion devices worldwide. It’s inside your phone; inside your car; and in the cockpit of every airliner.
GPS is also the ultra-precise clock by which the stock market times every trade; the power grid synchronizes generating stations; cell phones operate; and supplies get delivered to stores or your house.
“The GPS utility and usefulness has kind of crept into society and the average citizen doesn’t ever see it,” said Brad Parkinson, who developed GPS for the U.S. Air Force in the 1970s. “They don’t realize the harm that would be done if it suddenly weren’t.”
Parkinson is now vice chair of the National Space Based Position Navigation and Timing Advisory Board and is warning of threats to the system and calling for a backup system to prevent an economic catastrophe.
Should GPS be knocked out accidentally or by a U.S. adversary, Parkinson said “the impact would be enormous.”
GPS signals are relatively weak; Parkinson described them as “a tenth of a millionth of a billionth of a watt.” That makes the navigation and timing signals incredibly easy to jam or overpower with fake coordinates.
“Because the signals are so very, very faint, they can be easily interfered with,” said Dana Goward with the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. “And because the nature of the signals are public knowledge, it’s very easy for even a sophisticated hobbyist to interfere.”
The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) told the board at its fall meeting that there are thousands of jamming incidents affecting airliners every day. “Over one month, there were 41,000 Boeing, Airbus, and other aircraft that were affected by spoofing,” said the DOT’s Karen Van Dyke. Aircraft systems have security measures to detect, prevent, and log spoofing attempts, which is how DOT got the data.
Spoofing is used with nefarious intent to send incorrect positioning information to ships and aircraft or to hide a criminal’s whereabouts from authorities.
“They send false GPS signals, slightly less power than real GPS signals, but then they slowly, slowly increase the power of the signal until they’re just above the power level of the real ones, and the receivers go over there,” Goward said.
Admiral Thad Allen, former commandant of the US Coast Guard and current chair of the National Space Based Position Navigation and Timing Advisory Board (PNT), said there have been cases where navigation systems on ships at sea were displayed as being inland.
“The vulnerability of GPS, both jamming and spoofing, is a real considerable threat to the country and needs to be taken seriously,” Allen said.
The United States has no backup system for GPS. If the constellation of 31 satellites was taken out or disrupted, the U.S. would have to depend on signals from foreign systems.
Some U.S. agencies are currently integrating Europe’s space-based system called Galileo. The rest of the global systems are run by U.S. adversaries.
Russia has its own global positioning system called GLONASS. China has a space-based system called BeiDou. They also have ground-based backup systems the U.S. doesn’t possess.
China relies on a triad of space, fiber optics, and terrestrial broadcasts for reliable, redundant positioning and timing. “They have a very extensive fiber system – 20,000 kilometers with 295 timing stations – and they have a terrestrial broadcast system called eLoran,” Goward said.
The PNT has repeatedly recommended that the U.S. develop backup systems. The board has been sounding the alarm year after year. The current recommendation is called PTA: protect, toughen, augment.
U.S. presidents have issued executive orders since 2004 directing agencies to develop a backup system that has yet to materialize. In that time, Russia and China have both demonstrated separate capabilities to take out satellites in space.
The advisory board has been looking for a reliable, terrestrial-based backup system that would broadcast a signal across the United States. But broadcasters already have towers all over the country.
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is ready to embed GPS signals into its next-generation TV signals nationwide. “The solution is BPS, and that is for Broadcast Positioning System,” said NAB chief technology officer Sam Matheny.
“In essence, we’re taking the exact same timing signal that is transmitted via a GPS satellite, except we’re doing it from a television tower,” Matheny said.
The technology does not require new towers or separate transmitters, because the timing signal is embedded in the digital signal from the ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. NAB is already broadcasting the timing signals over the air at three stations.
“This is not meant to replace GPS,” Matheny said. “It is meant to be an independent system. It can operate completely independently of GPS, which we believe is one of the great advantages of BPS.”
Parkinson called it an appealing solution; Goward said the proposed solution “shows great promise. It has great accuracy. The infrastructure is already in place.”
Fellow board member and timing expert Pat Diamond believes BPS is a matter of national security. “That system is capable of carrying time that’s as good as what you get from GPS,” Diamond said.
BPS doesn’t require any regulatory approval, but it will cost the broadcasters money to install specialized equipment at every TV station in America. They also rely on the Federal Communications Commission to rapidly roll out ATSC 3.0 next-gen TV, because BPS relies on that standard to carry the timing signal.
“Sixteen hundred and nineteen [towers],” Diamond said. ”They’re all there. They’re operating today. They operate twenty-four hours a day. They’re highly resilient because they carry the Emergency Broadcast System. They also are there for the public good.”
The last launch of a new GPS satellite in the United States was more than two years ago. The latest batch of satellites will eventually provide a signal that’s much harder to spoof, but they need one more satellite for that new protocol to be deployed.
U.S. Space Force is responsible for the military system that has become an invisible utility relied upon by civilians and companies.
Space Force invited InvestigateTV to visit its GPS command center at Schriever Space Force Base outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, but later responded that commanders “aren’t able to support the interviews and visit at this time.”
Military commanders haven’t been shy about warning of the economic fallout of a GPS failure. “The entire economy would come to a halt because we couldn’t move data, and we couldn’t move people, and we couldn’t move goods,” U.S. Space Force General Michael Guetlein said.
The military has access to more secure receivers and encrypted signals that are impervious to spoofing. That technology is banned for civilian receivers, according to Parkinson.
“We know how to make a GPS receiver virtually immune to jamming and spoofing, but the techniques are denied the manufacturer right now because of restrictions,” Parkinson said.
The Space Based Position Navigation and Timing Board is only an advisory organization. It reports to the executive committee at NASA, one of several agencies responsible for GPS.
“Our adversaries know we are at risk,” Diamond said. “I would like to see the American public contact their elected officials and ask them the question, when are you going to fix this?”
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