“You can buy a used mode S transponder for under $200. All you need is a 12 volt battery and a $100 used altitude encoder to transmit a ghost signal.
A little bit of knowledge and bad intent can be dangerous.”
That reminds me of a story you might find amusing. When I was running a trucking company we had satellite GPS transceivers on our trucks. Our dispatchers were little tyrants and bugged drivers extensively about getting to their pickup/delivery addresses way ahead of time. This was a problem because down in the city there was nowhere to park and wait, or even go to the bathroom. Drivers would have to keep going around the block for a couple hours before their appointment to pickup or deliver. Dispatchers didn’t get that this was just illogical.
So the drivers would park at a truckstop outside of town and rest until it was closer to time for business. The dispatchers just did not understand the issues and would not allow this and were nuts about them getting to their addresses. So finally a driver got mad about it and to teach them a lesson he bought a weather balloon, helium tank, and a small 12V battery. He took the GPS transceiver off the truck and sent it out from the west coast across the Pacific in a high wind. There was a company wide panic for several hours over that truck headed across the Pacific without permission instead of going to it’s pickup address...
They got me up first to come in and see what was going on because the driver was out of my terminal closest to the west coast. I was laughing my butt off as I sat in my office tracking this truck across the Pacific on my computer. I knew who the driver was so I figured out what might be happening right away because he had joked about doing this. But it also got the attention of the owner because they woke him up in the middle of the night also with their panic, enough attention to call me and finally have discussions about the challenges the ignorant dispatchers were creating with their illogical irrational persistence and so their behavior was finally adjusted... :)
Along those lines we used to have a fuel gain sharing program wherein the pilots received an extra check determined by a formula. It was supposed to encourage fuel savings.
You don’t give a group of highly intelligent A Types a formula and expect predetermined results. It didn’t take long to figure that flying faster and thus burning more fuel led to larger gainsharing checks. We developed a saying, “ Mach .82 Everywhere”.
That went on for years since the dispatchers got a check too.
EC