With Global Navigation Space Systems (GNSS) used in road, rail and shipping equipment, a system failure could "just conceivably cause loss of life", said Dr Martyn Thomas, the chairman of the academy's GNSS working group.
”The UK is already dangerously dependent on GPS. GPS and other GNSS are so useful and so cheap to build into equipment that we have become almost blindly reliant on the data they give us. A significant failure of GPS could cause lots of services to fail at the same time, including many that are thought to be completely independent of each other," Thomas added.
Bob Cockshott, of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, said there was a whole generation of road users who could not read maps and could not operate without satnav, adding that more powerful jammers were "easily available to criminals and are being used by criminals".
"Dependency on GPS is growing and jammers are getting easier to obtain. We expect this problem to become more severe. You can buy jammers for £20,” Mr Cockshott said.
The report suggests that the loophole in UK laws, which forbids the use of jamming devices but do not outlaw their importation or possession, should be closed as soon as possible. The Royal Academy of Engineering goes as far as to suggest that the Government should consider the deliberate jamming of signals for a limited period, in order to allow users to evaluate the effectiveness of their backup plans.
Google News