Gents, Was browsing the WEB and came across this website. One of the best I have seen for Clyde shipping and joint warrior pictures. Hope it is of interest to you all. Hope i am not infringing any copyright laws by posting it on this site ? Don't think I am but pretty sure you will let me know if this is not the case. Thank You.
JOINT WARRIOR is a Maritime, Air and Land Exercise that will take place predominantly in Scotland, the Western Isles and North West Approaches, the Borders region, North East England including Spadeadam EWTR and the North Sea. The exercise will incorporate maritime/land attack and air defence operations, involving large formations of fast jet aircraft, acting as aggressors and defenders, in tactical packages. Rotary Wing aircraft will also be participating in the exercise. Up to 40 aircraft may take part simultaneously, some of which will launch and recover from NATO Units afloat.
All JW activity will commence at 0700 on Mon 3rd October 2011. The flying activity will cease at 1600 Monday 17 October 2011.The exercise will be operating in and around LFA 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17 AND 19 TTA 14T and 20T.
If you don't already know, you can find your LFA (low flying area) on the MoD web site:
I don't know if this occurred on JW exercises in the past, but I noticed a number of reports that OFGEM has apparently announced the following, but I couldn't track down anything on their site (there are downloadable reports on the effects of tests involving jamming, and analysis of the error modes), so maybe their contact has to be emailed direct:
(Rather far away from me, and I don't know if anyone is handy for this and has GPSr, but on the off-chance, it would be interesting to hear of any experience with this jamming, and what your GPS did. Off course, if you are in any of these areas you may be too busy avoiding the SatNav lemmings, who drive by staring at the SatNav screen rather than looking out of the windows of their vehicles, or looking where they are. If so, I completely understand how you may not be able to take your eyes off them to look at your GPSr. Mental pic of the lemming wandering/driving around in circles, driving over the pavement, across files, over cliffs, as their SatNavs flash "NO SIGNAL" or some such similar message that does not register in the space where their brains should be.)
Jamming of GPS signals
Part of the training in JW involves having GPS services withdrawn. This will be in force on occasions, listed below, from 4th-13th of October.
Jamming of GPS signals will affect equipment using GPS within 20 nautical mile line of sight of the jamming sites at Faraid Head, east of Cape Wrath, Loch Ewe NE and Loch Ewe SW.
Other martime movements need to be aware of this as indeed do hill walkers since the jamming radius of course extends inland and many hill walkers use GPS devices as a key landward navigation and position finding aid.
For information, the dates and times for GPS signal jamming from each of the three sites named above are:
I would have expected this to have had more publicity given the risks it implies for innocent members of the public like climbers. Mind you they are remote areas and the numbers of visitors using the roads or climbing the hills will probably be quite low.
Still you cannot jam a silva compass or an OS Map !
Jamming of global positioning signals (GPS) during Europe's largest military exercise has been suspended, following complaints from fishermen. The Royal Navy issued warnings in September and October that GPS in parts of Scotland would be disrupted during Exercise Joint Warrior. But Western Isles fishermen said the first they knew was when their equipment went offline last Friday. The Royal Navy said the military would seek to address their safety concerns. Joint Warrior is held twice a year and jamming of GPS in April drew no complaints, according to the military. The Royal Navy said all appropriate actions were taken to warn of the disruption during this year's second exercise, including a guide which was issued on 7 September. The guide gives the locations and timings for the jamming of GPS. The Scottish government confirmed it received the guide in September and put it on its website, but a spokeswoman added that it was the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) responsibility to distribute the information. A Royal Navy spokesman said: "Joint Tactical Exercise Planning Staff (JTEPS), who co-ordinate the tri-service exercise, issued a guide to fishing vessels, ferry operators and environmentalists on 7 September 2011. "This notice gave warning of the jamming operations, the specific date and times they would be happening and the locations. "A warning notice, called NAVWARN 269, was also issued on 3 October and both Aberdeen and Stornoway coastguards have been transmitting regular warning broadcasts on VHF, notifying mariners that the operations will take place."
I'm not going to get into the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of the jamming, but I have been involved in the use of GPS since some inconceivable date before 1998, and I think the modern used who has only come into it through SatNav or more recent uses has either forgotten, or is blissfully unaware that the GPS system is an American military service, to which civilians are granted access.
It's not British, and they have no 'right' to use it.
The Americans could turn it off their NAVSTAR sysem in a moment with the flick of a switch (I'm not suggesting this is likely, just that it could be done.) It's not going to happen of course, since GPS is so deeply buried into civilian operations now. Just look at what happened here, when a tiny corner of tiny Scotland suffered a tiny outage. Imagine the world's response to America if their SatNavs stopped working, and they were no longer able to drive without looking out the windscreen
This point is not wasted on our Government, which is part of a European consortium in the final stages of bringing Galileo online, which is a civilian GNSS (global navigation satellite system) which makes 'us' independent of the American military.
You will be aware I have just posted confirmation that the Russian GLONASS system has come up to global coverage a few days ago, and I can add that there is also the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS) coming along, plus the People's Republic of China, in the process of expanding its regional Beidou navigation system into worldwide coverage as the global Compass navigation system by 2020.
They're not the only ones, but the common them is a move away from America's military based NAVSTAR system and into civilian systems.
One of the reasons given is so that the military cannot switch if off - but I think that is somewhat naive, since anything serious enough to warrant that would mean we were in a situation where they could just declare an emergency, march into the ground stations, and do as they wished.
Here is the guide they referred to, something I failed to find last week despite spending some time trying to track it down
And maybe this link should be provided to all, together with a DVD of the programme BBC Two's All Roads Lead Home:
I have never bothered to look at a web TV channel devoted to geocaching, but for some reason decided to give it a spin tonight.
The chap had just acquired a new GPSr, made by Magellan, to complement his existing Garmin device.
He had travelled to an undocumented pillar (this was in Canada, but they have the equivalent of trig pillars there, not surprisingly) so he knew his coordinates precisely.
The aim had been to carry out a long-term average to see how the units compared in terms of location and precision - but the test failed.
After allowing twenty minutes for things to settle, he gave up. While the Garmin was (naturally) perfect, the same was not true for the Magellan.
He gave up because it kept insisting - despite the fact that it was sitting on top of the same pillar as the Garmin - that it was travelling at some 440 kph, and did not change its mind even after being reset.
It's not an unknown thing, and unless the user was also a SatNav owner (you know, drives along with eyes fixed on the SatNav, not looking outside as the cliff approaches), then it would be obvious something was amiss, and the reading was not to be trusted.
Later on - in a episode made some time later - it was reported that the offending Magellan device had decided to work perfectly when later used in another area.
This is one of many reasons why the existing civilian GPS is available, but not used, for automated flight. However, the newer subscriptions services will/are suitable for precision automated flight, since error correcting and system failure alerts are among the enhancements it contains. Imagine if a commercial passenger flight had an 'ordinary' GPS that did something similar to that Magellan, and decided that instead of cruising at 440 kph, the aircraft was stationary. Not good, and would definitely result in queasy passengers.
I am a bit surprised about the fuss from the fishermen, there is always plenty of advance publicity about danger areas and GPS jamming during JW and it happens every year. The CG would have been putting out SECURITAY warnings as well.
I wondered if it is all tied into the campaign about CG closures and loss of the tugs, something else to complain about. Perhaps claim they would not have had the SECURITAY warnings if the local CG base had closed!
Thank goodness someone else expressed that opinion.
I didn't dare because I thought I would be beaten up for not being sympathetic to the poor fishermen and their safety.
=====
I remembered a similar case to the Magellan item mentioned in the post before last.
I had (or thought I had, as it actually turned out) a problem with a Garmin GPSr.
Their service was excellent, and after a couple of investigations which found nothing (and that the unit was 100% within spec, the factory offered me a new one at my option - which I accepted.
Out of the box, I checked the memory (yup, nosey) and found it had been operated in the area around the factory in Taiwan - no great surprise there.
However, when I downloaded the log and the software added the velocities to the track...
This indicated my new GPSr had been travelling at some 750 mph during one trip - supersonic!
My guess was that the factory has a signal simulator that is used to test these devices, and that the chances of it having a flight in a military jet were somewhat remote.
There is a follow-up to this story.
After using the replacement GPSr for a few weeks, I decided it was crap compared to the first one. Basically it was 'deaf', and I was finding that in places I visited regularly where I had no signal problems, I could not get decent position fixes, which I was then repeating to check the accuracy - this was in the days of SA, when the signal was deliberately degraded for civilians.
I phoned the factory and asked if they still had my original device - they did - and were happy to send it back to me in exchange for the replacement they had provided.
I don't know what it'd like now, in the says of SatNav. but in those days, the guys at Garmin were great, always happy to spend time and answer technical queries about the unit and the software, and any small spares or hardware updates needed were just put in an envelope and posted to me, free of charge.
Border TV have been warning the Carlisle people to expect a low flying herc over the city and the surrounding area and have been told not be concerned.
There was an item in the Dunoon Observer this week about RFA Argus going down the Firth from Loch Striven POL Depot today to go on an exercise in the Western Isles and I have seen a few small naval ships sailing about.
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