I watched a video on this recently. Really interesting, especially how the researchers figured out it was a Russian satellite in a really high orbit. All it takes is a low-power burst to overwhelm the GPS network because it runs on such low powered, sensitive signals. They theorize the Russians were testing for very brief windows to see how well it world work. They could jam these signals anywhere over the Earth. Same for other nations too.
I watched the Veritasium episode on it just yesterday! The other theory is that it was actually being used for covert signals and the disruption was secondary.
Considering the impact of these tests, that doesn’t seem likely. You wouldn’t be sending covert messages in a way that would be so heavily scrutinized. I know it was a theory presented during the video, but that’s just journalistic integrity.
And ultimately, even if they were covert messages, now they also know they can disrupt gps
I think the point was less about making the messages undetectable as it was about making them unjammable. In order to stop their transmission, we would have to essentially shut down GPS for the entire EU. So you might use that frequency to send critical, must-have messages.
Especially once a second signal was noticed that was almost exactly the frequency used by the Chinese GPS system, as mentioned in the Veritasium video.
I thought that was the cover story. They deliberately used a channel partially in the bandwidth for some deniability. It isn’t like they didn’t know what bandwidth GPS used when they designed the satellite.
If I recall correctly, the idea was that they might have used that part of the band deliberately so that it couldn’t be jammed without also jamming GPS. Either way, we’re just guessing.
Yes, that’s the video I watched. Good stuff.
last I checked that channel was owned by private equity so take it with a grain of salt
All it takes is a low-power burst to overwhelm the GPS network because it runs on such low powered, sensitive signals.
The signals aren’t very sensitive, quite the opposite, they’re chosen because they can be very easily detected even at low powers. If you want to jam GNSS from the ground you don’t need a lot of power because the satellites are so far away and their signal is so low. If you want to jam it from a satellite you need quite a lot of power, especially if you consider that the suspected satellite constellation has twice the apogee of the GPS constellation. Also you don’t need a burst of power, you need sustained power to really jam GNSS, the suspected satellites only did bursts because they’re suspected of just testing their system.
GPS satellites send at like 25W of power. Naively I would think you could make that 2.5kW on a satellite without issues, probably even more.
I deal with this every day with the dark fleet using four enterprise AIS tracking systems and can 100% confirm this is accurate about GNSS systems.
please by all means share this video
For the life of me, I don’t understand why we as a species try so hard to make life worse for everyone.
Because some people have a hoarding disorder.
We don’t care about those people, we just care about us.
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Most people don’t know how unbelievably fucked the world would be if Russia did this on a consistent basis. The entire stock market runs on GPS for nanosecond timing of trades. Shipping, trucking, trains, planes all use GPS. Sure, all of them CAN operate without GPS, but the delays would be enormous because of how efficient GPS is and how automated a lot of things are. Communications systems use GPS for timing to sync up. Farms use GPS for accurate planting and picking of vegetables.
It’d be like Y2K, but for real.
The entire stock market runs on GPS for nanosecond timing of trades.
Funny you should mention this. At work we built a time delivery system on our fiber optic network (based on WhiteRabbit from CERN) with the national lab who generates our countries UTC contribution, and a stock market operator became one of our early customers.
Getting your timing source through fiber is definitely the best way to go, as long as you have a backup timing source OTA like GPS and other GNSS in case the fiber gets cut.
Also, many power grids are reliant on GPS to synchronize power plants to keep the power in-phase.
This is true but it’s not only GPS - it’s the whole array of GNSS and associated tech.
Modern receivers SHOULD be using whatever GNSS is in view, including Galileo, QZSS, GPS, Beidou, and GLONASS. They SHOULD be internet connected to get authentication and trust certificates.
However, there are 10 billion pieces of GNSS receivers out there, so not all of them are modernized.
they’d also fuck themselves
I mean, they have their own system: GLONASS. Their closest ally in China also has their system: Beidou. Many of their trading partners use Beidou or a mix of Galileo (EU’s system) and GPS and any other system in view. They are jamming GPS over a wide swath of territory already, so they know how to handle it within their borders. The world economy would crash, but it would be less of a crash in countries allied with China. Also, Russia’s economy is so fucked right now that a worldwide crash would just be a blip.
If Russia did this to the world they’d be declaring war on everyone. China wouldn’t stand for it and they would likely act.
Yeah, like, what nation wouldn’t see this as an act of war if deployed on a targeted and continous scale?
The thing is, China has their own GNSS called Beidou (pronounced like Play-Dough if I’ve been informed correctly). China has spent the last 10 years convincing non-aligned countries (Brazil and most of South America, many African nations, etc) to switch to using it instead of GPS. An attack by Russia would be “condemned” by China but would actually be a boon to them and their allies. Europe has their own GNSS, too, but it is much less widely used.
Oh I hadn’t realized that Beidou-3 has global coverage. I thought that was still a regional system. Thanks for mentioning countries outside of their earlier area of coverage
I say, do it?
Yes we all watched that Veritasium video.
I’ve actively avoided Veritasium since the lightyear long wire video, when he made claims that were proven wrong by numerous other channels and then doubled down on them. Then he sold out to private equity and YouTube has a hard on for pushing their videos in to my feed regardless of what I was just watching. I go so far as to scramble in to the room to change it if I’m just listening to the TV from another room to avoid having YouTube add that shit to my algorithm harder
Claire Saffitz? Veritasium is next. Scary Interesting? Fern next? No Veritasium. Fern? Veritasium. Veritasium videos from years ago you’ve already seen, why not. That fucking light-year video again, fuck you.
That said, EVEN I have seen that video.
You do know that you can block channels, right?
I mean, he did say he sold out to private equity cause he wanted to retire basically. His channel is basically now his retirement investment
Fern is also sold out to some PE
Words cant describe how much i despie terrorist “state” of russia
watch out, or you might be kicked off your instance :D
Trains don’t need gps, do they?
I mean, neither do cars or planes.
Planes don’t? That plane flying off course and getting shot down lead to GPS signals being made accessible to the public.
VFR pilots aren’t even allowed to use GPS for primary navigation. Those don’t fly bigger airplanes but visual flight is still taught and used to this day
Celestial navigation is still taught. Hard to use in certain weather conditions though.
Wasn’t taught when I went to flight school, or in any country AFAIK. Meanwhile VFR are taught to pretty much every single pilot today and they need to fly using them before learning instrument flight, that is all over the world.
It helps a lot, but planes were navigating the world long before the invention of GPS.
They also used to go off course and get shot down.
Well, you’ve not specified what shoot down incident you’re talking about but I’d argue the fault probably lies with the trigger happy air defenders not IDing their targets.
My guess is he means Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was caused by a mistake the Pilots made and a trigger happy/incompetent sovjet Airforce.
GPS is used a lot in logistics for real-time tracking of trains, trucks, wagons and containers. Of course they don’t need GPS to move, but you need it to coordinate transportation. The train needs to be there on time when the ship arrives, the truck needs to be there in time for the train.
If that process doesn’t work it isn’t only costly, the disruptions propagate. As in your train or flight will be delayed, or you’ll be late for work due to traffic.
Source: I worked for a logistics company and was responsible for a bug that led to trucks being backed up for kilometers in several locations, requiring the police.
Russia and Iran stole a drone a few years back. They did it by jamming and spoofing gps signals
GPScels cope and seethe, unguided projectile and mapchads stay winning
Let me know when they can block my paper road atlas.
your trial access to “seeing” has temporarily ended. please pay the milkmen for access to “seeing” again.
Oh no, not something to push people to adopt new block 3 capable receivers!
Surely they won’t just use $20 glonass or beidou receivers…
They’re all susceptible to the same attack. It’s “just” jamming.
For some reason I thought block 3 gps has some kind of rotating side channel bit selection method to resist jamming “perform more consistently in poor electromagnetic conditions” or some such…
would work if it’s regular EM interference but when a satellite broadcasts across an entire spectrum of frequencies there’s little more you can do to adapt.
How would you say that interference broadcast from satellite is different?
EM interference is going to hit lots of places across the spectrum and turn it into swiss cheese.
a satellite actively vomiting EM interference within a radio band takes away the cheese and tells you to fuck off.
I mean in a more technical sense. In what way is “traditional” terrestrial frequency jamming with wide band noise different when the source is extraterrestrial instead?
But my phone has GLONASS too?
Same tech
Apparently al these systems use about the same radio spectrum, so you could jam them all with similar signals.
How bad would GPS outage actually end up being? I am assuming that shipping and aviation are the most serious potential problems, what kind of backup do they have if any?
Normal people can just read a map easily enough without it, but that isn’t such an easy option at sea or in the sky.
We’ve had boats and aircraft for longer than we’ve had GPS so we’d be fine. It would be a pain but not devastating.
Things like missiles and other devices with no human operator they’d have to rely on inertial navigation systems which are notoriously inaccurate. So that would be a problem. There’s a new system which works on quantum magic nonsense but I have no idea how accurate that is.
The missile knows where it is at all times, because it knows where it isn’t.
(Link, if you are one of the lucky 10000)
Isn’t inertial stuff mainly for ICBMs, shorter ranged missiles don’t care about their position around the planet. Though I think medium range stuff often does use it
My father was an airline captain. When he started flying, VOR was a major navigation aid, and I imagine most airplanes have VOR receivers (highly directional radios). The next big upgrade were inertial navigation systems, but I don’t know if newer planes have then, since GPS was considered pretty resilient, due to the sheer amount of satellites. But yeah, planes have been getting to their destinations by one way or another since the beginning.
Planes also use automated celestial navigation since they are above the clouds.
Just to name one that would basically… impact all: cell towers use gps for timing. You would basically loose cell service
Huh… is there no backup system in place for that? Why don’t they just use the internet instead given that they are connected to it in the first place. How precise does it need to be and what is it used for, curious why that is a thing.
Accurate time is really important for computers for a lot of reasons.
Cell towers divide time into slots that different phones each get time in. If your time isn’t precise you might speed up or slow down which causes a slot to get a smaller or larger amount of time causing collisions. Handoffs between different towers need accurate timing to know exactly when one tower should release control of a handset.
NTP uses something called stratums. Basically stratum 0 is an atomic clock, stratum 1 is a device that talks to an atomic clock, but internally has its own time keeping. Then all the NTP servers moat people actually use are stratum 2+. Not only that, the Internet adds a ton of jitter because of how unreliable and unpredictable it is.
GPS satellites have atomic clocks on them making them stratum 0. They directly transmit that time. Thus receivers can become stratum 1 and have a very controllable, low jitter time source. Internet NTP isn’t precise enough. This kind of stuff requires microsecond precision.
GPS is used for a lot more than just navigation. It’s used as a precise time clock for many things like ensuring computers can manage data or even wireless Telecom. A lot of computer systems depend on accurate time keeping.
They aren’t the only ones.
