4 ms·

Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

186 points by y1n0 4mo ago

random3 4mo ago
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
- fsh 4mo ago
  Competing with four free GNSS constellations is an interesting business model for sure...
  - himata4113 4mo ago
    And starlink...
  - londons_explore 4mo ago
    I would guess the business model is 'pay us and we'll give you the encryption key to our coded transmissions'. Those coded transmissions are far harder to jam unless you have the key. So it's all about selling to as many customers as possible whilst having not a single customer leak the key. That's why militaries use keys that rotate daily and won't let anyone else use the military signal.
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      Why wouldn't they use public key cryptography for that?
      - londons_explore 4mo ago
        Your satellite doesn't want to be sending out lots of different signals - due to a limited power budget. So you have to send out one (or maybe a couple) of signals protected by a key. Yes, you can distribute that key individually to clients using public key cryptography over the same link (and many services like pay TV do exactly that). But fundamentally any client who is able to decrypt the main stream can also share the key with someone evil who can use that info to jam the same stream.
        mjmas 4mo ago
        > jam the same stream. To add to that, other people won't be able to spoof the original stream (as that needs the private key), but instead only jam it. It would be the same failure mode as SSL certificates.
        londons_explore 4mo ago
        In the case of gnss systems, you can also spoof the stream, since the interesting bit of the stream is not the data contained inside, but instead the relative time of arrival of different streams from different satellites. An attacker can record the streams and replay them milliseconds later. A client can protect against this if they have an atomic clock, but that's only for clients willing to pay a decent amount.
        Enginerrrd 4mo ago
        Isn’t this the exact problem tree-based broadcast encryption schemes were designed to solve? You could surgically revoke the keys of a bad actor, and I’m not exactly sure, but I think the scope of their ability to affect the jamming resistance of other users is necessarily limited by the tree.
        londons_explore 4mo ago
        Indeed you can revoke anyone's keys any time with such a scheme. But a single leaked and unrevoked key is still enough to jam it for everyone. Obviously you could have some "revoke each players keys in turn until the jamming stops" scheme, but it seems suboptimal.
        Enginerrrd 4mo ago
        I would think you could, in principle, deduce the bad key from a recorded segment of the jamming signal, and only revoke when identified. I would have to look at the math more specifically, but I would think it would be impossible to both disguise the compromised key and take advantage of the key to interfere with the signal in the way its designed to prevent. And even if you did, I’m fairly sure the jamming would only affect users whose decryption runs through your branch, and in your geographic proximity so I don’t think it would have an advantage of countering the below the noise floor decryption designed to mitigate against jamming.
    - XorNot 4mo ago
      No they're harder to spoof. Jamming is easy, but requires more power to achieve a desired effect and as they note they're planning to operate a low altitude constellation with closer transmitters as a result, so harder to swamp the signal for the receiver.
skeptic_ai 4mo ago
The worst ad ridden website I’ve ever seen.
- mnky9800n 4mo ago
  It’s jammed!
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    Raspberry!
    - blitzar 4mo ago
      There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry...
  - heresie-dabord 4mo ago
    This is a lucid way to think of enshittification in general and of the advertising business in particular: jamming the information signal.
    - mnky9800n 4mo ago
      This is why Russian propaganda always tastes like cherries.
vachina 4mo ago
I honestly see this jamming as a win. GNSS is a global blanket opt-in American spyware.
- fsh 4mo ago
  GNSS receivers are passive devices that receive beacons broadcasted from the satellites. It's technically impossible to spy on someone with GNSS.
  - vachina 4mo ago
    And 99.99% of those GNSS receivers are connected to the internet. Or are in proximity to an (American controlled/designed) internet connected device.
    - saagarjha 4mo ago
      This sounds like you have an issue with internet connected devices.
      - vachina 4mo ago
        You can’t bomb a person based on an IP address
    - hsuduebc2 4mo ago
      If we assume that person have a phone, which is majority of these devices with wifi and bluetooth you don't even need any GNSS.
- minetest2048 4mo ago
  My pedantic self says GNSS includes other non-US constellations such as GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou, and they flew those satellites because they don't fully trust US GPS
  - ggm 4mo ago
navigate8310 4mo ago
> 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?
kitchi 4mo ago
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.
- Jur 4mo ago
  I also read the same guerilla advertising for an alternative between the lines. If I understood it correctly from the article, the alternative itself is basically more of the same, but with a stronger signal. So they basically will launch 300 satellites with an alternative that will face the exact same issues once jamming output signals increase too?
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > with an alternative that will face the exact same issues once jamming output signals increase too? Encryption and LEO make this significantly harder to jam. I see value in it.
- unsnap_biceps 4mo ago
  Veritasium did a video a few weeks ago about scientists trying to figure out where a space based GPS jamming signal came from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
  - beAbU 4mo ago
    I've stopped watching Veritasium after the PE buyout. All of a sudden I'm deeply suspicous of their content and I'm left wondering if there is some Ulterior Motive that we are not aware of.
    - thenthenthen 4mo ago
      Always had a strange feeling watching that channel, something feels off somehow. Anyway, didnt the video also mention GPS basically has the same capability (to be weaponised)? Seems trivial and logical… its a transmitter.. just transmit noise or spoofed signals. Another thing I see pop up here in the comments is about encryption. Critical infra usually is not encrypted because you need to be able to receive it critical conditions, simple means. These infras have been steadily been replaced by ‘hightech secure’ stuff in the west (like c2000…) but here in Asia i can still get an weather-fax image using a 5 dollar radio.
Scoundreller 4mo ago
> 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.
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  >Anyone got any leads on Doppler shift detecting equipment? All radio receivers? Detecting the radio doppler frequency shift for satellites is kinda trivial. Spoofing/jamming systems also trivially include doppler shifts. The more someone is trying to interfere with your specific location, the harder it is to defeat the spoofing.
  - Scoundreller 4mo ago
    Seems like there's a gap for distributed gnss jamming/spoofing detection systems, not unlike what we have for lightning detection and flight tracking. Unfortunately gpsjam.org relies on ADS-B data and if you don't have a lot of flights (or ads-b receivers) in an area, it leaves a lot of gaps. Plus it's far from real-time.
    - colechristensen 4mo ago
      For that you need a custom GPS receiver stack and as well as the technical hurdles of designing the receiver in an expanded way to detect spoofing (by the way it's not just spoofing, in normal circumstances GPS signals will reflect off of things and you'll get perfectly natural "spoofing" which you have to properly reject) you'll also have to deal with the fact that GPS receivers are export controlled unless they meet certain requirements.
Animats 4mo ago
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-Spoofing-Final-Report-OPSGROUP-WG-OG24.pdf https://ops.group/dashboard/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/GPS-S...
- _moof 4mo ago
  > Before this, everybody in the industry thought GPS solved the aerial navigation problem. Many people in industry believed this but no one with a brain ever did. The vulnerability of GPS has been cause for concern for a long time, and the decimation of the VOR network has always had a lot of people up in arms.
  - christophilus 4mo ago
    It seems like we have enough satellites in space that are giving off enough unique signals that we could put together a device that solves the GPS problem without needing GPS itself. I wonder what it would take.
    - mirashii 4mo ago
londons_explore 4mo ago
Looks like this is mostly marketing for the services of this new constellation...
oskarpearson 4mo ago
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.
- ruuda 4mo ago
  It works fine if you don't enable javascript.
- Krasnol 4mo ago
  uBlock Origin works fine on Firefox there.
eqvinox 4mo ago
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.
tw1984 4mo ago
US is not even investing in GPS anymore. Their L5 signal has been in experimental operation for probably over a decade, still "experimental".
- geerlingguy 4mo ago
  The US invested $8 billion into upgrades... and then killed off the program due to tons of problems with the upgrades[1]: > However, the program was unable to deliver needed capabilities on an operationally relevant timeline at an acceptable level of risk to meet the GPS constellation modernization needs. Hopefully the newer equipment and incremental improvements can bridge over to whatever's next. [1] https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4465024/ussf-terminates-program-for-the-global-positioning-system-next-generation-opera/ https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4465...
  - tw1984 4mo ago
    LEO is the future, if they somehow switch to starlink, I'd consider it as a big win, actually a huuuge win.
willtemperley 4mo ago
> 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.
- eqvinox 4mo ago
  https://gpsjam.org/ https://gpsjam.org/ (ADS-B data from planes, hence limited coverage area.)
  - willtemperley 4mo ago
    That’s a lot closer-to-the-ground truth. It would be interesting to compare Xona’s map with this, if they provide the actual data.
weitzj 4mo ago
JAM as a Service
yogthos 4mo ago
A really good illustration of how vulnerable space based military tech is in practice.
stalfie 4mo ago
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.
- imglorp 4mo ago
  The article tiptoes around the who and the why but it's pretty clear. The US has HARM (anti radiation missiles) but it would be very easy for Ukraine, or anyone, to create an inexpensive drone, which you would program with a frequency, a signal strength, and a general direction and send it to ride the radio signal straight to the jammer. Repeat daily as needed. Anything on the ground transmitting high power on GPS freqs is up to no good for the global community.
DoctorOetker 4mo ago
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.
devladpopov 4mo ago
[flagged]

186 points by y1n0 4mo ago

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

fsh 4mo ago
Competing with four free GNSS constellations is an interesting business model for sure...
- himata4113 4mo ago
  And starlink...
- londons_explore 4mo ago
  I would guess the business model is 'pay us and we'll give you the encryption key to our coded transmissions'. Those coded transmissions are far harder to jam unless you have the key. So it's all about selling to as many customers as possible whilst having not a single customer leak the key. That's why militaries use keys that rotate daily and won't let anyone else use the military signal.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    Why wouldn't they use public key cryptography for that?
    - londons_explore 4mo ago
      Your satellite doesn't want to be sending out lots of different signals - due to a limited power budget. So you have to send out one (or maybe a couple) of signals protected by a key. Yes, you can distribute that key individually to clients using public key cryptography over the same link (and many services like pay TV do exactly that). But fundamentally any client who is able to decrypt the main stream can also share the key with someone evil who can use that info to jam the same stream.
      - mjmas 4mo ago
        > jam the same stream. To add to that, other people won't be able to spoof the original stream (as that needs the private key), but instead only jam it. It would be the same failure mode as SSL certificates.
        londons_explore 4mo ago
        In the case of gnss systems, you can also spoof the stream, since the interesting bit of the stream is not the data contained inside, but instead the relative time of arrival of different streams from different satellites. An attacker can record the streams and replay them milliseconds later. A client can protect against this if they have an atomic clock, but that's only for clients willing to pay a decent amount.
      - Enginerrrd 4mo ago
        Isn’t this the exact problem tree-based broadcast encryption schemes were designed to solve? You could surgically revoke the keys of a bad actor, and I’m not exactly sure, but I think the scope of their ability to affect the jamming resistance of other users is necessarily limited by the tree.
        londons_explore 4mo ago
        Indeed you can revoke anyone's keys any time with such a scheme. But a single leaked and unrevoked key is still enough to jam it for everyone. Obviously you could have some "revoke each players keys in turn until the jamming stops" scheme, but it seems suboptimal.
        Enginerrrd 4mo ago
        I would think you could, in principle, deduce the bad key from a recorded segment of the jamming signal, and only revoke when identified. I would have to look at the math more specifically, but I would think it would be impossible to both disguise the compromised key and take advantage of the key to interfere with the signal in the way its designed to prevent. And even if you did, I’m fairly sure the jamming would only affect users whose decryption runs through your branch, and in your geographic proximity so I don’t think it would have an advantage of countering the below the noise floor decryption designed to mitigate against jamming.
  - XorNot 4mo ago
    No they're harder to spoof. Jamming is easy, but requires more power to achieve a desired effect and as they note they're planning to operate a low altitude constellation with closer transmitters as a result, so harder to swamp the signal for the receiver.

skeptic_ai 4mo ago

The worst ad ridden website I’ve ever seen.

mnky9800n 4mo ago
It’s jammed!
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  Raspberry!
  - blitzar 4mo ago
    There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry...
- heresie-dabord 4mo ago
  This is a lucid way to think of enshittification in general and of the advertising business in particular: jamming the information signal.
  - mnky9800n 4mo ago
    This is why Russian propaganda always tastes like cherries.

vachina 4mo ago

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

fsh 4mo ago
GNSS receivers are passive devices that receive beacons broadcasted from the satellites. It's technically impossible to spy on someone with GNSS.
- vachina 4mo ago
  And 99.99% of those GNSS receivers are connected to the internet. Or are in proximity to an (American controlled/designed) internet connected device.
  - saagarjha 4mo ago
    This sounds like you have an issue with internet connected devices.
    - vachina 4mo ago
      You can’t bomb a person based on an IP address
  - hsuduebc2 4mo ago
    If we assume that person have a phone, which is majority of these devices with wifi and bluetooth you don't even need any GNSS.
minetest2048 4mo ago
My pedantic self says GNSS includes other non-US constellations such as GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou, and they flew those satellites because they don't fully trust US GPS
- ggm 4mo ago

navigate8310 4mo ago

> 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?

kitchi 4mo ago

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.

Jur 4mo ago
I also read the same guerilla advertising for an alternative between the lines. If I understood it correctly from the article, the alternative itself is basically more of the same, but with a stronger signal. So they basically will launch 300 satellites with an alternative that will face the exact same issues once jamming output signals increase too?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > with an alternative that will face the exact same issues once jamming output signals increase too? Encryption and LEO make this significantly harder to jam. I see value in it.
unsnap_biceps 4mo ago
Veritasium did a video a few weeks ago about scientists trying to figure out where a space based GPS jamming signal came from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
- beAbU 4mo ago
  I've stopped watching Veritasium after the PE buyout. All of a sudden I'm deeply suspicous of their content and I'm left wondering if there is some Ulterior Motive that we are not aware of.
  - thenthenthen 4mo ago
    Always had a strange feeling watching that channel, something feels off somehow. Anyway, didnt the video also mention GPS basically has the same capability (to be weaponised)? Seems trivial and logical… its a transmitter.. just transmit noise or spoofed signals. Another thing I see pop up here in the comments is about encryption. Critical infra usually is not encrypted because you need to be able to receive it critical conditions, simple means. These infras have been steadily been replaced by ‘hightech secure’ stuff in the west (like c2000…) but here in Asia i can still get an weather-fax image using a 5 dollar radio.

Scoundreller 4mo ago

> 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.

colechristensen 4mo ago
>Anyone got any leads on Doppler shift detecting equipment? All radio receivers? Detecting the radio doppler frequency shift for satellites is kinda trivial. Spoofing/jamming systems also trivially include doppler shifts. The more someone is trying to interfere with your specific location, the harder it is to defeat the spoofing.
- Scoundreller 4mo ago
  Seems like there's a gap for distributed gnss jamming/spoofing detection systems, not unlike what we have for lightning detection and flight tracking. Unfortunately gpsjam.org relies on ADS-B data and if you don't have a lot of flights (or ads-b receivers) in an area, it leaves a lot of gaps. Plus it's far from real-time.
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    For that you need a custom GPS receiver stack and as well as the technical hurdles of designing the receiver in an expanded way to detect spoofing (by the way it's not just spoofing, in normal circumstances GPS signals will reflect off of things and you'll get perfectly natural "spoofing" which you have to properly reject) you'll also have to deal with the fact that GPS receivers are export controlled unless they meet certain requirements.

Animats 4mo ago

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-Spoofing-Final-Report-OPSGROUP-WG-OG24.pdf https://ops.group/dashboard/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/GPS-S...

_moof 4mo ago
> Before this, everybody in the industry thought GPS solved the aerial navigation problem. Many people in industry believed this but no one with a brain ever did. The vulnerability of GPS has been cause for concern for a long time, and the decimation of the VOR network has always had a lot of people up in arms.
- christophilus 4mo ago
  It seems like we have enough satellites in space that are giving off enough unique signals that we could put together a device that solves the GPS problem without needing GPS itself. I wonder what it would take.
  - mirashii 4mo ago

londons_explore 4mo ago

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

oskarpearson 4mo ago

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.

ruuda 4mo ago
It works fine if you don't enable javascript.
Krasnol 4mo ago
uBlock Origin works fine on Firefox there.

eqvinox 4mo ago

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.

tw1984 4mo ago

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

geerlingguy 4mo ago
The US invested $8 billion into upgrades... and then killed off the program due to tons of problems with the upgrades[1]: > However, the program was unable to deliver needed capabilities on an operationally relevant timeline at an acceptable level of risk to meet the GPS constellation modernization needs. Hopefully the newer equipment and incremental improvements can bridge over to whatever's next. [1] https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4465024/ussf-terminates-program-for-the-global-positioning-system-next-generation-opera/ https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4465...
- tw1984 4mo ago
  LEO is the future, if they somehow switch to starlink, I'd consider it as a big win, actually a huuuge win.

willtemperley 4mo ago

> 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.

eqvinox 4mo ago
https://gpsjam.org/ https://gpsjam.org/ (ADS-B data from planes, hence limited coverage area.)
- willtemperley 4mo ago
  That’s a lot closer-to-the-ground truth. It would be interesting to compare Xona’s map with this, if they provide the actual data.

weitzj 4mo ago

JAM as a Service

yogthos 4mo ago

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

stalfie 4mo ago

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.

imglorp 4mo ago
The article tiptoes around the who and the why but it's pretty clear. The US has HARM (anti radiation missiles) but it would be very easy for Ukraine, or anyone, to create an inexpensive drone, which you would program with a frequency, a signal strength, and a general direction and send it to ride the radio signal straight to the jammer. Repeat daily as needed. Anything on the ground transmitting high power on GPS freqs is up to no good for the global community.

DoctorOetker 4mo ago

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.

devladpopov 4mo ago

[flagged]