[time-nuts] GPS outage?

Bob Camp lists at rtty.us
Fri Sep 6 21:37:04 EDT 2013


Hi

Ok, here's why the guy gets fired:

The trucking company doesn't do the GPS thing to catch the trucker goofing off. They do it because they get paid to do it. A number of companies will only ship with you *if* you can real time track the cargo and tell them when it'll get to their dock. Why - they only have to pay the unload crew to be there when there's cargo coming in. They only schedule production when all the parts will be there. No parts / no delivery  - everybody stay home and we don't pay you. 

When the tracking goes blank on the truck, the company does not pay the agreed on premium for the service. If the percentage of loads without tracking goes above a (quite low) threshold the truck line gets significantly less business than their competitor. 

The trucking companies go after this stuff because it costs them a lot of money, not because of any law that may be broken. 

Bob

On Sep 6, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:

> On 9/6/13 4:00 AM, Bob Camp wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> A "truck jammer" isn't what you would use to take out a large area,
>> you would need > 100,000 of that sort of jammer. Since the truckers
>> that use them get fired, there's a limited number of them in use….
> 
> Considering they cost $30, and they're not that easy to detect, I think it's a bigger problem than that.  If the trucking company's GPS logging system is always failing, they may *think* the driver is using a jammer, but they probably don't *know*, so the driver just winds up not getting called for trips.  But that same driver will go work for another company, carrying the jammer in his/her pocket.
> 
> In fact, even if the driver were caught by the FCC, AND they filed an enforcement action, I doubt it would show up in the usual background check.  It's not on your "driving record" or "criminal record", which are the things that people hiring drivers check.
> 
> If the driver were actually caught by the trucking company, I doubt they'd tell the FCC (since the FCC will come after the company too), and there's probably no law enforcement involvement.  The driver is terminated, and if someone were to ask, the company would just reply "yes, they worked as a driver from %date% to %date%".  I can't imagine a company telling someone calling for a reference about a driver using a jammer: there's too many downsides.  It's not cut and dried like "oh, Bob was terminated when he wrecked 3 trucks" or "came into work after being awake for 3 days straight waving a sword".  Those kinds of things are objective and easy to report.
> 
> 
> But as you say, you'd need a lot of eBay GPS jammers to cause a large area outage.  We here on Time-Nuts, of course, are far more sophisticated, and with the thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and millions of hours of experience (cumulatively), it would be short work for one of us to deny GPS to a significant area.  Just sayin'... {Let me go out to my garage and start warming up the filaments and start the water cooling system on the L-band Klystron. I need to drive up to the top of Mt. Wilson where I have a good view of the LA basin, bwa-ha-ha-ha...}
> 
> 
>> 
>> That said, if the "event" is simply toggling into holdover and then
>> immediately popping back out, there's a lot of things that can cause
>> that. Exactly what depends a bit on how long the firmware takes to
>> declare a loss / recovery of GPS.
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
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