6 ms·

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

by jshier 16d ago

michaelt 16d ago
There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.
- bb88 16d ago
  GPS jamming was being investigated by the NTSB as a possible reason for this air crash that killed 4 people near White Sands Missile Range. The plane reported GPS signal loss 5 minutes after the jamming started by WSMR. Three other planes in the area also reported GPS loss. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-05/ntsb-medevac-crash-gps-jamming-22466131.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-05/ntsb-medevac-...
  - sokoloff 16d ago
    I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming. That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099
    - bb88 16d ago
      I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming. One is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be. If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.
      - sokoloff 16d ago
        I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.
        bb88 16d ago
        If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military. If you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.
        sokoloff 16d ago
        In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.
        542354234235 15d ago
        >If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? Yes, obviously. Losing signal on your GPS unit, and having your GPS unit tell you that you are in a different position than you actually are, are two very different things. Also, since other aircraft reported GPS issues, that is evidence that would speak to jamming or spoofing. All three other aircraft reported a loss of GPS, not inaccurate GPS. Coverups are real, government conspiracies are real. But the completely evidenceless “I’m just saying…” or “isn’t it weird…” or “I’m just asking questions” is tiresome.
- pigggg 16d ago
  Eh a month or two before the October 2023 Israel conflict - there were many reports of GPS jamming in the middle east impacting air transport aircraft. To the point where it basically caused various failure modes that shouldn't have happened with avionics (think the things you'd expect in a fuzzing scenario). It was pretty eye opening example of just how poor modern avionics are (and their integrations) when they get unpredictable inputs & the dependant downrange systems that rely upon that data.
- Gigachad 16d ago
  GPS jamming is fairly detectable right? I wonder if we could create some crowd souced map of jammers. I think this kind of already exists as fairly course data but if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home and wired them up to note every time their location lock is lost or moves. It could create a hyper detailed map of where the jammers are and track them moving in realtime.
  - colechristensen 16d ago
    They're easy to find, but not necessarily with stuff from off the shelf. Professionals with the right equipment though have no trouble locating them. The FCC is happy to hand out 5 and 6 digit fines for operating a GPS jammer and has fined retailers tens of millions for selling them.
    - Gigachad 16d ago
      If you wanted to exactly pinpoint it with a single device sure, but I'm thinking of a map where nodes just report that they are experiencing jamming, and then with the whole network you can see a radius of the jam, see it moving around, and assume it's somewhere in the center. All with cheap off the shelf hardware. The police could probably combine this data with license plate scanners and see the single truck that always exists in the jammed location.
      - ryandrake 15d ago
        Here you go: https://gpsjam.org https://gpsjam.org
    - cucumber3732842 16d ago
      I know we all like to jack ourselves raw to the big powerful government handing out ruinous fines for things we don't like but realistically none of that is gonna stick to some McDonalds manager who's got a side gig importing Alibaba stuff or some delivery driver who bought it. You can't get blood from a stone. You're just guaranteeing the stone always stays a stone. Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
- matheusmoreira 16d ago
  > boss watching over their shoulder all the time Sounds like the root cause to me. It should be illegal to use GNSS to track employees, or anyone really. Jamming is starting to sound a lot like self-defense against surveillance.
  - DeepSeaTortoise 16d ago
    IMO tracking is just way too useful. You know when things are about to arrive (so you dont miss a parcel because you went to the toilet or you can even intercept your driver once he's in the area, removing most of the last-mile problem), routes can be changed on the fly (e.g. for on-demand public transport pickup, trunking or delay mitigation) or, well, you can track your vehicles, allowing you to find them quickly in case of theft, optimize routes or have decent evidence in case of disputes. The real problem is not really drivers being tracked, but how the tracking data is or might be used. Timestamped delivery notifications might be just as bad in this regard. As often, the solution is probably more about accessible and pro-human law. No idea how that should work, maybe certain sensitive data services having to be provided by a third party or even the government itself? There are probably much smarter ideas or variations of this...
    - XorNot 16d ago
      Is this even a real scenario though? A data logger is going to notice hours of GPS outage during your working hours.
  - 15155 15d ago
    So as a business owner, I'm not allowed to know where my $100,000 asset is? My insurance carrier requires me to track the vehicle as a condition of coverage, they also require a dashcam be operating at all times.
    - psadauskas 15d ago
      If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee. If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)
- torginus 16d ago
  If I was a concerned boss, I would likely use GSM cell info to track my drivers. While not good enough to do turn-to-turn navigation it certainly is good enough to tell where people are. Btw, don't smartphones have this built in? I remember some old and cheap Android phones without GPS that came with this.
  - kayodelycaon 15d ago
    I believe they do. It’s used to get an initial fix before you get gps coordinates. Wifi network names in range might also be used.
  - dotancohen 15d ago
    That's A-GPS. I think that the A stood for Assisted or maybe Augmented.
- dzhiurgis 16d ago
  Russia has a satellite constellation for global jamming.
- torginus 16d ago
  Antenna tech has moved way beyond what was possible in the days GPS was invented. Planar arrays and MIMO are ubiquitous and cheap. These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements and can detect and filter ambient noise. They are super hard to jam. The reason why drones have become such a PITA is that these inexpensive antennas are very hard to defeat even with military jammers. If this becomes a geniune need in the civilian sector, then I'm sure the tech is up to the challenge.
  - 15155 14d ago
    > These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements "These antennas" is doing an impossibly large amount of work. What you are describing here is a delay-calibrated coherent receiver, not an antenna, and it's absolutely not "inexpensive" to pull this off. With passive antennas, most of the attenuation of adversarial signals is being done by the relatively-high-directionality of planar arrays: off-boresight signals have far greater attenuation with these (20dB? - tricky because you still do want good satellite data close to the horizon), and most garden variety jammers are terrestrial and off-axis. Still, these signals are always below the noise floor and mostly unsigned, it's somewhat easy for an airborne (or spacefaring) jammer to fully drown out, replay/time-shift, or spoof the signal.
  - minetest2048 16d ago
    The tech is already there, but the reason those antenna are not widely used is that they used to fall under ITAR, so no US companies want to touch those for civilian uses. Of course Turkey and China is not US so they don't give a damn about ITAR compliance, and so you can buy those anti jam antennas out of alibaba. Brad Parkinson, the father of GPS and PNTAB, they've been trying to lobby the US government to remove ITAR from that technology so the civilian can benefit from anti jamming, and finally they managed to do it sometime last year. Now it falls under EAR
    - torginus 16d ago
      There's also a bunch of Western stuff you can buy off the shelves. MIMO tech is standard in every Wifi 5+ router, Cars have pretty sophisticated electronically steered radars nowadays, boats even more so. 5G towers also have phased array antennas. This tech is everywhere in consumer or industrial stuff. Not sure what makes an antenna/sensor ITAR restricted, I suspect if you try optimizing it to military use-cases, you'll get hit with ITAR, but I suspect Brad Parkinson is right - security through obscurity just doesn't cut it any more. I remember in the 90s, computer security was either missing or an afterthought (you could bypass the Win98 password prompt by pressing escape in the release version). Thankfully the industry got together and figured it out. Now everyone else needs to follow suit. We already have a bunch of examples of assuming security does not matter (hackable cars, meters that can be switched with a Flipper zero).
- dylanger 16d ago
  [dead]
azernik 16d ago
Being much closer to the receiver and tied into terrestrial power grids, ground-based beacons can transmit at higher powers than GNSS signals and be received at much higher powers. Received GNSS power is on the order of -130dBm (10e-16 W) - you can jam that with a 1W terrestrial source for hundreds of meters around. Way more if you're willing to scale the power from car USB power levels to bigger grid-connected supplies. LORAN, from my quick googling, looks to be about 6-7 orders of magnitude higher received power.
amelius 15d ago
Maybe we just need to sprinkle around jammers, and use them as beacons.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

by jshier 16d ago

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

michaelt 16d ago

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.

bb88 16d ago
GPS jamming was being investigated by the NTSB as a possible reason for this air crash that killed 4 people near White Sands Missile Range. The plane reported GPS signal loss 5 minutes after the jamming started by WSMR. Three other planes in the area also reported GPS loss. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-05/ntsb-medevac-crash-gps-jamming-22466131.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-05/ntsb-medevac-...
- sokoloff 16d ago
  I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming. That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099
  - bb88 16d ago
    I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming. One is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be. If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.
    - sokoloff 16d ago
      I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.
      - bb88 16d ago
        If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military. If you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.
        sokoloff 16d ago
        In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.
        542354234235 15d ago
        >If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? Yes, obviously. Losing signal on your GPS unit, and having your GPS unit tell you that you are in a different position than you actually are, are two very different things. Also, since other aircraft reported GPS issues, that is evidence that would speak to jamming or spoofing. All three other aircraft reported a loss of GPS, not inaccurate GPS. Coverups are real, government conspiracies are real. But the completely evidenceless “I’m just saying…” or “isn’t it weird…” or “I’m just asking questions” is tiresome.
pigggg 16d ago
Eh a month or two before the October 2023 Israel conflict - there were many reports of GPS jamming in the middle east impacting air transport aircraft. To the point where it basically caused various failure modes that shouldn't have happened with avionics (think the things you'd expect in a fuzzing scenario). It was pretty eye opening example of just how poor modern avionics are (and their integrations) when they get unpredictable inputs & the dependant downrange systems that rely upon that data.
Gigachad 16d ago
GPS jamming is fairly detectable right? I wonder if we could create some crowd souced map of jammers. I think this kind of already exists as fairly course data but if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home and wired them up to note every time their location lock is lost or moves. It could create a hyper detailed map of where the jammers are and track them moving in realtime.
- colechristensen 16d ago
  They're easy to find, but not necessarily with stuff from off the shelf. Professionals with the right equipment though have no trouble locating them. The FCC is happy to hand out 5 and 6 digit fines for operating a GPS jammer and has fined retailers tens of millions for selling them.
  - Gigachad 16d ago
    If you wanted to exactly pinpoint it with a single device sure, but I'm thinking of a map where nodes just report that they are experiencing jamming, and then with the whole network you can see a radius of the jam, see it moving around, and assume it's somewhere in the center. All with cheap off the shelf hardware. The police could probably combine this data with license plate scanners and see the single truck that always exists in the jammed location.
    - ryandrake 15d ago
      Here you go: https://gpsjam.org https://gpsjam.org
  - cucumber3732842 16d ago
    I know we all like to jack ourselves raw to the big powerful government handing out ruinous fines for things we don't like but realistically none of that is gonna stick to some McDonalds manager who's got a side gig importing Alibaba stuff or some delivery driver who bought it. You can't get blood from a stone. You're just guaranteeing the stone always stays a stone. Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
matheusmoreira 16d ago
> boss watching over their shoulder all the time Sounds like the root cause to me. It should be illegal to use GNSS to track employees, or anyone really. Jamming is starting to sound a lot like self-defense against surveillance.
- DeepSeaTortoise 16d ago
  IMO tracking is just way too useful. You know when things are about to arrive (so you dont miss a parcel because you went to the toilet or you can even intercept your driver once he's in the area, removing most of the last-mile problem), routes can be changed on the fly (e.g. for on-demand public transport pickup, trunking or delay mitigation) or, well, you can track your vehicles, allowing you to find them quickly in case of theft, optimize routes or have decent evidence in case of disputes. The real problem is not really drivers being tracked, but how the tracking data is or might be used. Timestamped delivery notifications might be just as bad in this regard. As often, the solution is probably more about accessible and pro-human law. No idea how that should work, maybe certain sensitive data services having to be provided by a third party or even the government itself? There are probably much smarter ideas or variations of this...
  - XorNot 16d ago
    Is this even a real scenario though? A data logger is going to notice hours of GPS outage during your working hours.
- 15155 15d ago
  So as a business owner, I'm not allowed to know where my $100,000 asset is? My insurance carrier requires me to track the vehicle as a condition of coverage, they also require a dashcam be operating at all times.
  - psadauskas 15d ago
    If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee. If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)
torginus 16d ago
If I was a concerned boss, I would likely use GSM cell info to track my drivers. While not good enough to do turn-to-turn navigation it certainly is good enough to tell where people are. Btw, don't smartphones have this built in? I remember some old and cheap Android phones without GPS that came with this.
- kayodelycaon 15d ago
  I believe they do. It’s used to get an initial fix before you get gps coordinates. Wifi network names in range might also be used.
- dotancohen 15d ago
  That's A-GPS. I think that the A stood for Assisted or maybe Augmented.
dzhiurgis 16d ago
Russia has a satellite constellation for global jamming.
torginus 16d ago
Antenna tech has moved way beyond what was possible in the days GPS was invented. Planar arrays and MIMO are ubiquitous and cheap. These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements and can detect and filter ambient noise. They are super hard to jam. The reason why drones have become such a PITA is that these inexpensive antennas are very hard to defeat even with military jammers. If this becomes a geniune need in the civilian sector, then I'm sure the tech is up to the challenge.
- 15155 14d ago
  > These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements "These antennas" is doing an impossibly large amount of work. What you are describing here is a delay-calibrated coherent receiver, not an antenna, and it's absolutely not "inexpensive" to pull this off. With passive antennas, most of the attenuation of adversarial signals is being done by the relatively-high-directionality of planar arrays: off-boresight signals have far greater attenuation with these (20dB? - tricky because you still do want good satellite data close to the horizon), and most garden variety jammers are terrestrial and off-axis. Still, these signals are always below the noise floor and mostly unsigned, it's somewhat easy for an airborne (or spacefaring) jammer to fully drown out, replay/time-shift, or spoof the signal.
- minetest2048 16d ago
  The tech is already there, but the reason those antenna are not widely used is that they used to fall under ITAR, so no US companies want to touch those for civilian uses. Of course Turkey and China is not US so they don't give a damn about ITAR compliance, and so you can buy those anti jam antennas out of alibaba. Brad Parkinson, the father of GPS and PNTAB, they've been trying to lobby the US government to remove ITAR from that technology so the civilian can benefit from anti jamming, and finally they managed to do it sometime last year. Now it falls under EAR
  - torginus 16d ago
    There's also a bunch of Western stuff you can buy off the shelves. MIMO tech is standard in every Wifi 5+ router, Cars have pretty sophisticated electronically steered radars nowadays, boats even more so. 5G towers also have phased array antennas. This tech is everywhere in consumer or industrial stuff. Not sure what makes an antenna/sensor ITAR restricted, I suspect if you try optimizing it to military use-cases, you'll get hit with ITAR, but I suspect Brad Parkinson is right - security through obscurity just doesn't cut it any more. I remember in the 90s, computer security was either missing or an afterthought (you could bypass the Win98 password prompt by pressing escape in the release version). Thankfully the industry got together and figured it out. Now everyone else needs to follow suit. We already have a bunch of examples of assuming security does not matter (hackable cars, meters that can be switched with a Flipper zero).
dylanger 16d ago
[dead]

azernik 16d ago

Being much closer to the receiver and tied into terrestrial power grids, ground-based beacons can transmit at higher powers than GNSS signals and be received at much higher powers. Received GNSS power is on the order of -130dBm (10e-16 W) - you can jam that with a 1W terrestrial source for hundreds of meters around. Way more if you're willing to scale the power from car USB power levels to bigger grid-connected supplies. LORAN, from my quick googling, looks to be about 6-7 orders of magnitude higher received power.

amelius 15d ago

Maybe we just need to sprinkle around jammers, and use them as beacons.