Following the  GNSS Interference, Detection, and Mitigation (IDM) conference at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory near London, two industry experts on GNSS interference and jamming will lead a GNSS Jamming & Interference: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions Conference later this month.  As the surveying world becomes ever more reliant upon GNSS signals this research becomes ever more important. A marked increase in incidents of GNSS jamming and interference has raised the profile of their effects on users and their equipment.  Equipment. Whether unintended or intentional, in the military domain or civil environments, these incidents have raised concerns among GNSS manufacturers and users about how to avoid or mitigate the adverse phenomena.

Signal interference can be placed into four basic categories; physical interference, propagation interference, partially in bound spill over and outbound interference. A well known example of the proposed outbound interference was the LightSquare Project whose terrestrial communication stations were set to transmit just below the GPS L1 frequency.  This caused concern that the GPS L1 signal would be lost – no GPS L1 would have meant no GPS.  This project has now been shelved.’