Did you know that for the past couple of years Russia has been jamming GPS signals in the Baltic? They have! Allegedly, of course:
Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected by the GPS jamming in recent months, according to experts. The jamming, which affects all GPS users in the area when it is in operation, has also impeded signals used by boats in the Baltic Sea, leading to warnings from the Swedish navy about the safety of shipping.
GPS jamming is easy to conduct with relatively cheap equipment, according to experts.
"Easy to conduct," they say. If that's the case, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. The dimwits who hang around airports and shine lasers at arriving planes should be all over this.
Or maybe not, since it turns out it doesn't usually disrupt anything. A couple of Finnair flights had to turn around last week and return to Helsinki, but that was only because they were making night landings at Tartu, one of the rare circumstances that requires a GPS signal.
So why is Russia doing this? Nobody seems to know, and Russia denies everything. It's just to be annoying, I guess.
And it can have an impact. Not on airplanes but on online dating. Apparently the IDF routinely jams GPS signals near Gaza and Lebanon, which confuses cell phones into thinking they're somewhere else. So Israelis using Tinder get lots of profiles of Lebanese residents and vice versa. I wonder if Estonians are likewise getting hooked up with Finns?
Just turn off GPS and let the network and good old text and maps take care of it, unless they're jamming the cells too (they are).
So, have there been corresponding pushes to get people/countries/whatnot to adopt Glosnas?
We can find out if it's Russia: set off an EMP in the area around the suspected facility in Kaliningrad. When Russia blames the west, claim Russians were probably smoking too close to their own facilities.
Jamming the signal can’t be that hard. I doubt it is a very powerful radio signal coming from the satellite. A local source will be brighter than something a couple of hundred miles away up in orbit. Spoofing a precise deviation would be harder.
There are no good guys in Russia either.
"So why is Russia doing this? Nobody seems to know, ..."
Perhaps because GPS is used to guide Ukrainian drones. See here:
"Russia is deploying electronic-warfare systems to counter drone attacks."
"According to Russian business daily Kommersant, government authorities ordered 4G networks to be switched off at night between January 25-30 in Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov in northwestern Russia to enable anti-drone units."
"On January 18, Ukraine struck an oil terminal near St Petersburg, Russia's second-biggest city. Then on January 21, it struck a gas terminal near the city.
Electronic-warfare units work by scrambling the systems used to navigate drones to their targets. ..."
Yes, I suppose the Baltics are close enough to St. Petersburg to be affected by disruption in its vicinity. But Russia would certainly treat spillover to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as a feature, not a bug. Putin has never accommodated to their independence. They are on his list, though probably behind Transnistria and the rest of Moldova.
So the IDF is really trying to get everyone to get along--or get it on, whatever the case may be.
It is super easy, you just generate noise all over the right bands[1]. GPS is pretty low-power, you don't need a huge rig unless you want a huge area of effect. You need a Zener diode[2], an amp and some wire. Scavenging the parts from household electronics is trivial.
The hard part is not getting caught. Doing this is super obvious, and the inverse-square law points to the source. The FCC absolutely will come down on you like a ton of bricks, the FAA will get in on the fun, and you'll probably attract a bunch of civil lawsuits just for flavor, because that's how America rolls.
That of course works a bit differently if you're a sovereign with nukes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Overview_of_frequencies
[2] https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/zener-diode/
Do Estonians and Finns dislike each other?
Not at all... and they have a common distaste for Russia. I have been on the Tallinn-Helsinki ferry and it's only about 60 miles. Which would work for some ad-hoc international relations, if you know what I mean.
While GPS jamming is bad, GPS spoofing is even more insidious. GPS has been integrated into many aviation systems, like the enhanced ground proximity warning systems (EGPWS), which is good to have working properly if you prefer not flying into the side of a mountain on a dark, cloudy night.
Probably more than you want to know about GPS and aviation, but its an informative 22 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbd9eSw6GfI
Read a story recently about a guy who bought a GPS jammer so his employer wouldn’t be able to track his GPS equipped truck. He probably would have gotten away with it except he left the truck parked in an airport parking lot where the jammer interfered with all the plane’s GPS systems. Planes use GPS not only for navigation but also for the safety critical ground proximity warning system. The feds came down hard on him, hitting him with a five figure fine.
“Or maybe not, since it turns out it doesn't usually disrupt anything.“
https://company.finnair.com/en/media-centre/all-releases/news?id=2568789F7B492403
It’s probably just me, but does anyone else find Drum unbelievably blasé and indifferent to anything that doesn’t directly affect him? I realize he posted this last night and this press release is from this morning, but his rush to proclaim with his latest royal decree that “this latest example of something that doesn’t really matter” series is getting nauseating.
Agreed. Day, night, in fog, rain, snow, etc., it is far safer for aircraft to use a landing procedure that includes vertical guidance (a glide slope), instead of just an older VOR/DME type approach. In smaller airports, vertical guidance may be supplied by a GPS system, since it is cheaper to implement and maintain than a radio based instrument landing system (ILS). To have these GPS based systems disrupted through jamming or spoofing results in a material negative impact on safety.
Maybe Kevin has been hanging out more with his Republican friends in Orange County. (The "good ones" of course: the ones who "simply" want conservative economic policy married with liberal social policy, but also don't want to just vote for mainstream or left-of-center Democrats who basically push for this arrangement all the time because eww.) Republicanism is all about not caring about anything that doesn't directly affect you personally.
There's few things more pathetic than someone posting on a blog to complain about how much they dislike it. Door's that way, bud, don't let it hit you on the ass as you go out.
Everything is not black and white, dude. Kevin at his best tries to find and show data relevant to issues of the day, and many of us appreciate that. Doesn’t mean we can’t push him on these ‘but, no worries’ posts.
Yeah, because "nauseating" as a description is just the way to get someone to change their behavior.
This one is black and white: if you're that pissed off, go away.
'Usually' is a word, that Kevin used, and you quoted.
The Israelis have been jamming GPS to throw off drone and missile attacks. Apparently, it has destroyed Waze and other mapping apps. People actually have to look up the route and navigate for themselves.
...and hope someone hasn't messed up the signs and landmarks on the ground.
The jamming is an attempt to interdict drone strikes into Russia and to fuck with the west.