I've been working on mapping GPS jamming using ADS-B data for a couple
years, and I'll try to address questions and points brought up here
based on what I know.
(From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24,
FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?")
"A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is
happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different
sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence."
There are heuristics you can use that allow you to make a pretty good
guess about whether jamming is happening based on signals from just
one or two aircraft, and have worked well on GPSJAM for the past
couple years.
With regard to localization of GPS jammers, yes you can do direction
finding of the emitted signal directly, but that's easy mode. For a
fun challenge, do it based just on observations of the ADS-B data from
affected (and unaffected aircraft). Here's one approach from
researchers at the GPS laboratory at Stanford, "GNSS Interference
Source Localization Using ADS-B data":
https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...
I have some other ideas about how to do that localization.
"Do aircraft systems really only use GPS and not the full
constellation of navigational satellite systems?"
ADS-B doesn't tell you what navigation system is, but my understanding
is that most aircraft are still using GPS. Maybe someone who works on
aircraft avionics will chime in. A few years ago I did see data that
distinguished between different GNSS, and GPS was experiencing more
jamming than the others. I assume as multi-network systems become more
and more common jammers will just target all of them, if they're not
already.
"There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most
expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights
either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the
ground at a surveyed point to get data there."
That's right, no (or few) flights over Ukraine with ADS-B transponders
means no data. I actually first started mapping GPS jamming on
Feb. 14, 2022
(https://gpsjam.org/?lat=45.00000&lon=35.00000&z=3.0&date=202...),
because I thought it might give me an early warning of the expected
Russian invasion of Ukraine. It didn't work out that way--there was no
indication of interference right up until Feb 24., and then all civil
aviation stopped and there was no more data for that region
(https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.18928&lon=33.51687&z=3.9&date=202...).
As some of you have noticed, GPS jamming is highly correlated with
conflict zones. Some conflicts are higher intensity than others--for
example, I think the airspace around Cyprus has been jammed for years
(since 2018 maybe?), and I get the feeling it's more harrassment than
anything else (maybe someone more geopolitically savvy than me knows
more).
"I see 2 red cells on the US/Mexico border right about Texas/Coahuila
region". Someone always says it's cartels, and the evidence is that
it's much more likely to be U.S. military testing and training. First,
the interference is always in the Laughlin and Randolph military
operating areas (MOAs) (https://imgur.com/vieGhgN). Second, the
interference usually runs during the week and takes weekends
off--which I doubt cartels do, but that's the typical pattern seen for
military exercises.
"am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?"
From 2/24/2022 until 3/19/2024, gpsjam.org was the only site with
regularly updated GPS jamming maps. On Twitter, @auonsson
(https://twitter.com/auonsson) and @rundradion
(https://twitter.com/rundradion) have been posting geospatial and
other analysis of similar data for the past several months at least,
and @x00live (https://twitter.com/x00live) has looked at ADS-B and GPS
interference for a while too. (I'm not even going to try to catalog
academic or government efforts, though I will mention HawkEye 360's
satellite based GPS interference mapping:
https://spacenews.com/hawkeye-360-gps-ukr/)
"If line of sight to the jamming antenna is required to be jammed, why
do aircraft not have a downwards shield so that they only receive GPS
signal from the sky (satellites) and not from jammers (coming from the
bottom hemisphere)? Or is the jamming signal so many orders of
magnitudes stronger than the satellites that there's always going to
be some gain no matter how good the shield is?"
Yes, GPS signals are so weak (below the noise floor!) that it's just
super easy to overpower them with terrestrial (or airborne)
jammers. But there are special antennas and other techniques for
building jam-resistant systems, e.g. "controlled reception pattern
antennas" (CRPA):
https://www.gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-th...
But I think the main reason most civilian aircraft systems aren't jam
resistant is because they didn't need to be--For the past several
decades GPS jamming has been a much smaller issue than it is now, and
I don't think there was sufficient reason to spend time and money on
what would have been an over-engineered, mostly unnecessary
system. But the situation is changing, and I expect anti-jamming to
become a more significant concern by equipment manufacturers and
aviation authorities.
[Edited to add:]
"I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my
phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine."
From the GPSJAM FAQ: ""I live in one of the red zones and my GPS was
fine?""
(https://gpsjam.org/faq/#i-live-in-one-of-the-red-zones). Yeah, the
answer is, as you mentioned, aircraft fly at higher altitudes, so they
get much longer line of sight to the jammer.
On the general idea of using ADS-B to map GPS interference, when I
thought of this idea I was pretty excited. I realized that if you had
access to worldwide ADS-B data, which ADS-B Exchange graciously gave
me as part of my Advisory Circular project
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661), you could also make a
worldwide map of GPS jamming, and I hadn't seen anyone do that before
(later I found some researchers who realized you could get GPS jamming
information from ADS-B, but they only looked at a couple
aircraft).
I just think it's pretty neat that even though there were multiple
companies devoted to processing, analyzing, and selling ADS-B data,
and ADS-B data is not all that complicated, none of those companies
had realized this new way of using it. Sometimes there's gold left
even in data that you think must have been completely mined out.
Even specifically looking at ADS-B data as it relates to GPS
interference, there's still lots to be done! FR24 is mapping jamming,
but I don't think anyone else has made worldwide maps of spoofing
(yet!): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1770515361739493488
[Edited to add more:]
With respect to safety issues, yes, aircraft have redundant navigation
systems. But GPS is one of the important layers that add safety to
aviation, and it is not at all normal for entire countries or even
larger regions to lsoe GPS while still maintaining passenger
flights. This Eurocontrol presentation, "GNSS Interference and Civil
Aviation", has lots of details:
https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...
From the presentation:
Aviation Safety is built on two main principles:
• Trust your instruments
• Follow standard operating procedure
GNSS RFI causes pilots to have to question both principles!
There have been close calls due to lack of GPS. It increases workload
for both pilots and controllers, which is a safety issue by
itself. Despite a lot of airlines and government aviation agencies
saying everything is fine, they're not really prepared for a world
with frequent GPS denial, and everything is not fine. Industry and
government are organizing emergency meetings about how to handle this
in a less ad hoc way than they have been so far (commercial aviation
is kind of the opposite of ad hoc).
I'm not a NATO strategist or anything, so I'm adding this as a child comment, but I think the big story in the GPS/aviation world these days is probably Russia's n̵e̵a̵r̵-̵c̵o̵n̵s̵t̵a̵n̵t̵ frequent jamming of GPS over Poland, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Lithuania. Degrading and even neutralizing strategic infrastructure in EU and NATO countries, significantly affecting commercial aviation at the least, is a big deal. There's some reluctance to say it's Russia doing the jamming, though that seems to be the consensus among experts. I assume governments know with 100% confidence who it is.
John, I've been following your work for years (including back in the old lemonodor years). I just wanted to say thank you here, for sharing your expertise for all on this topic, and for all the other tremendous work you've done. What an inspiration.
I know older long-range planes from the 70s and 80s had excellent inertial navigation systems.
Not quite as good as GPS, but good enough to know the location of the plane within a few nautical miles. The main problem is that inertial navigation systems drifted over time and required constant recalibration from the crew whenever they had a fix from real navigation beacons and errors could be catastrophic (especially when skirting the edge of Soviet airspace).
I've always wondered if modern avionics suites kept the older style inertial navigation systems as a backup to GPS, or if the systems were deleted when everyone switched to GPS.
I think it would be smart for larger planes to have a modern inertial navigation system that constantly recalibrated off GPS, ready to take over in the case of GPS jamming or spoofing.
I have lived in Kiev and I have seen how GPS jamming works on the ground. As soon as russian missiles or drones approached Kiev, our air defense typically turned on the GPS jamming. I could immediately see on my phone that I'm steadily moving in a straight line directly northeast at a high speed in a very different part of the city - all while sitting on the couch in my home not very high above the ground. A few times like that.
I was curious how powerful should a jammer be to completely actively substitute GPS coordinates in a city so large.
Who is jamming around Tallinn area? Also is GPSIII just as susceptible to jamming?
Hawkeye + SAR data would be pretty interesting for ship tracking. I think I've seen some papers here before, but nothing interactive like your site. I think open SAR data is not quite realtime yet, but hope soon is.
> but my understanding is that most aircraft are still using GPS.
GNSS, GPS plus other constellations depends on the receiver. Even drones or consumer ones support that these days, some bigger drones even support L5 bands.
> As part of the ADS-B messages we receive from each aircraft, the Navigation integrity category (NIC) encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft. The NIC value informs how certain the aircraft is of its position by providing a radius of uncertainty.
> Poor NIC values alone might indicate a problem with an aircraft’s equipment or unfavorable positioning. However, when observed in multiple aircraft in close proximity during the same time frame, it suggests the presence of a radio signal interfering with normal GNSS operation.
A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence.
> A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence.
Could you use RTLSDR triangulation to hone in on granular lat long of jamming sources?
This is really cool since ASDBExchange was bought out by a private equity firm and has since stopped giving out data to cool projects. I see they are being sued for IP theft and a couple other items. Link to Lawsuit in CA is below because I was reading it tonight.
Do aircraft systems really only use GPS and not the full constellation of navigational satellite systems?
Besides GPS, the GNSS currently includes other satellite navigation systems, such as the Russian GLONASS, and may soon include others such as the European Union’s Galileo and China’s Beidou.
So how should I interpret this? The map lacks geopolitical boundaries, so it's hard to interpret.
There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there.
There's a big red blob over Turkey, is that maybe the southern edge of the reach of Russian jammers in the Black sea?
There's also a big red blob over the eastern Mediterranean. Is that Israel? I'm not so sure though, because it's not centered on Israel and parts of Israel proper are green on the map. I also assume they're heavy users of GPS, so wouldn't want to jam it.
There's a red blob in Southeast Asia, and that looks like Myanmar, where there's a civil war right now.
There's a little red blob over what looks like Kashmir.
The hole over Ukraine is definitely the lack of civilian flights.
Another notable spot is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave. It looks relatively normal on some days, like today, but on others like yesterday it's covered by solid red stretching far into Poland, Sweden and even Germany.
I was curious too. Did some sleuthing, it looks more like Punjab. I think that’s to block drone infiltration from Pakistan [1]. It does change going back to 14th March there is no jamming in the region, US and Europe blobs also reduced, so I think this stuff is event driven, wonder what goes on, fascinating stuff.
Their data comes from commercial flights. If there are no flights, there's no data. There aren't many commercial flights over Ukraine or Belarus right now, so that whole area's empty.
The Eastern Mediterranean might be the (significant, underreported, under-remembered) Russian military presence in Syria. They have airbases, a naval base, they rotate and train their officers there, they constantly ship military equipment back and forth from the Black Sea ports via the Bosphorus to Syria, they train the Syrian army, they build human shield observation posts overlooking Israel.
What's unfathomable to me is how Israel (or Netanyahu?) keeps treating them as a frenemy.
I see 2 red cells on the US/Mexico border right about Texas/Coahuila region. Navigating that dessert region without GPS or with GPS for that matter can be deadly.
Yea, oddly, if you go back to like august, there's still a bunch of red over the Mediterranean, parts of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. so it's not totally clear what that is. I've heard anecdotally that gps has gotten unusable in Israel in recent weeks but it's not clear why that's changed based on the mapping information we're seeing here.
If anyone found the above interesting, I wrote a short article mapping plane activity on FlightRadar's 'blocked' list (i.e FlightRadar had agreed to remove the ADBS data from their dataset following probable legal pressure).
The article was interesting alone, simply for the Google Dork technique explanation. Have not heard the "unusual, yet specifically frequent" search technique described that way previously. Very similar to what's necessary for searching StackExchange and similar, such as "site:https://aviation.stackexchange.com/ tracking private planes"
Known Conversions: GlobalEye, Project Dolphin, Raytheon Sentinel, Saab Swordfish, PAL Aerospace P-6, E-11A, HALOE, PEGASUS, Hava SOJ, CAEW, HADES.
Actually has a tie-in with the article, since the Hava SOJ is an air stand-off jammer configuration for the Turkish region.
Otherwise, if I still worked for the government contracting, I'd probably offer you a job, although you're apparently British, so there might have been citizenship issues.
That's LADD (Limited Aircraft Data Displayed), which requires that aircraft marked as such in the FAA's database to be removed from the official data feeds used by the commercial flight radar sites.
Crowdsourced data isn't subject to LADD, so adsbexchange and other such sites can and do display such aircraft.
For flights within the US, there's also a private address program that allows an ADS-B equipped plane to broadcast an alternate address.
Thanks for linking gpsjam -- flightradar24's map is total trash by comparison (colours, lack of borders).
Does anyone know if a similar service covers things like GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou?
EDIT: nevermind, these services can't distinguish. From the FAQ:
> The ADS-B data used by this map includes information on the accuracy of the navigation system used by each aircraft, but doesn't specify the type of navigation system. It could be GPS, another global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like GLONASS, or it could be an inertial navigation system (INS). My understanding is that most aircraft are using GPS, so that's probably mostly what the map shows.
If line of sight to the jamming antenna is required to be jammed, why do aircraft not have a downwards shield so that they only receive GPS signal from the sky (satellites) and not from jammers (coming from the bottom hemisphere)? Or is the jamming signal so many orders of magnitudes stronger than the satellites that there's always going to be some gain no matter how good the shield is?
- GPS positioning is more accurate if the satellites it sees come from a variety of angles (GDOP), so the satellites near the horizon are valuable.
- Aircraft pitch and roll, so a fixed antenna like this would lose precision as it turns to make an approach - just about the worst possible time.
It's difficult to make an antenna with a sharp cutoff to limit the ground vs. above-ground. So, most anti-jammers will use beamforming to cancel out interference in one or more specific directions. So, the null in the antenna moves to follow the interference.
I thought GPS signals from space were incredibly weak. Limited power budget + 100km in the sky. Seems trivial for a ground based system to crank up the watts to whatever arbitrary limit they desire.
The data is taken from aircraft [EDIT: not airlines; see traceroute66's comment], so it doesn't give full coverage of the world, but it does include other satellite navigation systems aside from just GPS. Looks like the jammed/interfered areas are:
* A large part of Eastern Europe around Ukraine is missing data, and there are many jammed/interfered areas around it, including the southern coast of the Black Sea and parts of Poland and the Baltic. Part of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Kaliningrad are also jammed/interfered.
* Part of Germany near Berlin, possibly part of the Ukraine-related jamming/interference?
* A large part of the eastern Mediterranean and some of the Middle East around Gaza.
* A small area on the India-Pakistan border near Punjab and Lahore.
* Two medium-sized areas in western Myanmar.
* Two small areas in New Guinea with a gap in the data between them, spanning the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border.
* Two small areas in western Australia.
* A small area on the US-Mexico border.
* A dot in southern China with some gaps in the data around it near the border with Vietnam.
Ukraine, Gaza, and Myanmar all have major conflicts going on. Other comments have suggested that the US-Mexico interference might be related to drug cartels. The India-Pakistan border is a longstanding point of tension. Not sure what (if anything) is going on in New Guinea and Australia.
The jamming/interference in India-Pakistan, US-Mexico, and China all went away in the last 6 hours -- they're only visible in the 24-hour data.
The data is ADS-B data which is broadcast by aircraft.
FR24 (and other similar services) obtain the data via a community[1], you can take part too[2].
For certain parts of the world, they may have the option to augment the data via commercial services, but that is highly unlikely to be on a global basis.
Conclusion: Missing coverage means no community coverage in that area and no commercial augmentation.
> Part of Germany near Berlin, possibly part of the Ukraine-related jamming/interference?
Of the four tiles in that area (for March 19th at least), one is entirely in Poland, one is covering the Polish-German border, one is a bit of the German coast around Rügen but mostly the Baltic Sea, and the other is Bornholm (island in the Baltic Sea) and a bit of the Swedish coast.
My guess is, this is part of a larger system to limit Russian military use of the Baltic, and possibly also a single layer of defence against Russian aircraft and missiles targeting Berlin and Copenhagen. Likewise, I would guess that the strip of interference from St Petersburg in the direction of Moscow is a similar single-layer of defence by Russia.
At this resolution, it also looks like the west is interfering with access to St Petersburg and someone (could reasonably be either side) is worried about Kaliningrad, but that image is also also making me think "WTF?" about the Gulf of Riga.
The single tile near Kandalaksha (Russia) suggests something interesting is going on there, but I have no idea what that might be, and there's a non-zero possibility that it's a deliberate red-herring to make western analysts waste time — as an analogy, imagine a troll releasing three greased pigs with the numbers "1", "2", and "4" painted on the side.
I crosschecked with google Maps and I belive the Jindalee Operational Radar Network in Laverton is stationed there. Maybe that has something to with the interference. A 560kw transmitter is no joke.
I guess south-west Texas is most likely also military. E.g. the Naval Air Station Kingsville is not far away.
That spot in western Australia is interesting, I was looking at that earlier. My map doesn't show any indication of interference there, in fact from what I can tell there's plenty of evidence of _no_ interference. Eh, there are sometimes analysis or other artifacts, and it can be tricky to try to infer too much from one hex.
This is suspiciously similar to `gpsjam.org`. It's useful, for sure, and it does use readily-available ADS-B data that FR24 (and ADSBExchange) uses anyway, but the data viz is just eerily similar.
Then again, I'm not very GIS/geodesy minded, so maybe hexagons are the best shape that'll tessellate over a sphere easily.
Was this work in any meaningful way inspired by GPSjam? If yes, it'd be nice to have an acknowledgement in there.
I can't say if it's inspired by the site you link, but basing your suspicion on the hexagonal shape is very weak, at best.
Also, the data seems to be in different resolutions, and the actual jamming data is quite different just looking at both sites.
I've seen hexagons used for maps and boardgames for years.
That is Eagle Pass, TX. The infamous, massive border crossing area where suspected criminal border crossers are corraled under the bridge, where Elon visited, etc.
The jamming is done to make crossing the border without going through the checkpoint more difficult
TL;DR: It's weak signal, not jamming. The weak signal reports come from military training aircraft carrying out maneuvers that cause temporary signal loss.
Interesting - as I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine. All the local services that rely on positioning via phones seemed to work fine as well.
I wonder how the jamming works - is it just for higher altitudes or maybe it only affects GPS and my phone also uses GLONASS or something?
On your phone the GPS is just one input to determine its position. It's most likely also triangulating cell phone towers. Get an app that only shows GPS data and check if you see coordinates jumping around.
Google maps (and your phone's location services) seldom rely only on GPS.
For one, accelerometer-based location has become pretty good. You can usually get by for a few kilometers on the average road.
For two, Google maps is aware that you are driving, and this it sticks to roads, especially ones that are on your itinerary, because of your GPS registers as the middle of a field, it's more likely that you're experiencing GPS issues rather than you driving at 130km/h in a potato field.
Finally, location services are amplified by nearby wifi signals, mapped by google with street view. Your phone can say "here is the Mac address of every wifi network I can see and a rough estimate of my position" and Google's services can very accurately triangulate where you are.
Aircraft fly higher, which means they pick up ground radio signals from much further away - both good (ATC communication, ground-based navigation beacons) and bad (intentional jamming).
On the ground, the radio horizon is about 20-40 miles. In the air, the radio horizon is about 200-400 miles.
When I wait for relatives/friends to land in Turkey, I always get a mini heart attack because either plane drifts like Fast and Furious or disappears completely from map and ask myself, is this real this time? Sometimes I have nightmares about it, I see the planes just falling down from the sky spontaneously because of the stress that GPS jamming induced to me over the years.
There are things that will naturally interfere with GPS and they are fairly well known. The FAA provides an expected outage map [1] (a forecast, if you will) for pilots that may need that info. Jamming is an act by humans to intentionally disrupt the GPS signal.
The GPS jamming map linked to in the article[1] discusses this somewhat, in the "About the data" box:
- ADS-B messages include position information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, etc.
- It is not possible to directly measure GNSS interference, but we do calculate the NIC (Navigation integrity category) for ADS-B messages.
- The NIC value encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft.
- Poor NIC values alone might indicate a problem with an aircraft’s equipment or unfavorable positioning. However, when observed in multiple aircraft in close proximity during the same time frame, it suggests the presence of a radio signal interfering with normal GNSS operation.
I'm strongly believe sooner or rather later GPS/GNSS will be considered human right since the areas where their signals are mostly devoid of them are intentionally devoid by the prepetrators.
Currently I am working for a new wireless PHY technique that is more secure and robust against jamming, and also the first that able to propagate with limited non line of sight (NLoS). Hopefully soon we can overcome this anti human GPS/GNSS jamming shenanigans.
For an excellent example for anti jamming secure wireless network for GPS (not my work) please check this thesis by Cara Yang Kataria [1]. She is currently working at the infamous MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
[1] Antenna-driven methods for increased wireless network security:
To the north is the Black Sea, and the Russia-Ukraine war. To the east is Armenia and Azerbaijan (as well as Iran). To the south is the middle east. Also Cyprus with the frozen conflict, there.
Is the data actually interesting? I feel like any place that would have widespread jamming would also see routing away of non-military aircraft meaning you'd never see the jamming taking place except if you happen to get lucky and the jamming zone is larger than the "stay out" zone. This makes sense then why the map is entirely green with some red just at the periphery of Ukraine with the majority of Ukraine having no data since it's a no-fly zone for civilian traffic.
This is a case where nominally, with a solid understanding of geopolitical events, maybe it's not interesting on average. BUT, all of a sudden something might pop up one day. The accessible, "crowdsourced" data is helpful to have in those cases.
The jamming over Kaliningrad affecting civil aviation has made the news recently, and the map does provide some interesting insights both how far the effect reaches into Poland and Sweden, and how often it is turned on and off.
If you read the article, jamming is based on uncertainty of the aircraft, just because it's uncertain, doesn't mean that it's dangerous level of uncertainty
I love this feature, especially how they were able to create it from data that they were already getting, but personally my excitement about it is overshadowed by how colorblind unfriendly it is. Considering how many people are colorblind, ~4% of the global population, or roughly 1 out of 25 people, it's remarkable how often designers get this detail wrong.
The map implementation is not great, what I miss most is country borders and labels.
https://gpsjam.org has come out first and is a much better design IMHO.
Flightradar24 has _just_ the advantage of bigger sensors network and hence wider coverage.
Does anyone know if the how the ADS-B uncertainty measurements interact with GPS spoofing? Often when you look at these maps you see a donut around Kaliningrad - could it be that there's wide area jamming, and then localized spoofing more directly around Kaliningrad?
I'm not expert on it, but I suspect that two of them might somehow be related to the Transmit and Receive stations for Australia's JORN (over the horizon radar) that are located in Western Australia near Laverton.
Though if that were the case, I'd probably guess there should be more areas at the other site locations around northern Australia - so that might invalidate my guess.
I'm a little surprised that Shenzhen doesn't seem to be churning out ITAR-busting anti-jamming systems. The tech is pretty old by now and the market is there.
The choice of cells as a fundamental unit is interesting, I guess it’s better than a color coded gradient map. But this will still suffer from centroid issues.
Most of the time it is not that strong but few weeks ago my family living north have problems with mobile internet and phones (gps was almost fully dead) for like two days cause of interference from r*ssia.
They are fairly large cells. I assume the “bad” cells are displaying some maxima-based aggregate rather than implying the whole area (or a large part of it) in them is noticeably jammed.
The US has laws against interfering with GPS, but I don't think there's any global laws about GPS jamming, you'd need something from the UN but it doesn't seem like most countries would want to give up that ability - we can't even get people to stop making nukes and they have a much higher danger
jjwiseman|1 year ago
Relevant previous posts on HN:
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346
2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106
(From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?")
"A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence."
There are heuristics you can use that allow you to make a pretty good guess about whether jamming is happening based on signals from just one or two aircraft, and have worked well on GPSJAM for the past couple years.
With regard to localization of GPS jammers, yes you can do direction finding of the emitted signal directly, but that's easy mode. For a fun challenge, do it based just on observations of the ADS-B data from affected (and unaffected aircraft). Here's one approach from researchers at the GPS laboratory at Stanford, "GNSS Interference Source Localization Using ADS-B data": https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...
I have some other ideas about how to do that localization.
https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1764054377982308484
"Do aircraft systems really only use GPS and not the full constellation of navigational satellite systems?"
ADS-B doesn't tell you what navigation system is, but my understanding is that most aircraft are still using GPS. Maybe someone who works on aircraft avionics will chime in. A few years ago I did see data that distinguished between different GNSS, and GPS was experiencing more jamming than the others. I assume as multi-network systems become more and more common jammers will just target all of them, if they're not already.
"There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there."
That's right, no (or few) flights over Ukraine with ADS-B transponders means no data. I actually first started mapping GPS jamming on Feb. 14, 2022 (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=45.00000&lon=35.00000&z=3.0&date=202...), because I thought it might give me an early warning of the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine. It didn't work out that way--there was no indication of interference right up until Feb 24., and then all civil aviation stopped and there was no more data for that region (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.18928&lon=33.51687&z=3.9&date=202...).
As some of you have noticed, GPS jamming is highly correlated with conflict zones. Some conflicts are higher intensity than others--for example, I think the airspace around Cyprus has been jammed for years (since 2018 maybe?), and I get the feeling it's more harrassment than anything else (maybe someone more geopolitically savvy than me knows more).
"I see 2 red cells on the US/Mexico border right about Texas/Coahuila region". Someone always says it's cartels, and the evidence is that it's much more likely to be U.S. military testing and training. First, the interference is always in the Laughlin and Randolph military operating areas (MOAs) (https://imgur.com/vieGhgN). Second, the interference usually runs during the week and takes weekends off--which I doubt cartels do, but that's the typical pattern seen for military exercises.
"am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?"
From 2/24/2022 until 3/19/2024, gpsjam.org was the only site with regularly updated GPS jamming maps. On Twitter, @auonsson (https://twitter.com/auonsson) and @rundradion (https://twitter.com/rundradion) have been posting geospatial and other analysis of similar data for the past several months at least, and @x00live (https://twitter.com/x00live) has looked at ADS-B and GPS interference for a while too. (I'm not even going to try to catalog academic or government efforts, though I will mention HawkEye 360's satellite based GPS interference mapping: https://spacenews.com/hawkeye-360-gps-ukr/)
"If line of sight to the jamming antenna is required to be jammed, why do aircraft not have a downwards shield so that they only receive GPS signal from the sky (satellites) and not from jammers (coming from the bottom hemisphere)? Or is the jamming signal so many orders of magnitudes stronger than the satellites that there's always going to be some gain no matter how good the shield is?"
Yes, GPS signals are so weak (below the noise floor!) that it's just super easy to overpower them with terrestrial (or airborne) jammers. But there are special antennas and other techniques for building jam-resistant systems, e.g. "controlled reception pattern antennas" (CRPA): https://www.gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-th... But I think the main reason most civilian aircraft systems aren't jam resistant is because they didn't need to be--For the past several decades GPS jamming has been a much smaller issue than it is now, and I don't think there was sufficient reason to spend time and money on what would have been an over-engineered, mostly unnecessary system. But the situation is changing, and I expect anti-jamming to become a more significant concern by equipment manufacturers and aviation authorities.
[Edited to add:]
"I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine."
From the GPSJAM FAQ: ""I live in one of the red zones and my GPS was fine?"" (https://gpsjam.org/faq/#i-live-in-one-of-the-red-zones). Yeah, the answer is, as you mentioned, aircraft fly at higher altitudes, so they get much longer line of sight to the jammer.
On the general idea of using ADS-B to map GPS interference, when I thought of this idea I was pretty excited. I realized that if you had access to worldwide ADS-B data, which ADS-B Exchange graciously gave me as part of my Advisory Circular project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661), you could also make a worldwide map of GPS jamming, and I hadn't seen anyone do that before (later I found some researchers who realized you could get GPS jamming information from ADS-B, but they only looked at a couple aircraft).
I just think it's pretty neat that even though there were multiple companies devoted to processing, analyzing, and selling ADS-B data, and ADS-B data is not all that complicated, none of those companies had realized this new way of using it. Sometimes there's gold left even in data that you think must have been completely mined out.
Even specifically looking at ADS-B data as it relates to GPS interference, there's still lots to be done! FR24 is mapping jamming, but I don't think anyone else has made worldwide maps of spoofing (yet!): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1770515361739493488
[Edited to add more:]
With respect to safety issues, yes, aircraft have redundant navigation systems. But GPS is one of the important layers that add safety to aviation, and it is not at all normal for entire countries or even larger regions to lsoe GPS while still maintaining passenger flights. This Eurocontrol presentation, "GNSS Interference and Civil Aviation", has lots of details: https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...
From the presentation:
There have been close calls due to lack of GPS. It increases workload for both pilots and controllers, which is a safety issue by itself. Despite a lot of airlines and government aviation agencies saying everything is fine, they're not really prepared for a world with frequent GPS denial, and everything is not fine. Industry and government are organizing emergency meetings about how to handle this in a less ad hoc way than they have been so far (commercial aviation is kind of the opposite of ad hoc).jjwiseman|1 year ago
keithflower|1 year ago
phire|1 year ago
I know older long-range planes from the 70s and 80s had excellent inertial navigation systems.
Not quite as good as GPS, but good enough to know the location of the plane within a few nautical miles. The main problem is that inertial navigation systems drifted over time and required constant recalibration from the crew whenever they had a fix from real navigation beacons and errors could be catastrophic (especially when skirting the edge of Soviet airspace).
I've always wondered if modern avionics suites kept the older style inertial navigation systems as a backup to GPS, or if the systems were deleted when everyone switched to GPS.
I think it would be smart for larger planes to have a modern inertial navigation system that constantly recalibrated off GPS, ready to take over in the case of GPS jamming or spoofing.
egorfine|1 year ago
I was curious how powerful should a jammer be to completely actively substitute GPS coordinates in a city so large.
dzhiurgis|1 year ago
Hawkeye + SAR data would be pretty interesting for ship tracking. I think I've seen some papers here before, but nothing interactive like your site. I think open SAR data is not quite realtime yet, but hope soon is.
unknown|1 year ago
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rightbyte|1 year ago
It might be sampling bias. More military aviation with erratic movement and also planes turning off and on their transmitters.
To measure GPS jamming, you should measure from a fixed object. Trying to do that with planes is unnecessary hard.
tamimio|1 year ago
GNSS, GPS plus other constellations depends on the receiver. Even drones or consumer ones support that these days, some bigger drones even support L5 bands.
TXCSwe|1 year ago
gregmac|1 year ago
> As part of the ADS-B messages we receive from each aircraft, the Navigation integrity category (NIC) encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft. The NIC value informs how certain the aircraft is of its position by providing a radius of uncertainty.
> Poor NIC values alone might indicate a problem with an aircraft’s equipment or unfavorable positioning. However, when observed in multiple aircraft in close proximity during the same time frame, it suggests the presence of a radio signal interfering with normal GNSS operation.
A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence.
toomuchtodo|1 year ago
Could you use RTLSDR triangulation to hone in on granular lat long of jamming sources?
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/detecting-gps-jammers-in-augmented-r...
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/kiwisdr-tdoa-direction-finding-now-f...
throwmenow99|1 year ago
Pretty neat! I starting sending data from my ASD-B feeder as well. https://airplanes.live/get-started/
This is really cool since ASDBExchange was bought out by a private equity firm and has since stopped giving out data to cool projects. I see they are being sued for IP theft and a couple other items. Link to Lawsuit in CA is below because I was reading it tonight.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm...
https://www.lacourt.org/casesummary/ui/index.aspx?casetype=c... 23CHCV02662
adolph|1 year ago
Besides GPS, the GNSS currently includes other satellite navigation systems, such as the Russian GLONASS, and may soon include others such as the European Union’s Galileo and China’s Beidou.
https://www.terrisgps.com/gnss-gps-differences-explained/
tivert|1 year ago
There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there.
There's a big red blob over Turkey, is that maybe the southern edge of the reach of Russian jammers in the Black sea?
There's also a big red blob over the eastern Mediterranean. Is that Israel? I'm not so sure though, because it's not centered on Israel and parts of Israel proper are green on the map. I also assume they're heavy users of GPS, so wouldn't want to jam it.
There's a red blob in Southeast Asia, and that looks like Myanmar, where there's a civil war right now.
There's a little red blob over what looks like Kashmir.
wongarsu|1 year ago
Another notable spot is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave. It looks relatively normal on some days, like today, but on others like yesterday it's covered by solid red stretching far into Poland, Sweden and even Germany.
seatac76|1 year ago
[1]https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/over-100...
muglug|1 year ago
unsigner|1 year ago
What's unfathomable to me is how Israel (or Netanyahu?) keeps treating them as a frenemy.
javier_e06|1 year ago
nolongerthere|1 year ago
randomcarbloke|1 year ago
whalesalad|1 year ago
dfworks|1 year ago
https://dfworks.xyz/blog/hnwi-osint-private-jet/
Slightly tangential so feel free to remove if irrelevant
araes|1 year ago
The Bombardier Global Express 6000 GLT6 result is interesting, as it's a plane with a known large number of military conversions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Global_Express#Mili...
Known Conversions: GlobalEye, Project Dolphin, Raytheon Sentinel, Saab Swordfish, PAL Aerospace P-6, E-11A, HALOE, PEGASUS, Hava SOJ, CAEW, HADES.
Actually has a tie-in with the article, since the Hava SOJ is an air stand-off jammer configuration for the Turkish region.
Otherwise, if I still worked for the government contracting, I'd probably offer you a job, although you're apparently British, so there might have been citizenship issues.
flyinghamster|1 year ago
Crowdsourced data isn't subject to LADD, so adsbexchange and other such sites can and do display such aircraft.
For flights within the US, there's also a private address program that allows an ADS-B equipped plane to broadcast an alternate address.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
jjwiseman|1 year ago
toomuchtodo|1 year ago
Also: https://gpsjam.org/ | https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gpsjam
(am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?)
someotherperson|1 year ago
Does anyone know if a similar service covers things like GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou?
EDIT: nevermind, these services can't distinguish. From the FAQ:
> The ADS-B data used by this map includes information on the accuracy of the navigation system used by each aircraft, but doesn't specify the type of navigation system. It could be GPS, another global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like GLONASS, or it could be an inertial navigation system (INS). My understanding is that most aircraft are using GPS, so that's probably mostly what the map shows.
imoverclocked|1 year ago
https://sapt.faa.gov/outages.php?outageType=129001450&outage...
H8crilA|1 year ago
croemer|1 year ago
Ok it exists, but shielding is (only) about 20dB looking downwards, which may not be enough: https://safran-navigation-timing.com/product/8230aj-gps-gnss...
morcheeba|1 year ago
- GPS positioning is more accurate if the satellites it sees come from a variety of angles (GDOP), so the satellites near the horizon are valuable.
- Aircraft pitch and roll, so a fixed antenna like this would lose precision as it turns to make an approach - just about the worst possible time.
It's difficult to make an antenna with a sharp cutoff to limit the ground vs. above-ground. So, most anti-jammers will use beamforming to cancel out interference in one or more specific directions. So, the null in the antenna moves to follow the interference.
GDOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigat...
0cf8612b2e1e|1 year ago
AdamH12113|1 year ago
* A large part of Eastern Europe around Ukraine is missing data, and there are many jammed/interfered areas around it, including the southern coast of the Black Sea and parts of Poland and the Baltic. Part of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Kaliningrad are also jammed/interfered.
* Part of Germany near Berlin, possibly part of the Ukraine-related jamming/interference?
* A large part of the eastern Mediterranean and some of the Middle East around Gaza.
* A small area on the India-Pakistan border near Punjab and Lahore.
* Two medium-sized areas in western Myanmar.
* Two small areas in New Guinea with a gap in the data between them, spanning the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border.
* Two small areas in western Australia.
* A small area on the US-Mexico border.
* A dot in southern China with some gaps in the data around it near the border with Vietnam.
Ukraine, Gaza, and Myanmar all have major conflicts going on. Other comments have suggested that the US-Mexico interference might be related to drug cartels. The India-Pakistan border is a longstanding point of tension. Not sure what (if anything) is going on in New Guinea and Australia.
The jamming/interference in India-Pakistan, US-Mexico, and China all went away in the last 6 hours -- they're only visible in the 24-hour data.
traceroute66|1 year ago
No. It is not.
The data is ADS-B data which is broadcast by aircraft.
FR24 (and other similar services) obtain the data via a community[1], you can take part too[2].
For certain parts of the world, they may have the option to augment the data via commercial services, but that is highly unlikely to be on a global basis.
Conclusion: Missing coverage means no community coverage in that area and no commercial augmentation.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/how-we-track-flights-with... [2] https://www.flightradar24.com/apply-for-receiver/
ben_w|1 year ago
Of the four tiles in that area (for March 19th at least), one is entirely in Poland, one is covering the Polish-German border, one is a bit of the German coast around Rügen but mostly the Baltic Sea, and the other is Bornholm (island in the Baltic Sea) and a bit of the Swedish coast.
My guess is, this is part of a larger system to limit Russian military use of the Baltic, and possibly also a single layer of defence against Russian aircraft and missiles targeting Berlin and Copenhagen. Likewise, I would guess that the strip of interference from St Petersburg in the direction of Moscow is a similar single-layer of defence by Russia.
At this resolution, it also looks like the west is interfering with access to St Petersburg and someone (could reasonably be either side) is worried about Kaliningrad, but that image is also also making me think "WTF?" about the Gulf of Riga.
The single tile near Kandalaksha (Russia) suggests something interesting is going on there, but I have no idea what that might be, and there's a non-zero possibility that it's a deliberate red-herring to make western analysts waste time — as an analogy, imagine a troll releasing three greased pigs with the numbers "1", "2", and "4" painted on the side.
Reason077|1 year ago
But what's going on in Western Australia? And South-west Texas?
barryrandall|1 year ago
My guess is that the spots in Western Australia are the same thing, given the nearby RAAF training bases.
_kb|1 year ago
zsims|1 year ago
lhoff|1 year ago
I guess south-west Texas is most likely also military. E.g. the Naval Air Station Kingsville is not far away.
unknown|1 year ago
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jjwiseman|1 year ago
verandaguy|1 year ago
Then again, I'm not very GIS/geodesy minded, so maybe hexagons are the best shape that'll tessellate over a sphere easily.
Was this work in any meaningful way inspired by GPSjam? If yes, it'd be nice to have an acknowledgement in there.
y04nn|1 year ago
This is Uber H3 for spacial indexing: https://h3geo.org/
This was a good read:
https://klioba.com/how-to-use-postgresql-for-military-geoana...
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662246
Spacemolte|1 year ago
I've seen hexagons used for maps and boardgames for years.
wyldfire|1 year ago
hammock|1 year ago
The jamming is done to make crossing the border without going through the checkpoint more difficult
barryrandall|1 year ago
TL;DR: It's weak signal, not jamming. The weak signal reports come from military training aircraft carrying out maneuvers that cause temporary signal loss.
seatac76|1 year ago
tazu|1 year ago
TomBombadildoze|1 year ago
ape4|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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terryf|1 year ago
I wonder how the jamming works - is it just for higher altitudes or maybe it only affects GPS and my phone also uses GLONASS or something?
jcfrei|1 year ago
themoonisachees|1 year ago
For one, accelerometer-based location has become pretty good. You can usually get by for a few kilometers on the average road.
For two, Google maps is aware that you are driving, and this it sticks to roads, especially ones that are on your itinerary, because of your GPS registers as the middle of a field, it's more likely that you're experiencing GPS issues rather than you driving at 130km/h in a potato field.
Finally, location services are amplified by nearby wifi signals, mapped by google with street view. Your phone can say "here is the Mac address of every wifi network I can see and a rough estimate of my position" and Google's services can very accurately triangulate where you are.
tjohns|1 year ago
On the ground, the radio horizon is about 20-40 miles. In the air, the radio horizon is about 200-400 miles.
weinzierl|1 year ago
icegreentea2|1 year ago
tuukkah|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
gusfoo|1 year ago
CSDude|1 year ago
tdudhhu|1 year ago
I am absolutely no expert in this but I can imagine that even natural occurrences can interfere with the GPS.
imoverclocked|1 year ago
[1] https://sapt.faa.gov/outages.php?outageType=129001450&outage...
mmwelt|1 year ago
teleforce|1 year ago
Currently I am working for a new wireless PHY technique that is more secure and robust against jamming, and also the first that able to propagate with limited non line of sight (NLoS). Hopefully soon we can overcome this anti human GPS/GNSS jamming shenanigans.
For an excellent example for anti jamming secure wireless network for GPS (not my work) please check this thesis by Cara Yang Kataria [1]. She is currently working at the infamous MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
[1] Antenna-driven methods for increased wireless network security:
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/115902
irviss|1 year ago
goodcanadian|1 year ago
ianburrell|1 year ago
nevir|1 year ago
vlovich123|1 year ago
martinky24|1 year ago
wongarsu|1 year ago
hoffs|1 year ago
consumer451|1 year ago
What is the max range I wonder? Probably same as radar? How much power does it take?
asdfgjkl|1 year ago
sodality2|1 year ago
Edit: Looks like they might source their data from commercial ADSB providers. Bummer
lostfocus|1 year ago
hoherd|1 year ago
umpalumpaaa|1 year ago
espinielli|1 year ago
icegreentea2|1 year ago
throwaway4good|1 year ago
yla92|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_civil_war_(2021%E2%80%...
https://myanmar-now.org/en/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfo_5Cnf4A0
photonbucket|1 year ago
tuukkah|1 year ago
Red areas: Military experiments and exercises, probably. https://gpsjam.org/faq/#what-can-cause-aircraft-to-report-lo...
gavanm|1 year ago
Though if that were the case, I'd probably guess there should be more areas at the other site locations around northern Australia - so that might invalidate my guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Net...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'02.6%22S+122%C2...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'36.3%22S+122%C2...
traceroute66|1 year ago
You answered your own question. Put 2+2 together.
Hint... https://www.flightradar24.com/apply-for-receiver/
asylteltine|1 year ago
[deleted]
hk1337|1 year ago
stracer|1 year ago
throw0101d|1 year ago
* https://gpsjam.org
mjs|1 year ago
topynate|1 year ago
lifeisstillgood|1 year ago
I don’t think I am misreading the map - what on earth is that? Are the sheep rebelling and have some decent anti-aircraft tech?
e_i_pi_2|1 year ago
seatac76|1 year ago
dr_kiszonka|1 year ago
poorman|1 year ago
silvestrov|1 year ago
Might be use of WebGL which Mac-Safari doesn't support.
callalex|1 year ago
can16358p|1 year ago
nf3|1 year ago
- There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Starr!
ErigmolCt|1 year ago
krzyk|1 year ago
I wonder, how does it influence navigation in mobiles/cars?
machinekob|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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dghughes|1 year ago
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KingOfCoders|1 year ago
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Vicinity9635|1 year ago
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