Impact of personal privacy devices for WAAS aviation users

Personal privacy devices (PPDs) are low-cost jammers to mask GPS signals, so that the location of the host vehicle is not revealed to other parties. Although it is illegal to use PPDs in the United States, they are being used and have caused problems for other GPS users. This paper investigates the PPD impact on aviation users from the WAAS service perspective. Although PPD jammers on the ground cannot reach airplanes far in the air, PPDs can interfere ground-based WAAS reference stations. We conducted Montel-Carlo simulation on WAAS availability coverage based on real data retrieved from current WAAS reference stations. Our simulation results show that PPD jamming activity has had negligible impact on WAAS service due to redundancy and robustness of large number of WAAS reference stations.