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Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
https://archive.is/zUA3D https://archive.is/zUA3D
- teeray 1mo agoI saw some rumblings (can't find an article) that there's interest in restarting LORAN to provide an alternative to GPS for this reason.
- laruss5 1mo ago[dead]
- budman1 1mo agoLORAN can be jammed.
- teeray 1mo agoWell certainly, no one thing is impervious. But if you have GPS, LORAN, VORs, NDBs, astronavigation, etc. you have many more options at your disposal and present a much more complex attack target.
- butvacuum 1mo agoIt's 2026: we have more ways to defeat jamming, or make it irrelevant, at unit costs trivial for commercial and most private applications. 1) atomic clocks can be smaller than a closed fist and allow GPS to work with 3 satalites with ocassional drops to 2. 2) the same clocks can be used to filter out radio sources from the wrong direction. 3) star navigation (commercial is often above weather, most weather is clear in some IR bands) 4) Terain following (easy to store maps now) 5) Inertial. 6) magnetic When combined it is very hard to break the position fix. I expect the issue with the system is it's a military tech. with all it's that'll associated legal problems. After all. it'd bypass most the protections built into GPS modules.
- mschuster91 1mo ago> astronavigation Good luck finding a pilot trained on doing this, or an aircraft with high enough window cutouts that allow for the use of a sextant. Old Boeings had them [1], but no modern aircraft does. I think even among navies you'll be hard pressed to find a navigator who still can do astronavigation. IIRC even the US Navy discontinued astronavigation, but recently-ish reintroduced training for it again. [1] https://virginflightdeck.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html https://virginflightdeck.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.htm...
- teeray 1mo ago> Good luck finding a pilot trained on doing this Not necessary. ICBMs have been able to do this autonomously for a very long time [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation
- leonidasrup 1mo agoIn the 21st century you don't do astronavigation by hand, you use cameras, computers and software. Astro-inertial guidance is used for example in submarine-launched ballistic missiles. "Astro-inertial guidance, or stellar-inertial guidance, is a sensor fusion-information fusion of inertial guidance and celestial navigation. It is usually employed on submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Unlike silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose launch point does not move and thus can serve as a reference, SLBMs are launched from moving submarines, which complicates the necessary navigational calculations and increases circular error probable. Stellar-inertial guidance is used to correct small position and velocity errors that result from launch condition uncertainties due to errors in the submarine navigation system and errors that may have accumulated in the guidance system during the flight due to imperfect instrument calibration." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance
- mschuster91 1mo agoYeah but good luck getting that approved for new airliner designs, much less retrofitting it into existing airliners. For the older ones, you'd probably need to rework half their computers.
- cyberax 1mo agoNot really. It uses 2MHz band, with the wavelength of around 160m. This means that it's easy to receive via a ferrite bar antenna but hard to transmit. You need an antenna of at least around 40m size for that to be efficient.
- lstodd 1mo agoEven a 160m guy-wire tower is cheap. 40m.. my friend installed 32m one just to have better internets, not exactly out of pocket cash, but nothing compared to say swapping a car.
- cyberax 1mo agoSure, but such an antenna will be extremely conspicuous and easy to triangulate. You can't install it covertly. Meanwhile, GPS can be jammed or spoofed with a briefcase-sized device for a couple of kilometers around you.
- lstodd 1mo agoI thought we were talking about how eLoran is cheap enough. But if you are about jamming, well. Either discontinue AIS/ADS-B or directed VHF jammers are not that conspicious. Not even a PESA, 60s tech.
- KaiserPro 1mo agoyes, but trying to pump 25kw through that without it being obvious is a lot harder.
- jacquesm 1mo agoNot so simple. For one the distances to the transmitter are much smaller, for another the amount of power available to the transmitters is pretty much whatever you want to hook it up to, whereas GPS satellites are on a pretty strict power budget. On the reception side the power levels are many orders of magnitude apart.
- leonidasrup 1mo ago"In trials conducted by the General Lighthouse Authorities of UK and Ireland, a 1.5W radio jammer was able to knock out GPS signals over a range of 30 kilometers. However, to do the same to the Loran system, you'd need a 40ft tower — and around 25kW of juice to power it." https://www.engadget.com/2013-01-21-uk-eloran-navigation-system-gps-substitute.html https://www.engadget.com/2013-01-21-uk-eloran-navigation-sys...
- throw0101d 1mo agoSee UK and France: * https://insidegnss.com/uk-and-france-renew-ties-resilient-pnt-eloran-a-key-part/ https://insidegnss.com/uk-and-france-renew-ties-resilient-pn...
- ianburrell 1mo agoeLoran has been proposed as more accurate version of LORAN competitive with GPS. The Wikipedia page says that China has deployed an eLoran network but I can't tell if used for navigation or just high-precision timing.
- geerlingguy 1mo agoThe US has done tests with eLoran as well. The receivers are quite expensive and the signal isn't permanent yet, so it's more of a lab thing right now. Also experiments with BPS (Broadcast Positioning System) using high power TV transmitters to distribute time and position in urban areas (very hard to overpower that signal).
- juliusceasar 1mo agoThose cheap GPS jammers, which sites should I avoid to not buy them by accident?
- michaelmrose 1mo ago[dead]
- vablings 1mo agoIt's not rocket science to make a GPS jammer. GPS Spoofing is more complex and causes way more damage or chaos. I would seriously avoid touching this subject whatsoever this is the kind of thing that will have the FBI and FCC so far up your ass you will feel it in the back of your eyeballs. On the off chance the feds don't catch you and you cause a serious accident you will be charged with 1st degree murder of how many people were on the aircraft that crashed along with a litany of other federal offences meaning life without parole is basically a guarantee.
- eternityforest 1mo agoIs there a reliable app to detect these without using excessive amounts of battery?
- imglorp 1mo agoI feel like gps nav software should start considering the jamming and spoofing cases as real conditions they will encounter that should throw up an INOP warning. It wouldn't take much smarts for it to consider the type of vessel it's in and the max and current speeds. If the calculated position of a 10 knot vessel suddenly jumps 100 km away in seconds, that sure seems like a spoof. And if you had 10 satellites locked and then you have none, that sure seems like jamming, or you're in a tunnel; INOP either way.
- thenthenthen 1mo agoBetter use a software defined radio like hackrf or a more dedicated gps thingy, esp32 with gps addon and some machine learning? (‘Some’ doing a lot of heavy lifting here)
- madiling 1mo agohttps://archive.is/zUA3D https://archive.is/zUA3D
- bronco21016 1mo agoWhats really sad for aviation is there was already an extensive network of ground based navaids. As GPS has proliferated, they've slowly been decommissioned as they age out to save on cost. I'm specifically referring to VORs which provide azimuth and range to station. GPS is fantastic and as a primary source everyone loves the benefits it brings. However, in a century of aviation, everyone has kinda sorted out that you can't have too many backups to critical items... unless you let the accountants and bureaucrats run the show.
- buildsjets 1mo agoVOR is extremely short range and requires an extraordinary number of transmitters to provide any volume of coverage. Additionally it cannot provide coverage over oceanic areas. We USED TO have a nearly global long-range land based navigation system called LORAN, which only required one master station and a few remote stations to provide continent-scale coverage. But it was decommissioned in a cost savings move after it was determined that it could be replaced by GPS. It worked perfectly fine until it was decommissioned in 2010, not that long ago. In the '90s I used to fly light aircraft back and forth between Seattle and Alaska. You were frequently out of range of any VOR transmitters, but that LORAN always worked. NDBs? That didn't work so great for Ron Brown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C
- verelo 1mo agoOn VOR: It's also a PITA to use, and for inexperienced people, or someone who rarely uses it, they can confuse flying towards and away from the station.
- buildsjets 1mo agoIf you are a general aviation goober like me, flying a 1960's propeller airplane, sure, that is true. However, in a modern commercial aircraft, all position sources including VOR-DMEs, GPS, and IRS are cross-compared by the flight management system and turned into a latitude, longitude, and circular error of probability. There is no TO/FROM flag to worry about in a 777, and no reverse sensing on the back side of a localizer approach.
- djoldman 1mo agoNo worries in the long run; similar to the "energy crisis," new inventions and technology will mitigate the issue: Quantum Compass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass Also see: https://www.sandboxaq.com/post/sandboxaq-and-acubed-achieve-remarkable-progress-in-magnetic-navigation https://www.sandboxaq.com/post/sandboxaq-and-acubed-achieve-...
- andrehacker 1mo agoAlso see https://q-ctrl.com/ironstone-opal https://q-ctrl.com/ironstone-opal
- Hizonner 1mo agoI'm sorry, but a multi-kilogram (at a guess), five-figure-priced (at a conservative guess) device with kilometer-scale error (per their actual press release) is not a substitute for a GPS. And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too. The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation. Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- djoldman 1mo agoNo need to be sorry. My "no worries" comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Who knows how far the tech will go or how cheap it will get.
- monster_truck 1mo agoDatasheets that look like that are a pretty strong indicator you're dealing with something that is giga export controlled, not as in "can only go to some countries, you have to declare it and theres a LOT of paperwork", more "attempting to, or even making plans about trying to leave the country with one is a pile of federal crimes" Virtually anything navigational that cannot be easily or reliably jammed falls into this category far before meeting any of the accuracy/drift requirements.
- stefan_ 1mo agoThe systems jamming in Hormuz and Ukraine aren't exactly cheap and low powered, nor are those used by the US military in one of their many jamming exercises every year. Cheap GPS jammers fit in a cigarette lighter and are used by truckers who don't want their boss snooping on them, but they don't quite threaten aviation. That aside, you don't need to give up on GPS just yet. As expensive as airplanes are, there is no reason not to have at least 8 element CRPA receivers in them. Mostly a military niche product in the past they are rapidly proliferating, and most fuselages make for a great ground plane.
- bigfatkitten 1mo ago> Cheap GPS jammers fit in a cigarette lighter and are used by truckers who don't want their boss snooping on them, but they don't quite threaten aviation. They absolutely do threaten air and maritime navigation, because those trucks drive in and near ports and airports. https://insidegnss.com/fcc-fines-operator-of-gps-jammer-that-affected-newark-airport-gbas/ https://insidegnss.com/fcc-fines-operator-of-gps-jammer-that... https://ilwulocal94.org/news/2024/CSA%2001-24%20GPS%20Jamming%20%20Spoofing.pdf https://ilwulocal94.org/news/2024/CSA%2001-24%20GPS%20Jammin...
- donohoe 1mo agoWhat I want is a tiny portable bluetooth jammer for those who insist everyone in public must be listening to their music. Sadly they are too clunky to haul around each day.
- abirch 1mo agoUnfortunately for me, when I hear music it's from the horrible audio of a cell phone speaker.
- subw00f 1mo agoAre they? You can make one pretty easily and sew it into your backpack for added camouflage. I heard.
- itubaj 1mo agoIf I am not mistaken, this type of jammer can severily affect people with pacemakers. But, as a Brazilian citizen, I can understand the feeling of being forced to listen other's people music.
- yjrpnz440v0b2n1 1mo agoits myth youre mistaken because that would mean all the wifi devices and normal bt devices will also stop pacemaker. only early version of pacemaker before internet would be affected modern pacemakers have protection as long as you keep a safe 6 inch distance
- itake 1mo agocan you cite the source? I'd imagine temporary (15 minutes?) disruption would be considered in the design of pacemakers or blood glucose monitors, but if you're using this in close proximity for a long period of time... then wouldn't there be problems?
- alightsoul 1mo agoIn a third world country which are the most affected by this, Pacemakers are very rare and if you have one chances are you live in a rich area where you don't live with neighbors who do that. People die before they ever get a chance at having a pacemaker and the very conditions that require it are very rare in those areas in the first place
- mlhpdx 1mo agoWith all the man made EM emitters in the world, it seems like passively matching what can be “seen” to a database of known emitters (with signal profiles and locations) could be extremely accurate where people are (less helpful on the open ocean and remote wilderness). Similar to what’s already being done with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but general purpose, perhaps?
- 1718627440 1mo agoI think that is already done by the two big smartphone OS vendors.
- Terr_ 1mo agoThey record spots for all wireless access points too, unless you opt-out by naming them certain ways and the surveillance-capitalism company decides to honor it. (e.g. The _nomap suffix.) I hope some future Wifi standard makes it much easier to anonymize or obscure persistent access points.
- Gigachad 1mo agoThat's always existed with Hidden SSID. If you are particularly paranoid you can set it up like that. But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped.
- Terr_ 1mo ago> That's always existed with Hidden SSID. If you are particularly paranoid you can set it up like that. It's actually the opposite, a hidden SSID will backfire and hurt your privacy when it comes to phones and laptops. With a normal network, your phone can passively listen for when it approaches MyHomeNetwork and then connect. If you change that to a 802.11 hidden SSID, then whenever you aren't connected your phone will be constantly emitting a very distinctive mating-call: "Any hidden networks? Hello, if you're MyHomeNetwork, please then let me in." That makes it easy for someone to uniquely identify your phone as it moves around, and it also takes up more battery power with the often-fruitless transmissions. Both issues could be reduced by restricting it to only auto-seek the SSID based on other clues, like GPS regions or neighbors' public SSIDs, but that usually isn't a feature. > But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped. How often do you reset/rename it? Surely it's at least weird that some big companies, via sensors carried by your neighbors, know you moved your apartments from X to Y even when you don't use any of their products. Some phone-apps will have access to the network name too, but that seems just marginally worse compared to other identifying info they could track and exfiltrate.
- fangspire 1mo agoStarlink can be uses as GPS. Good luck jamming 20 thousand satellites.
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoThey've removed the in-built PNT service
- nomel 1mo agoThat's near orders of magnitude more than reality. The only number that matters is the number of satellites that are in communication line of site. A satellite on the other side of the world doesn't help you.
- m463 1mo agoI wonder how many are in view? gps is 31 total satellites 12,000 miles up starlink is 10,000 satellites at ~ 300 miles. (and what orbit?) EDIT: I found this: -- starlink: "In any given place there are 3-4 Starlink satellites visible at a time" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42445512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42445512 :) in december 2024, there were 4,000 starlink satellites in orbit so starlink is ~ 8 at all times? -- GPS: This 24-slot arrangement ensures users can view at least four satellites from virtually any point on the planet. - https://www.gps.gov/space-segment https://www.gps.gov/space-segment
- BenjiWiebe 1mo agoRemember there's also BeiDou, Galileo, and GLONASS as well. Our RTK base station (a Ublox ZED-F9P receiver, with a cheap patch antenna on the roof) can currently see 45 GNSS satellites.
- KaiserPro 1mo agoYou also need to know where the satellites are meant to be at any one time. That means a stable orbit. Starlink isn't really designed for that. It then also needs to be signed/secure so that its not spoofed. Then your signal that your measuring time from needs to be transmitted often enough and robust enough. Plus your time source on the transmitter needs to be accurate enough. It might be possible with starlink, but you'd also have to trust musk....
- jayshah5696 1mo agoThis is likely just the start. With growing consumer reliance on GPS, jammer proliferation will mirror what we see in military contexts. Same thing will happen to starlink and jamming in contested zones
- seki285 1mo agoYou can't jam starlink, at least from what we've seen so far in the war happening in Ukraine.
- ifwinterco 1mo agoThe more likely counter in a proper hot war context between major powers would be shooting down the satellites with ASAT weapons, which is technically feasible but politically a much bigger step
- dlenski 1mo ago> At the quantum-sensing firm SandboxAQ, an Alphabet spinoff… This was an interesting article up to the point where the writer started taking SandboxAQ seriously. For why you shouldn't take SandboxAQ seriously as a creator of actual technology or real products, start here: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/lavish-spending-weak-growth-engulf-billionaire-backed-ai-startup-sandboxaq https://www.theinformation.com/articles/lavish-spending-weak...
- United857 1mo agoAren’t most modern receivers multi-constellation? What is the technical feasibility of jamming every GNSS provider?
- tepmoc 1mo agoThey all within same close tied frequency range, so it’s pretty easy. Though L1,L2,L5 need separate jammers if you only target GNSS
- rkeswick 1mo agoThis explains why my drone occasionally loses signal near commercial areas. A real nuisance to deal with.
- Descon 1mo agoI wish there were cheap Bluetooth jammers to prevent speakers from playing when hiking
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- HaloZero 1mo agoWouldn’t they also stop AirPods from working?
- gib444 1mo agoWhenever I hear leaking earbuds on public transport, it's invariably AirPods
- elric 1mo agoI strongly suspect those would be very illegal and could result in serious side effects, such as for people who use continuous glucose monitors.
- deadbabe 1mo agoOh wow but a GPS jammer is okay so someone could get lost and possibly killed, or even crash a plane?
- trial3 1mo agoi’m delighted to report that it’s actually possible for people to talk about a second, related topic in a comment section without invalidating the problems of the main post being commented on
- alwaysmrno 1mo agoMany people do not understand this concept!
- 1mo ago
- vamos_davai 1mo agoWe have a defense budget. Deploy some troops or hellfire the jamming operator
- noipv4 1mo agoJamming and spoofing have come out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Naive receivers will soon be outclassed by smart receivers.
- nutjob2 1mo agoThis is what I wonder about. Do GPS receivers, aviation class ones, just accept signals coming from whatever location (maybe not from the sky), at whatever strength and reporting whatever location? Also I imagine inertial navigation still works. Using a last "known good" position, can that be used to do a sanity check and too weed out bad actors? It's like the internet all over again, where adversarial players were just not considered.
- bluGill 1mo agoIt likely is the case that most GPS receives, even aviation class ones just accept signals. Until a couple years ago this was a theoretical issue that few real world people ever dealt with. Military class GPS likely has some form of protection (but what is classified) since military use of jammers have been known for a few decades - but they were very limited use and so non-militaries just ignored them. Today things are different. Russia's military is jamming GPS on a large scale and that is affecting areas outside the war zone. GPS jammers are also cheap enough that the FCC and similar organizations (most non-poor countries have one) are unable to keep up with all the illegal uses (most countries have laws predating GPS that make these jammers illegal)
- giantg2 1mo agoThis really shouldn't be a problem. We were lazy with GPS. Maps, compasses, altimeters, etc all still exist. They might not offer the same precision as GPS, but they can easily fill the gaps. We already have inertia guidance systems for munitions. That's pretty accurate and similar in theory.
- gehsty 1mo agoWe can use candles instead of lightbulbs? INS systems are expensive accurate ones are export controlled (or were when I used them on subsea surveys!
- Nifty3929 1mo agoOne can navigate by stars as well, at least at night. Really, all modern conveniences like grocery stores and plumbing are "unnecessary" in the sense that we survived for 100k years without them.
- greenjudge 1mo ago[flagged]
- MichaelJamesFL 1mo ago[flagged]
- xaxbxcxdxe 1mo ago[dead]