A 63-hour-long marathon of GPS jamming attacks disrupted global satellite navigation systems for hundreds of aircraft flying through the Baltic region – and Russia is thought to be responsible
Russia is suspected of launching a record-breaking 63-hour-long attack on GPS signals in the Baltic region. The incident, which affected hundreds of passenger jets earlier this month, occurred amid rising tensions between Russia and the NATO military alliance more than two years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“We have seen an increase in GPS jamming since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and allies have publicly warned that Russia has been behind GPS jamming affecting aviation and shipping,” a NATO official told New Scientist. “Russia has a track record of jamming GPS signals and has a range of capabilities for electronic warfare.”
Russia is really stretching this out, aren’t they. Maybe they need some proper ass kicking to fall back in line.
At some point the west has to react.
There are smart people in Russia who need better things to do. This bullshit is out of control.
There needs to not be a ‘Russia’ after this. Split it up. Try to keep the regions peaceful and shit, but absolutely divide them politically, so one cannot say ‘Russia’ is a meaningful entity.
Yeah, we know how it went with Africa. Sure. You’d like to do that from the comfort of your home, right?
Africa was carved up with the intent to be exploitable, with minority regimes that needed colonial support in power and intentional ethnic and resource conflicts aplenty.
Don’t be a dick about it, carve it up based on extant cultural regions with balancedish resources, and it could work. At least closer to ‘works’ than having a ‘Russia’ is right now.
Oh that sounds easy and like it surely would backfire spectacularly /s that’s how you get a nuclear war or similar.
You can’t convince me Russia’s nuclear arsenal works for shit, much less the missiles.
And even if one or two get through; still a net gain on human life over another year or ten of meat grinder warfare.
And if you put a bounty on Russian warheads…
Bring back Novgorod.
Russia will be paying back for these years, for decades to come.
Or just carve up Russia so no part us big enough to pull this shit again, and people there are less under the thumb of a handful of shit heads in Moscow/st Petersburg.
I don’t know really… carving up Africa, did not really work too well. Although it does make sense to divide it into smaller independent regions, I don’t see this happening to other mega countries like China, USA, India etc.
It basically has in the united states. I will be killed if I go to the CSA, but I’m only gonna get social murdered here on the west coast. I’d be pretty okay splitting off.Lotta people here would. Biggest problem is water, abd that’s going to shit anyway.
I’ve read some of your posts, and you seem a hell of a lot more murderous and psychotic than anyone I’ve ever met in the south.
“…and Russia is thought to be responsible.”
Nooooooo… Russia? Really? They would neeeveeeer?
Isn’t that kinda pathetic? Jamming GPS is not hard, nor impressive. It’s just annoying.
Seems like a message is being sent.
I love to be a fly on the wall behind the scenes, as far as what’s going on between the two sides, that they actually decided to do something as annoying as this.
That’s all they’ve got left after throwing all of their troops into the meat grinder.
Not all. Just too fucking many.
Unfortunately, their recruitment rate is at a record high 😕
Its on par with bringing the dog out when merkel was visiting. Thats all they have.
As if being impressive is the goal of these attacks.
I dont think they are doing it to impess.
looks to be pretty effective to me
And that effect was…???
Threatening the lives of EU citizens and commerce in an effort to force the European nations to withdraw support from Ukraine.
It was GPS spoofing. The navs fucked up.
Don’t pilots still learn to work with a compas or stars? Radio guidance? Like, nothing that uses GPS is new.
It was just really inconvenient for a bunch of people.
Inconvenience is the point.
So, what, order a bunch of pizzas? Spam everyone with dick pics? I’m not seeing it. This just looks impotent, unless there’s more to it.
You’re missing the point.
Maybe they were just testing reaction time
On a mostly civilian system with known fallbacks?
Edit: fuck em. You don’t have to fight Russia, you just have to fight Moscow. If they manage to provoke Europe, they lose. Badly. They’re barely managing to hold against supported Ukraine.
I thought GPS had been kept restricted from civilians for ages for its military uses, I may be wrong though
Yeah but at this point that’s all redundant, right? any military planner worth shit knows this can happen.
How much more will we allow these assholes to get away with? When does it stop?
When the West decides it’s willing to risk flash dessication.
As shitty as Putin is, I don’t think he has a death wish.
I think we’ve made it clear we know where he is at all times. First reply we send is on his head.
As shitty as Putin is, I don’t think he has a death wish.
How certain are you?
Remember his affinity for comically long tables for meeting people during the pandemic?
Doesn’t mean he doesn’t think he’ll be fine inside his bunker.
What if putin was going to die soon from something?
dessication
desiccation
I’m not sure what flash dessication is, but I’m willing to bet Putin would bring the world down with him if cornered.
Nuclear blast, where I focused on the heat and excluded the long, painful radiation deaths that would also occur.
Edit: radio - > radiation
It is highly likely that exactly zero Russias nukes work. Nuclear maintenance is extremely expensive, and there is a zero percent chance that corruption that we witnessed in tank maintenance and other areas of their military did not spread to their nuclear program. It has also been 34 years since they successful a launched a nuke.
Russia as a country has never launched a nuke (USSR did) so it’s seriously debatable if they even have the capability.
And I’m not advocating for war, but Russia needs to have consequences for their actions, and the world needs to respond resolutely and immediately before this gets any worse.
It stops only when they are forced to stop and not a moment sooner. Who has the will or the ability? In the U.S., conservatives are on Putin’s side, so as long as conservatives have any power (like they do now), they will back him.
The EU is sounding the alarms, but only France is stepping up to the plate ready to fight. As usual, the EU will just hope France will protect the rest of them.
Drone pilots are going to have to learn how to fold paper maps!
Guess it’s time to dust off those VOR navigation skills, then…
And, as ususal, fuck Putler and his cronies.
I’m assuming there’s a European backup to GPS, is there?
Europe is using same or similar systems. Also Europe has Galileo satnav system. But it has the same drawbacks as GPS.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but VOR can be jammed just as easily? It’s effectively just ground based GPS.
There are actually devices, that can to a certain extent resist jamming by rejecting signal coming from some direction while amplifying signal from other. Typically they amplify signal from space and reject signal from ground where the jammers would be. So in a way GPS is more resilient against jamming if you can use this device. But AFAIK they are only used for military purposes.
That device is called a CRPA (pronounced serpa). They are very effective at anti-jam.
As far as VOR jamming, those use a VHF omni-directional antenna, so it can be jammed. It might be hard because of the omni-directional part and the numbers of them, but definitely doable.
Might have to break out the ole INS
Inertial systems are good enough for rockets going to Mars, so why not a plane flying in a straight line?
So I read about it on Wikipedia and apparently they’re still the main navigation tool for modern airliners. GPS is just used to maintain the accuracy of the INS.
Hopefully a few VOR and DME approaches left in the chart book.
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death to poopin
I love this picture of Obama talking down to Putin
Lol, can’t even see where poot poots heels end, there could be 3-4 cm of extra lift hidden under those pantaloons!
If anyone died that would’ve been article 5. Are they nuts?
Russia already shot down a passenger jet and nothing happened.
That’s quite different than attacking directly over the airspace of NATO members.
Also arguably an accident.
Yes, but only if it can be proven it was absolutely Russia. And then it has to be proven that it was approved by their government as an official act, not just some vodka-soaked hackers somewhere in Siberia…
Might be worth some degree of suspicion around including GLONASS as a part of GNSS. Russia could create worldwide issues if they decided to fuck around with their constellation.
It would probably be easier for them to mess with it and not affect themselves than it is with GPS and Galileo.
All right, we’re Jammin’
Jammin’ in the name of the lord.
I was always a fan of Log Jammin
Is this where the beginning g of the end of free open GPS starts?
Been wondering when we’d have to start paying for the privilege to use an encrypted private GPS service.
It wouldn’t matter against jamming though. You just need a jammer that screams louder
Yup. As long as you’re transmitting via radio waves, if something on that frequency “screams” louder, you won’t get the original signal. That’s why the FCC has strict rules against radio interference. About the only way you could get past that would be some sort of laser guided/optical communications, but would be damn near impossible given the number of planes and weather conditions.
Luckily the louder something screams the more easy it is to pinpoint.
I mean, doesn’t matter. We pinpoint russia and then what. Sure, we can retaliate and block their comma, and radio communication doesn’t work for both of us. We can always invade, but a load of political capital is needed, and the west doesn’t exactly have the most ammo ever right now.
Finally, I think the true source is this
Unless they are on a different wavelength from GPS, which is what Xona is doing.
Ok, then they just block that one
Do you think country-wide jamming of a high-power radio signal is easy? The magnitude of difference between jamming a building and jamming at airline altitudes or at long distances is massive. You don’t just go out and buy a jammer that blocks GPS for a country.
I don’t think that for an individual it is easy. But for a country as large as Russia (even with a somewhat pathetic economy)
I work developing the next generation GPS satellites, and half of my job is dealing with defeating jamming. Without giving specifics that can only be shared in a SCIF, jammers are for small regional use, not for large scale usage. RF power drops off at 1/r^2, so doubling the distance requires 4 times the power. A normal person can buy a jammer that handles a few hundred feet around their house or car. It is 100x harder to cover a city block of buildings and is mostly restricted to governments (my math could be off on that, since RF isn’t my specialty). Going from jamming a city block of government buildings to jamming flight traffic in a small neighborhood is roughly 100 times as much as that power. Going from that small neighborhood to blocking a very small country is 100 times as much as that power (or 10,000 as much as the power of a big jammer). Doing the same thing but with multiple RF signals is even harder.
I can’t talk about Russia’s specific capabilities, but even for Russia it wouldn’t be easy outside a small region.
That will not fix this, unless your private service flies their own satellites with more transmitter power
Xona is out there planning their own satellite constellation in their own band of the spectrum (so not jammed at the same time as GPS), and is fully encrypted.
That’s not how jamming works
Explain how jamming works. The person isn’t saying encryption overcomes jamming, just that encryption will be used to make the new system private and paid instead of free to use. Not being GPS will make it avoid GPS jamming.
It doesn’t matter if you encrypt it, it still has to make information out of communication with satellites. Jamming saturates the band range that something is attempting to communicate across. So no sensible information is available because it’s all noise
Did you not read what I said? I said “the person isn’t saying that encryption overcomes jamming, just that encryption will be used to make the new system private and paid.” At no point did I say or imply that encryption helps overcome jamming. I did say that since they don’t transmit on the same frequency as GPS then jamming GPS won’t affect it (depending on how close their L-band range is to the GPS L-band range).
I design GPS satellites for a living. I understand how jamming works.
You asked how jamming works, I simply discussed that.
Even if the new system is encrypted and on another spectrum, that doesn’t make it invincible from jamming, the jammer just needs to be adjusted to target it.
All I’m saying is encryption and subscription does not defend from jamming.
Tactics like signal hopping and multi signal parallel processing / handshake help with jamming (plus highly focused and shield directional antennas)
that’s… not how gps works, y’know?
the satellites only send out signal, they don’t care about the ground
You are talking about Xona. Private company, fully encrypted signal, paid service, not jammed at the same frequency as GPS.
EDIT: I would love for one of the people who down-voted me to explain what was wrong with my completely factual description of a company who is doing exactly what this person asked about.
If enough people are using this new system, Russia could easily pivot to target it as well. Jamming is not inherently hard, especially if a nation is attempting it.
Jamming in the US will bring the FCC down your throat. The stronger the signal, the faster they will show up. Russia transmitting a jamming signal from Russia doesn’t have to worry about such things. A jamming device is not hard to find, but on sovereign soil it’s still untouchable short of war.
Not the point of the post I replied to or my post. I develop GPS satellites for the Space Force. I understand jamming quite well and know what capabilities Russia has.
The person didn’t say that this hypothetical private system couldn’t be jammed. They said that if GPS is jammed then it opens up a niche for a private company to sell their own service. I said that exact thing is happening. That isn’t to say that service couldn’t also get jammed, but Russia is mainly jamming GPS because it affects military missions. Since the military wouldn’t be using this private company, then Russia is unlikely to jam their signal.
I feel like these planes should be able to fall back on other GNSS. Like Galileo, GLONASS, or even BeiDou.
GLONASS
Fall back to the Russian GNSS constellation to defend against Russian GNSS manipulation?
I mean hey, why not?
Let’s be real, they probably aren’t jamming themselves?
Who am I fucking kidding, they probably are with how the war has been going.
I’m betting on Russia being the culprit
How do you stop a jammer like this, short of turning off the transmitters responsible for it?
As others have said, you can’t passively bypass GNSS jamming. The signal more or less has the same amount of power as a 60 watt light bulb, transmitted from a satellite out in Medium Earth Orbit. You throw enough energy at the same frequency as the signal and it’s over. There are ways to improve the receivers resilience by giving it more signals to connect to (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou) or several signals being transmitted by the same constellation (L1, L2, L5).
Also, many different systems occupy pretty much the same frequencies, just with different characteristics which makes all the signals more susceptible.
You can’t. Think of it like two radio stations that are too close. It doesn’t matter how good of a receiver you have it will only ever pick up the signals being transmitted. And when there is noise on the frequency then that is what it will pick up.
Well there’s always the option of outcompeting each other in signal intensity, but I guess that that’s not really possible in this case.
I would suggest HARM Missiles launched from F/A 18 Aircraft. That will teach the effing russians to mess with GPS
Best way to mitigate is have an inertial system. It’s a calculator that, based on where you are and where you’re heading, keeps track of your updated position.
The math is not that crazy, but with enough time the sensors errors crop up and you’ll be slightly off course, then a bit, then a lot.
Destroy our otherwise turn off the source of interference.
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