It feels like we are on the tipping point of a total technology collapse. Newspapers are publishing AI hallucinated news and don't understand why their editors aren't catching it. GPS and mobile communications are subject to jamming/spoofing. Public utilities are subject to hacking. Air traffic control is teetering on the edge of a cliff. And our best technical minds are working on keeping teenagers addicted to 15 second dopamine hits.
"A single 1-kW jammer can take down GPS for a 300-nm radius.[...] A CRPA can shrink the effective radius of the 1-kW jammer to 3 nm. The jammer’s area of effectiveness is slashed from 280,000 m² to 28 m²."<p>An example of the kind of unit confusion that could crash a Mars orbiter?<p>I thought we were talking about nanometers and square meters here for a second. But this only makes sense if "m²" means square miles and "nm" means nautical miles. How about at least using "mi" for miles to reduce confusion?
GPS jamming is certainly a fun problem to deal with... I've been getting into GPS for timing data, and especially if you're building a global network or coordinated system using GPS as the time source, you have to account for it if you care at all about time stability.<p>Apparently (I haven't had this happen personally, yet) many truckers install GPS jamming cigarette lighter accessories in their trucks when they want to mask their location from trucking companies that track them everywhere. That can wreak havoc on GPS receivers at facilities, especially if you have, say, a logistics building right next to a datacenter.
> "A single 1-kW jammer can take down GPS for a 300-nm radius."<p>This is one of those occasions when capitalisation <i>really matters</i>: "nm" (lowercase) is nanometer, the tiniest of scales. On the other hand, "NM" (uppercase) is nautical miles, used in aviation (because aviation is stuck in the age of sail, and measures distance in boat miles and speeds in boat miles per hour)<p>All Aviation literature will tell you to never spell it lowercase, and this is why. There's a lot of physics in aviation, and it's too easy to misread things. Always get your units right.
Supposedly CRPAs are already due to come off the ITAR list later this year, so that's good news.<p><a href="https://insidegnss.com/crpas-to-be-removed-from-itar-list-opening-market-for-u-s-manufacturers/" rel="nofollow">https://insidegnss.com/crpas-to-be-removed-from-itar-list-op...</a>
> Goward says Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory suspects that China’s Beidou can mimic and spoof both GPS and Galileo signals.<p>Galileo has optional cryptographic signatures of its navigational data. They embed the data into their broadcast. Can be used for free.
>One of the deadliest GPS L1 civil signal interference events occurred on Dec. 25. On that date, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190, was lured off course while enroute from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia.<p>I am not seeing anything about that in the Wikipedia article:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_8243" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...</a><p>It sounds like the GPS was jammed, not spoofed. The aircraft had already shot some missed approaches at the destination airport before the event that caused the loss of the aircraft.
"GPS is falling behind Galileo and Beidou as the preeminent GNSS"<p>I remember, that Galileo went offline a few years ago for some days - and the joke was, no one noticed. So possible that today there are more regular users and possible that there are some advanced features of Galileo like the mentioned<p>"Galileo’s open service (civil-access) E1 signal incorporates public/private key encryption to digitally sign and authentify data"<p>But I think GPS falling behind Galileo would imply a bit more Galileo users, compared to GPS. Which would surprise me.
The fundamental weakness of GPS and similar is that they are a set of beacons from which a position may be calculated. This has simplified the navigation task but also made that task more fragile.<p>Navigation itself must "toughen up" and the seeds for that are being deployed to autonomous systems as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Instead of being dependent on a single data source, a toughened system would infer location from many sources: magnetometers, photogrammetry, inertial measurement, and other sources of radiation (ex star trackers). The article does cover some developments in these areas as a second line after advocating for breaking changes to the current radio-time system.<p><i>GPS jamming and spoofing will not abate anytime soon. The first line of defense is to crosscheck GPS PNT against inputs from other sensors. Parkinson advocates “deep integration,” or close coupling, of GPS sensors and inertial reference platforms, such as laser, fiberoptic gyros and microelectromechanical gyros and accelerometers, to flag obvious GPS signal interference.</i>
It does seem that if next-gen GPS tech isn't already being tested/deployed then we've managed to already begin falling behind. GPS III just isn't anywhere near as useful in a non-permissive environment<p>Also, I read something on ITAR being relaxed specifically for CRPAs, this year, so maybe some of this is improving? -><p><a href="https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/20/first-fix-freeing-crpas-gps-worlds-editor-on-itar-change/" rel="nofollow">https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/20/first-fix-freeing-crpas-gps-wo...</a><p>Not directly related, but I also think its impressive that a major airliner could take a SAM hit, from what was likely a Pantsir-S1 (20KG of HE moving at Mach 2 is not something airlines usually design for) and still land with half the souls surviving. While not great, that is certainly far better than I expected and shows some excellent airmanship.
Here is an example of how GPS jamming/spoofing affects Strava tracks in Russia.
<a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/14539835271" rel="nofollow">https://www.strava.com/activities/14539835271</a>
I did a <i>Ctrl+F</i> and it doesn't mention once Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)[1]?<p>As long as an external signal for navigation is used, the problems of external signals will remain. INS doesn't suffer from this issue and is already used in planes, ships, cars and phones for years. Actually I miss INS in cycling computers, it could fix so many issues.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system</a>
There is also Xona (<a href="https://spacenews.com/u-s-air-force-to-explore-xona-spaces-commercial-alternative-to-gps/" rel="nofollow">https://spacenews.com/u-s-air-force-to-explore-xona-spaces-c...</a>), a privately funded LEO constellation for PNT
Don't phased array antennas and similar need to be on a somewhat stable platform to be able to track a satellite? I can't imagine that would work too well in a mobile phone
Now that the US is no longer cooperative with other nations who are "taking advantage" of us, we should probably not expect to see the same level of international cooperation on GNSS as we have seen to date.