7 ms·
GPS signal disturbed at altitudes above 2000-3000 feet over Norway [pdf]
- otp124 9y agoI don’t see the assumption of the cause in the PDF (difficult to read on this tiny mobile device). Could it be iron ore or something else affecting the magnetic fields? Does this happen elsewhere on earth?
- Reason077 9y agoSeems unlikely to be a natural phenomenon, considering it's never been noticed before. Could be the Russians are up to something? Jamming GPS signals would be a significant strategic advantage in war time.
- gchokov 9y agoThey are doing this in bigger Russian cities. GPSes often doesn't work in downtown Moscow or St. Petersburg. There's plenty of information available on the internet about this. Also, they have their own positioning system, that is also available worldwide - Glonass
- johansch 9y agoCare to link to any of that information?
- mshook 9y agoStuff like: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-kremlin-eats-gps-for-breakfast-55823 https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-kremlin-eats-gps-for... http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/02/technology/kremlin-gps-signals/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/02/technology/kremlin-gps-signa...
- gsich 9y agoIt's bad if you relly on one and only system. As there is NAVSTAR GPS, Glonass and Galileo you'll have to jam your own system too.
- cpncrunch 9y agoAll current aviation GNSS systems only use GPS (US system) as far as I'm aware. There are some GLONASS dongles such as Garmin GLO, but they're not IFR approved.
- jhayward 9y agoGPS and Galileo use the same frequency for their public service. Jamming one gets them both. Glonass is a couple hundred megaherz away from GPS L1.
- gsich 9y agoSo there is no reason NOT to support Glonass.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoExcept the Russians run and control it and may consider opportunities to weaponize it offensively against unsuspecting Western users. The best bet is to use as many positing systems as possible in order to prevent attacks narrowly targeting one positioning system.
- gsich 9y agoThe same can be said to NAVSTAR GPS. The only system which is not primarly built for military uses is Galileo. Yes, that's what I am saying. Don't rely on one system. Using more also increases accuracy.
- lawl 9y agoCould just as well be the US. When selective availability was disabled they said they will come up with something new to deny hostile forces accurate GPS. [0] > Develop measures to prevent the hostile use of GPS and its augmentations to ensure that the United States retains a military advantage without unduly disrupting or degrading civilian uses. GPS only being jammed at higher altitudes, but not on the ground fits the above pretty well imo. We don't know how this jamming would affect US military GPS usage, but it's not impossible to think that it doesn't. [0] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/gps/policy/presidential/?print=go#1 https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
- Ao7bei3s 9y agoThe two-sentence "Result of the Check" section ends with "and the strength increased the closer to the Russian helicopter wing". As professionals, they state the observations and facts and don't cross into the realm of speculation.
- vita17 9y agoSo not iron ore. Iron curtain.
- danbruc 9y agoBut after a few tens of meters in the air we see a noise signal. [...] The noise signal is on GPS L1 (1575.42 MHz) with 1 MHz bandwidth, see Figure 3-5. So the signal is jammed by something sending a noise signal around the L1 frequency, whether intentionally or not.
- Animats 9y agoLook at the screenshot from the spectrum analyzer. That's a very specific signal, uniform in power, centered on the L1 frequency, and contained to a 1MHz bandwidth. That's intentional, not some random event.
- danbruc 9y agoIt surly looks like intentional jamming but I did not want to draw any conclusions that are not in the source. It certainly does not look like any random event but it could still be unintentional, e.g. someone just forgot to turn of his GPS jammer or accidentally broadcasts on that frequency, but that is admittedly not the most plausible explanation. I am also not sure how big a deal the whole thing is, I would assume that GPS jamming is not too uncommon to protect potential high profile target.
- jhayward 9y agoThe jamming is very highly specific to GPS. Chances of it being unintentional are miniscule.
- sorenjan 9y agoThe signal came from Russia just weeks before their Zapad exercise, and was clearly intentional. https://www.nrk.no/finnmark/stoy-fra-russland-slo-ut-gps-signaler-for-norske-fly-1.13720305 https://www.nrk.no/finnmark/stoy-fra-russland-slo-ut-gps-sig... This time it was only blocking GPS signals. Previously this year Russia spoofed GPS signals over the black sea, sending false position data to ships in the area. https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/mass-gps-spoofing-attack-in-black-sea https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/mass-gps-spoofing-...
- johansch 9y agoI experienced a very odd GPS failures about a week later (September 24) in south-eastern Sweden. At one point I was driving for about an hour (in quite isolated areas - around https://www.google.com/maps/@58.0381615,16.2094966,13.37z https://www.google.com/maps/@58.0381615,16.2094966,13.37z) without my iphone being able to get a gps fix. It's never happened before, or since. The phone was fixed to the car's front window with plenty of sight towards the sky. I rebooted the device twice but it didn't help. Our natural instinct here is to blame the russians for these kinds of things. At this time our biggest military exercise since the 90s was taking place in this region, with a lot of US involvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_17 (One random theory: the russians were trying out some kind of remote, localized target GPS jamming tech. The GPS outage stopped once I got closer to the largest city in the region (150k people). Additional rationale: If they unleashed GPS jamming signals that made hundreds of thousands of people lose GPS it would probably have made news. By localizing it to just affecting a couple of hundred people in isolated areas they would avoid that kind of mess.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rz2k 9y agoThe iPhone 4S and newer models also use GLONASS along with GPS for positioning. I suppose they could also encrypt their own system with a different scheme in unique situations.
- johansch 9y ago(I was using an iPhone 5s.)
- netsharc 9y agoI would assume the US/NATO also jams GPS/use some sort of scrambler for the unencrypted signal to have some military advantage...
- johansch 9y ago
- UncleEntity 9y agoThere was massive solar flare activity in September which may (or may not) have something to do with this.
- ISL 9y agoIt is the rare natural phenomenon that can make 1 MHz-wide bandstopped white noise, centered exactly on a human-chosen navigational frequency of import.
- cesis 9y agoThere's was also some cellphone outage reported in Baltic https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/latvias-cellphones-stopped-working-russias-war-games-may-be-to-blame/2017/10/05/449162d4-a9d3-11e7-9a98-07140d2eed02_story.html?utm_term=.9a11a75a4095 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/latvias-cellphon...
- cozzyd 9y agoWould be interesting to see if this shows up in GPS occultation data.
- lisper 9y agoIt is worth noting that there are two different ways to attack GPS: jamming and spoofing. Jamming is when you broadcast a noise signal at the GPS frequency, which prevents affected receivers from receiving the GPS signal. The result is that the GPS doesn't know where it is. Spoofing is when you send out a fake GPS signal that appears genuine but has the wrong timing. The result is that the GPS thinks it knows where it is, but it's wrong. Spoofing is more difficult -- and far more serious -- than jamming. What is reported here appears to be (an attempt at) jamming, but spoofing attacks have also been reported in the past. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/gps_spoofing_at.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/gps_spoofing_...
- joering2 9y agoThis is what keeps my awake at night sometimes... that one of US drones flying over Afghanistan will be eventually fooled into thinking the target it has to drop a bomb on is actually somewhere else over the Europe.
- beambot 9y agoDepending on who you believe, that GPS spoofing has already been used for military purposes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident
- londons_explore 9y agoOne can GPS spoof with $100 worth of hardware and a few days putting together opensource software defined radio modules. Just hook a GPS signal emulator to a software defined transmitter. A total system bandwidth of 1 Mhz is nowhere near computational limits today. Total transmission power of a couple of watts is trivial.
- jof 9y agoThe GPS P(Y) and Military codes exist to (hopefully) prevent spoofing.