this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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GPS guided drone attacks. Civilian GPS top out at 300 m a second. Anything beyond that is a missile and GPS refuses to work unless you have one of the special government GPS chips without the limiter.
Are you meaning 300 measurements per second? Because civilian gps has an accuracy of ~3 meters. I may be misunderstanding though
The GPS chips have internal limits on how fast they think they can move. If they determine that they are moving faster than 300m/s they will stop outputting any results for a period of time. This limit is, IIRC, put in at the silicon level, so only military chips can bypass it.
If you try to use mapping apps on a plane you sometimes run into this issue.
It is trivial to make your GPS receiver firmware ignore these limits. There are even open-source receivers (SwiftNav piksi, for example). Modifying a binary is much harder, but not impossible for a motivated state like Iran or Russia. It's best to think of the COCOM limits as suggestions.