Safeguarding GPS and thwarting a Bond villain

[Blowfeld]

By Physics Today on June 14, 2011 12:07 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The 13th James Bond movie, Octopussy, came out in 1983, two years before West Germany's first-generation cellular phone system, C-Netz, was launched. In the movie, Bond learns of a plot to explode a nuclear warhead at a US Air Force base in Germany. Lacking a mobile communications device, he has to deliver the news in person. In fact, he has to defuse the bomb in person.

By the time the 18th Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, arrived at cinemas in 1997, the number of cell phone subscribers in rich countries had reached 18 per 100 inhabitants—too many, I presume, for the movie's screenwriter, Bruce Feirstein, to have Bond use an ordinary cell phone. Indeed, Bond's Ericsson phone came equipped with a stun gun, fingerprint reader, and remote control for his armored, weapons-laden BMW 750i.

omorrow Never Dies is the most telecommunications-intense movie in the Bond series. The villain, Elliot Carver, is a media magnate who seeks to provoke a war between Britain and China. Besides a ratings boost, the payoff for Carver is exclusive media rights in China for 100 years.

Carver and his henchmen set their plot in motion by tampering with the GPS signal received by HMS Devonshire, a Royal Navy frigate cruising in the South China Sea. Fooled into believing that his ship is far outside Chinese territorial waters, the captain is surprised when two MiGs from the People's Liberation Army Air Force warn him off. Carver's stealth ship sinks the Devonshire and shoots down one of the MiGs to create what looks like an act of mutual aggression. Thanks to Bond and Chinese agent Wai Lin, shown above, war is averted.

When I first saw the movie, I wondered about the feasibility of tampering with GPS signals in a way that secretly alters position information. In their 2006 book The Science of James Bond (Wiley), Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg don't discuss that element of Tomorrow Never Dies's plot, but they do devote three paragraphs to a similar plot element in Dr No, the first Bond movie. Using radio waves to throw a rocket's gyroscopic controls off balance—called toppling in Dr No—is, they conclude, "a bit of a stretch."

Still, it's perfectly feasible to jam GPS signals, or any other radio signals if you know the frequency—which brings me, at last, to my news. Last week I received a press release from QinetiQ, a defense manufacturer based in Britain. In partnership with the Canadian company NovAtel, QinetiQ has developed what purports to be the first-ever single-enclosure GPS antijam antenna for military land vehicles. According to NovAtel's press release, the antenna, which is called GAJT and pronounced "gadget," is a

commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product, providing short order lead times and enabling quick deployment to the field. Manufactured in Canada, and incorporating Canadian and UK technology, GAJT only requires Canadian and UK export approval, which means exporting to authorized customers in foreign countries is greatly simplified.

I'm not sure whether the scientists, engineers, and marketers at QinetiQ and NovAtel were inspired by James Bond. But it does strike me as plausible that QinetiQ's odd spelling is derived from Bond's gadget supplier, Q.

Charles Day

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