New Qwiic-connected board offers 5ns timing accuracy with a clear view of the sky — dropping to 2.5ns with correction data.

SparkFun is continuing to broaden its high-accuracy Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) product range with the launch of a Qwiic breakout board for the u-blox ZED-F9T — offering five-nanosecond timing accuracy.

“This week, we finally get to show off a board that we have been working on for the past couple of months, the ZED-F9T GNSS Timing Breakout,” says SparkFun’s Chris McCarty of the new board. “This is a new piece of technology that we are excited to finally release and we eagerly await some of the new projects you make with it!”

GPS Is Easy to Hack, and the U.S. Has No Backup
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-is-easy-to-hack-and-the-u-s-has-no-backup/#Echobox=1575312374

At risk are airliners, electric grids, stock markets and other systems that rely on GPS to time their operations

On August 5, 2016, Cathay Pacific Flight 905 from Hong Kong was heading for an on-time arrival at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport when something unexpected occurred. The pilots radioed air traffic controllers and said they had lost GPS (Global Positioning System) guidance for the final eight nautical miles to “runway right-24.”

The folks that are studying the strange circumstances surrounding these anomalies say they are stumped as to how this is being done or why the fake location data correlates into a ring around a seemingly random area along the bustling Huangpu River. We don’t have an answer to those questions, but after a bit of research, we may have discovered a major clue that could help in doing so.

A radio antenna structure or high-rise could be essential and may have to do with the odd dispersion of coordinates.

And what do you know? Right in the center of where the ring of data points was located was a huge smokestack—one of two that are part of a sprawling plant operated by Shanghai Gaore Industries. Bloomberg describes the company as a distributor of “coal and other minerals and ores.”

In the available satellite imagery, the smokestack appears to be hundreds of feet high, offering a perfect perch for which to install whatever gear could be involved in this GPS data tampering operation

in all the satellite photos we could find, the smokestack in question hasn’t emitted anything going all the way back to 2011.

Still, just because something exists exactly where you hypothesized it would, that doesn’t mean it is being used for what you think it is. Coincidences happen all too often when it comes to these kinds of situations.

on the road just next to where the smokestack is located, a remarkably tall red radio tower pops up out of literally nowhere in the second half of 2018.

the tower disappeared right around the end of 2018 or the first days into 2019.

Taken as a whole, this evidence points to the possibility that some sort of hardware is present at the center of the mysterious ring. If that is indeed the case, we still don’t know who that hardware may belong to or what that entity’s goals are.

The eerie patterns are unlike anything experts have seen in previous GPS spoofing incidents, which have typically pointed to a single location.

Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day
90 percent of the technology’s financial impact has come since just 2010.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/study-finds-that-a-gps-outage-would-cost-1-billion-per-day/

Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems.

To assess the effect of an outage, the study looked at several different variables. Among them was “precision timing” that enables a number of wireless services, including the synchronization of traffic between carrier networks, wireless handoff between base stations, and billing management. Moreover, higher levels of precision timing enable higher bandwidth and provide access to more devices. (For example, the implementation of 4G LTE technology would have been impossible without GPS technology).

In the case of an outage, there would be relatively minimal impacts over the first two days, but after that time, the wireless network would begin to degrade significantly. After 30 days, the study estimates that functionality would lie somewhere between 0 percent and 60 percent of normal operating levels. Landline phones would be largely unaffected.

“GPS came along at a time of significant evolution in the telecom sector and played a critical role in the digitization of telecom infrastructure and the advent of wireless technology,” the study states.