You could start seeing tips on some questionable devices if you spent a lot of time driving eBay for interesting technical stuff. I recently heard of the tiny GPS jammers that directly attach to a 12V car socket. When shipped to your home, it seems to be a perfect tool for science.

Now you may ask what a machine legitimately uses. The only reason you want to mess with GPS signals in and around a vehicle is that you want to drive. You can drive a tracked car from your car and want a quick two-hour nap in the car park, or you can disable an embedded GPS of a car that you have just robbed for a long time. You know, you know, you do, just as you do.

There are no plausible harmful reasons why this program works. Hackers were never so selective for machines you learn and play, and for some reason, we shouldn't start. Let's use a grey field hardware test drive to see whether it ticks.

While the average height of the GPS constellation may not be the same as communication satellites in the geosynchronous orbit of 20,200 km, it remains very remote. With this extraordinary distance and antenna height, the signal is not unforeseen on many GPS systems. It's so low, generally, it's under the noise floor. Only smart algorithms and a hint of wizardry make this your handheld whisper.

It is this fragility that makes such cheap jammers possible. It does not override the legitimate signal. Be conscious that such a device does not emulate the GPS; it transmits ample noisy insanity to prevent seeing the real satellite.

Once the jammer is triggered, the unit patterns fully erase the already minimal signal that can be clearly seen. There is no business at all, it is ten thousand kilometers from the legal sign, and that is screaming. I haven't measured the range of this device because I don't want to drive it longer than needed, but I know it can be done in meters, at least.

Now that we have broken federal law with the use of this tool for many minutes and tried this hard thing, we now have to open it up and see how it works. For the 8 dollars that I pay for this unit, I haven't anything expected, but it is fun to see how simple it is to create so many problems.

It's a pity an unauthorized jammer will tear down until we see one of the most common computing devices ever. You can learn more about GPS jammer from gpsjammers.org.

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