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Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

177 points by y1n0

by Animats

3 subcomments

Ops.group published a report on GPS spoofing back in 2024.[1] It's bad. Ops.group is an organization for dispatchers and pilots, the people who decide the routes aircraft take and fly them. They are really angry about it. Key concerns:
- The greatest safety concern is the degraded functionality of the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS). The system does not operate correctly after spoofing, even if GPS coverage is restored. The number of false alerts is astounding. ...
- A similar concern is the significant possibility of the GPS Receiver appearing normal to flight crew after spoofing, but in reality being contaminated with false data. ...
- This year, a 500% increase in spoofing has been observed. On average 1500 flights per day are now spoofed, versus 300 in Q1/Q2 of 2024...
They included maps. Most of the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe no longer have useful GPS coverage. It's not just jamming. There's active spoofing, which sends out false position info.
And this was before the Iran war.
Before this, everybody in the industry thought GPS solved the aerial navigation problem. In the US, the FAA wanted to shut down many of the old radionavigation aids. Now, there's a lot more interest in improving the other systems. The military wants to go mostly inertial and is working on better inertial systems.
[1] https://ops.group/dashboard/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/GPS-S...

by random3

1 subcomments

GPS tampering “data” from a company who’s upcoming tech is advertised to solve the problem their data shows is indeed a problem, and coincidentally also raised their 170M series C

by oskarpearson

2 subcomments

Is there any other more useful url? Even with ad blocking enabled this site is a mess of auto playing adverts. It makes the actual content difficult to find.

by navigate8310

0 subcomment

> Gunning says that, with the superior strength of the PNT signal transmitted by the company's planned LEO constellation, existing jammers would only be able to affect about 5% of the area they can currently disrupt. "The effect of the jamming is going to be reduced to a smaller radius," Gunning said. "The degradation area will go down, and the full lock-out radius will also go down."
Will this suddenly make offending countries scramble for an alternative?

by kitchi

5 subcomments

Is GNSS jamming really as bad a problem as the article makes it seem?
The article itself reads like guerilla advertising so I'm inclined not to take it at face value.

by Scoundreller

1 subcomments

> When we fly over North America, for example, we see a beautiful signal all the time
I think by “fly”, they mean several hundred km in the air where you have sharply reduced below-the-horizon blocking.
Anyone got any leads on Doppler shift detecting equipment? Not hard to detect you’re getting spoofed or jammed with based on that. Power levels being all improbable wouldn’t be hard to detect either. Difficult to detect if “tuned” to a particular target but blanket spoofing would be hard.
Then at the consumer level, fallback options exist (hi wifi); but having something more local would be nice. FM radio stations maybe? Can mess with those too ofc. AM systems are already a fallback in aviation for gross navigation.
A private GNSS constellation has very business cases.

by londons_explore

0 subcomment

Looks like this is mostly marketing for the services of this new constellation...

by stalfie

1 subcomments

Once again, Russia turns out to be the reason we can't have nice things. War truly is a waste for everyone involved. Now that Russia is also helping North Korea to launch satellites (one so far), expect everything to get worse in the future.
I give it 2-10 years before one of the two threatens an imagined adversary with detonating a nuke in orbit, with the explicit intent of causing Kessler syndrome.

by willtemperley

1 subcomments

> Gunning says that, due to the altitude of the Pulsar-0 satellite, the map may not truthfully reflect where jamming is worst for users on the ground
Right. So have they employed ground truthing to quantify this uncertainty? Truth was important when I went to GIS school.

by DoctorOetker

0 subcomment

with directional antennas or telescope mounts, it would seem one could do positioning with catalogs of radio pulsars or optical pulsars (with clear skies or above the clouds), by more old-fashioned navigation like once used at sea.
To find your place on the globe you need to know the current time, and the azimuth and elevation of a feature in the astronomical sky.
Since the pulsars have different periods, observing them should allow you to reconstruct the time, and the directions of these emissions then allow you to determing where on the globe you are for such a time.

by eqvinox

0 subcomment

This "signal strength" thing doesn't pass a smell check. Whatever transmitter they put on a satellite, Russia can just put a stronger one on their jammers. Any satellite is limited by its space and power budget, terrestrial tech has no such limit.

by tw1984

1 subcomments

US is not even investing in GPS anymore.
Their L5 signal has been in experimental operation for probably over a decade, still "experimental".

by skeptic_ai

1 subcomments

The worst ad ridden website I’ve ever seen.

by weitzj

0 subcomment

JAM as a Service

by yogthos

0 subcomment

A really good illustration of how vulnerable space based military tech is in practice.

by vachina

2 subcomments

I honestly see this jamming as a win. GNSS is a global blanket opt-in American spyware.