Mildly interesting, and highly likely related. A cluster of 5(?) Ukrainian marine drones wound up today outside and around of Constanta off the coast of Romania with one detonating in the port and the rest detonating... somewhere around. Que here noisy exposion in port:
The Ukrainans apparently lost control of the drones and they wound up there. My pet theory is that Russian EW jammed the control signals and guided the GPS jamming walking them to Constanta. I'll admit, if it was intentional (it seems so) it's pretty damn' impressive work from Russian EW.
Interesting to see that they are able to identify the specific satellite. I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Working on construction projects on the Romanian coastline (just South of Ukraine) and on the Polish continental waters (just West of Kaliningrad) we experienced jamming on a daily basis.
That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right? Unless it is very carefully aimed which seems unlikely since it is also trying to cover a very large volume.
>must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
They don't give a fuck.
Was watching a youtube video by a russian the other day talking about war & sanction impact and things like ride sharing apps literally say on screen the location is going to be wrong and to select pickup spot manually. It's just assumed to be fucked as a given even at an app development level
Bit of a reach, their internet may be restricted to a degree, but they sure do have internet... my partner calls and video calls their family back in Russia daily from half way around the world.
it's broken in the most retarded and cowardly way imaginable, which is perfectly representative of Putin's regime. they no longer block things via a kangaroo court order, but throttle and/or allow a few kilobytes to go through before cutting it off. Cloudflare is summarily blocked, breaking nine out of ten random websites, likely to habituate the population to the inevitably coming Great Cuckwall.
do not ever give up your guns, my American friends.
"Do not ever give up your guns", har-har. In the guerilla stage of the Second Chechen War one of the ways to deal with the insurgents who would barricade in a building was to drive a T-72 to it and fire a couple of HE shells at it. The house would fold in like, well, a house of cards; I believe there even used to be recorded footage on YT. I imagine a single fragmentation shell would be enough for an average American house. My point is, in the modern days having small firearms is not really going to help you against a government who would be willing to use its military on its own territory; you'd need automatic weapons and artillery at the very least, and a lot of foreign funding and training as well. Even then...
okay, let me rephrase that: would it have taken two wars to subdue that tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's?
Not only Poland, they have jammers around St Petersburg as well which affects Finland, there have been reports about boats losing GNSS reception in Swedish waters, etc. This has been going on for years.
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
Not on regular Russians, mind. Their ruling class. They're still free to move about the continent, make investments, do whatever. Currently Europe seems to be more interested in breaking away from the US than dealing with the power that has killed hundreds of thousands on their own continent.
Maybe there are reasons Europe is pulling away from the US?
The current US president has threatened to invade European territory, is attempting to impose Russia's preferred "peace" plan on Ukraine, and has recently relaxed sanctions on Russia. He also consistently denigrates the military support Europe's given to the US in the recent past. The US has basically cut aid to Ukraine to zero, while Europe continues to supply them, which is currently the best way of dealing with Russia, sucking their military power into a war their not going to win.
When the Russians invaded Georgia in 2008, Europeans inked a deal for a second gas pipeline with them, Nordstream 2. When they annexed Crimea in 2014, Europeans went to the Sochi Olympics (which happened that same year) and went to the World Cup in 2018. And this is before you take into account the dozens of smaller incidents.
Those aren't "threats to invade European territory", not even ones that were ignored by the military. Those were shooting wars that got people killed and redrew the map in Eurasia. Europeans continued to do business with Russia more-or-less unimpeded until 2022. Many Russians still live, work, and do business in the Schengen area.
The US Congress passed a bill to fund Ukraine this week. [0]
The (misguided IMO) idea was that buying their gas and integrating them into world markets would strengthen ties and liberalize them in the medium term.
It's not completely true, but there are hundreds of thousands of visas given to Russian tourists each year by European countries, something that's hopefully will get corrected soon.
> According to data cited in Wednesday's letter, which was seen by Reuters, 477,878 Schengen visas were issued to Russian citizens for tourism in 2025, up from 440,558 in 2024.
Europe seems to be interested in neither. As a rule, elites in any country are not concerned about hundreds of thousands of their citizens being killed. I have yet to be proven wrong.
US has got itself compromised by Russia. US president is a Russian asset. Breaking away from unreliable former ally is the logical thing to do for Europe's security.
Funny how Ukraine situation started improving once they have severly limited sharing information with the US.
GPS interference is estimated from ADS-B data which is broadcast by airplanes so that they can be tracked. The lack of data over Ukraine is because their airspace is closed to civilian flights.
Probably because Wester jammers are used from ground and drones have antennas on the top side. For comparison, Russian satellite can jam the signal from above and on a large area. Russian technology is superior.
If Russian GNSS receivers wasn't affected they wouldn't need fiber optic drones, Ukraine is jamming both the small and large drones. Russia have both their own Kometa system to try to filter out the jamming signals, and plenty of Chinese tech as well.
Russian technology is very dependent on both western and Chinese tech, yet they couldn't even defend their own oil refineries in St Petersburg or make any relevant progress along the front in years.
To be fair, USA also could not defend their allies and their bases, and didn't move the frontline in Iran as well. And if Iran buys a submarine capable to launch missiles from a friendly country the situation might get worse.
No one gives a fuck what russian residents are thinking about it. And if they start to talk about issues - police will quickly force everyone to shut up.
Thats true, but its also true that most russians support this war. Maybe they dont say it, but they are the soldiers in the trenches, mechanical engineers building missiles, software developers building their military software, Oil/NG workers that fund the war and so on
The soldiers in the trenches now are mostly recruited from convicts/suspects who want to get a pardon, and volunteers lured by large salary and bonuses, and loan repayment suspension. Most prefer to support the war from the couch.
I'm sure that if you ask any of them, they would say that they don't have a choice. Same as western IT developers that continue to support the enshittification of the internet. They don't have a choice. /s
Russians got used that GPS in Moscow and St. Petersburg often shows wrong position (I did not observe it because I never enable GPS though). We also have mobile Internet shoutdowns which are more annoying than GPS spoofing.
I’ve briefly been somewhere for a few days with significant GPS interference, and yes, basically phone navigation doesn’t work reliably.
For me it was a minor annoyance while driving but presumably any apps that rely heavily on GPS (Uber, food delivery) just wouldn’t work very well or at all
Jamming in general will affect everything using those frequencies (and potentially more besides) in a given area, so if you're using it you're weighing up the effects it'll have on your stuff as well. (early in the current Ukrainian invasion, reportedly Russian electronic warfare units were screwing up their own side more than the Ukrainians)
Doesn't sound like you have actually been there. Military is a major employer, but in a territory inhabited since 1944 there are generations of people born there who didn't see a reason to live, the same foreign gastarbeiter as in any Russian city, etc. I.e plenty of ordinary people who could be inconvenienced.
I don't think you meant it like that, but Kaliningrad, or Königsberg is inhabited since a bit longer. For example Immanuel Kant lived and taught there.
Obviously. But since the Russian occupation infamously expelled the natives completely, when I talk about “inhabited since 1945” in the context of people living there now, I’m obviously referring to the Russian population.
>That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
Russia does not care, nor does it care about its population.
Where are you from?
I ask because you have western privilege, like me, and assume our governments care about its people. Why I lucked out being born in Sweden, the more I learn about the world, the more I am convinced I lucked out ahahaha.
1) with the exception of probably a few pensioners (who also depend on gov’t funding), everyone in the area is dependent on the military. It’s a giant military base in the middle of nowhere.
2) anyone not military (and hence in on it), is a pensioner or the like and won’t give a shit about GPS.
This is not a thriving urban metropolis or tourist location.
Why lie? It _is_ a tourist location, with > 2mln tourists annually (for their 1 mln permanent population). It also has quite a diverse economy, with Avtotor being a major car assembler (though not quite what it was pre-war), a fishing industry, amber mining, a TV manufacturer, &c. With a significant military presence, of course, but "giant military base in the middle of nowhere" is just ridiculous.
The city has half a million residents and the oblast has a million residents. There's restaurants, museums, grocery stores, car dealerships, parks, zoo's, malls, stadiums, factories, train stations, an airport, ports etc etc. It's a real place.
Yeah, same with traveling by boat in the Baltic Sea, been continuously GPS-jammed since 2022 or something annoying like that, basically the entire South East-coast of Sweden been unnavigatable with GPS since then.
>I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Russia signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1967, this may be a treaty violation of this or other treaties, something like that or retaliation regarding it may be possible.
You can hack the satellite, or use other electronic warfare options to jam or interfere with it's operations.
You can shoot it down with a missile.
The X-37B is in space right now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.
If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).
No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.
> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years
I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.
LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.
90% of starlink satellites are >400km in altitude. They aren't in very low earth orbits where that intuition even might be correct. They're above the space station.
I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.
I've thought about this before - do you actually need to "shoot it down" (make it explode)? What if you just nudge it a little and either make it spin or change its orbit? If your missile can reach the satellite then these seem like things that should be possible, no?
Depends, if you nudge it only a little, its own onboard stabilizers / thrusters should be able to correct it. It'd have to be more than its own systems can correct for.
The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely. Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already. Therefore, the disruptions must either be regular tests of the capability, or just actual communication. Right?
> The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely.
Is it? If it is an early warning system, could it be jammed briefly so it would fail to warn, couldn't it? It will be a global disruption of GPS, but a brief one and I'm sure people wouldn't be concerned of it due to other news.
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless
Do you believe that cutting sea cables is a sensible action? Or sending drones to neighbors? It is what they call "hybrid asymmetric warfare", I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but presumably it may let them take over the world or something.
Probably they just strive to normalize deviations, to boil frog slowly. When people become used to some stupid actions they widen their repertoire, until everything short of tanks crossing the borders became just normal news noise nobody reads twice.
There is definitely value in having a demonstrated as opposed a simply supposed capability, though. And actions that are 'almost-certainly-but-not-completely-provably-us' is very much something Russia likes to do.
(One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go)
> One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go
GPS is suprisingly low power. I believe the satellites themselves transmit between 20W and 50W, and in general the signal is quieter than the background noise threshold. It's only by correlating with the PRNG stream [1] that the data signal can be detected at all [2].
[1] The PRNG stream is 1023 bits at 1.023Mbps, so repeats every 1ms, and only autocorrelates with the correct stream when they are aligned. When the streams are not aligned, the data looks like random noise, and each transmitter has a different LFSR configuration to provide a different sequence such that each stream has a low level of correlation with another.
[2] The PRNG stream bits at 1.023Mbps are exclusive-or'd with the data stream at 50bps, so when the decoder is using the correct PRNG and sequence offset, exclusive-or'ing with that produces detectable long pulses at the expected 50bps.
FWIW this is how almost every communication system works. They're all weaker than background noise (e.g. sunlight) but you extract them by correlating with some kind of carrier signal (often but not always a sine wave)
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already.
Forget "state actors", truck drivers have taken out entire airports with GPS jammers:
The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate.
Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation as its line-of-sight only. But if the sun threw a Carrington event (or worse) at us, I think a lot of western aviation could carry on.
> The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate. Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation […]
I'm aware of the FAA's MON, Minimum Operating Network.
Exactly: that doesn't help boats. Or people in cars. Or farmers:
Why these capabilities, if they exist, were not used to send Iranian drones to a wrong target? Maybe because they do not exist. Israel definitely would be happy if thousands of drones were rerouted to a neighbour country or into the sea.
Even if that's for communication, repurposing it for mass jamming shouldn't be that hard. It already has this effect. Unless it's low power satellites that wouldn't be able to sustain radio signal in anything longer than short bursts.
yeah, I have to admit I was commenting on possibilities here without having gone into the article yet -- having now looked for real, I agree that the disruptions don't seem very useful for actual jamming and repeatedly like this for years across satellites and bands in this specific way doesn't make sense for some mistaken targeting either.
There is a very good reason to do this. Suppose you had a device that would make the shoplifting detectors at stores go off. The first time you did it everyone would get hassled. And the second time and so forth. But if you kept doing it eventually the employees would stop caring. Then you just walk out the door with your stuff.
Is that normal? To promote a research paper in ArXiv so heavily? I think the parent comment’s concerns still apply, saying a large, well-funded YouTube channel is specifically releasing coordinated content to promote this prompts more questions than it answers, in my mind.
Yes it is common, just not always to the scale of a Veritasium video. Usually it’s just the press office for a university putting out a press release or a summary article in Scientific American.
But in the case where the story is interesting to a larger audience, having a push behind a story across non-academic media is not unheard of. If you can get some media coverage of an academic topic, it can be very beneficial to the researchers’ careers. One goal for a researcher is to bring notoriety to their research, to their institution, and to the field in general. This is the main motivation I see.
The authors may have pushed the arxiv paper out earlier due to the timing of the release of the video.
It doesn't sound that conspiratory: someone of the millions of subscribers of Veritasium watches the video and thinks that is good content suited for HN, but instead of linking the video itself (rarely video links raise upvotes here) it links the primary source.
But even if the paper was "promoted" (i.e. a link submitted), what is bad about it? People seem to find it interesting, and unless there are upvoting bots involved, posting links is the raison d'être of this site.
I doubt it based solely on that there are multiple interviews including from one of the paper’s authors. Given that Veritasium is a very well known channel at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they were contacted instead and then roughly coordinated the timing of the paper and video release together.
The video did not settle on the jamming of von der Leyen plane on approach to Plovdiv, but AFAIR it was a (likely unintentional) lie.
Never acknowledged by von der Leyen nor by her press secretary because it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office.
TLDR: Neither von den Leyen nor her office knew about ADB-S nor about the multiple services that collect ADB-S broadcasts and republish, and there was none around who could stop them from announcing an embarrassing lie.
Probably because some missing mention of some specific thing you care deeply about doesn't imply "lack of basic world knowledge" for an entire political office, really strange thing to say and most likely why people are downvoting. It's neither kind, curious and definitively a snark/swipe that doesn't really add anything to the point you were trying to make.
If you listen to the press conference, Podesta (the press secretary) spoke about the plane circling and not being able to land. When preparing the press conference, she should have checked if this obvious lie can be obviously disproved, but she did not. This probably means that she did not know this was a lie, but then someone who ordered this to be announced knew.
My bet is that von der Leyen or her close aide told Podesta to announce the lie in these terms, and the thing that worries me as a European is that there was none to warn these war-mongering ladies that they are making a mistake. This whole situation screams for an intern that sets up the mics and has a callsign and who can stop Podesta as she walks to the pied de stal of shame and explain that the position of planes is monitored all the time and is public information.
But I bet that all their interns are servile 3rd generation eurocrats.
P.S. The whole press conference (and many others) are fascinating to listen to. The language these people use is softened by the media. What do you think von der Leyen was doing on that plane? She was going "along the frontline" to inspect our preparedness for war where "the frontline" is the Eastern EU border.
P.P.S The story made rounds in EU circles, and there was a parliamentary question offering a chance to apologize, but von der Leyen chose to ignore it.
I don't care about Ursula von der Leyen nor her plane, merely explaining that if you try to extrapolate that a group of people don't have "basic world knowledge" based on not knowing a specific technology nor how/why it's used, the community is actually doing the rest of us a favor by downvoting it.
Want to discuss her office's use of a plane and how it's related to inspecting ammunition factories or whatever tirade you're going on about? Do create a new submission where that can be discussed, hardly related to the interesting story and methods of trying to track down GNSS interference.
It's a 9 months old story, even the MEP who wrote the question got over it.
I raised it because it was mentioned in the Veritassium video, but they stopped short of calling it a lie. They wanted to stay on topic, but the beauty of HN is that we can wander slightly off-topic and discover curious facts without being punished.
Yeah, curious facts like "it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office". Go outside brother, and get some fresh air before that too disappears :)
I wonder why they call this specific discovery “jamming”. What they found is a relatively rare burst transmissions over roughly 5MHz of spectrum of something looking like a 12ms cyclic prefix with spacing related to 150 seconds multiplies. I would suspect it is some sort of sync or data close to L1 GPS frequencies, that as a side effect causing lower CNR for the GPS receivers. Btw it is only 10dB, which also I can’t really call “jamming”.
Overall it seems to be an overfitting the observation to the wider intent of a malicious actor.
I do not see any discussion of the power required for such wide-area jamming. Even as the useful GPS signal is quite weak at the ground level, this satellite would require power in kW range, right?
Being on a Molniya orbit probably also helps: the apogee is at nearly 40000km, but the perigee is on the order of 1600 (according to the EKS wiki page), so outside of their primary observation points of their orbit they are quite close to the earth and thus have a ton of blasting ability for satellites with geostationary comms capabilities.
TLDR (conclusion from the paper):
"By a combination of these techniques the satellite Cosmos 2546 (NORAD ID 45608) was identified with high confidence as
one source of the interference. Further analysis pointed to the Russian Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema, an early warning
constellation to which Cosmos 2546 belongs, as collectively responsible for the wide-area transient interference causing GNSS
degradation across Europe since 2019."
> Note that Cosmos 2546 was launched in May 2020 and so cannot be responsible for the interference events that occurred in 2019. Moreover, Cosmos 2546 was not over Europe during some interference events after May 2020. But during all events on the 75 days shown in Table 1 there was at least one EKS satellite above a 35∘ elevation angle with respect to every reference station that observed the interference. Thus, it is highly probable that the EKS constellation is collectively responsible for the wide-area transient GNSS interference events noted since 2019.
Your local cellphone towers already provide a more accurate position beacon signal for GPS modules in most parts of the world. Additional RF beam-forming in G5+ systems also make it impractical for lamers to jam long-distances due to limited coherent signal propagation.
Indeed, amateur Hams have caught Russian ships jamming/spoofing local port traffic several years before the various official overseas conflicts started. Not sure if it is government sponsored, or just various smuggling schemes like some ships spamming China harbors. =3
I have this idea that I'll get Bosch 9-DoF sensors onto every lane of every road, at least twice a month, then any other thing on a road can use a Shazam - like waveform lookup to determine where they are.
I didn't come up with this for dead reckoning, it's more for, um, autonomous cars to be able to avoid potholes and stuff.
As an ordinary person reading all of this from far away, it seems that some Europeans are addicted to war. If there is not enough, new ones are started from all sides. There is no "good guys" in these comments.
from a cold-war diplomat interview "What I experienced in the decades of my service was that each side constantly assumed the worst of the other. In each situation, if anyone had doubts they would make stories about the intentions of the other. .. If somehow people could stop doing this, much suffering could be reduced".. something like that, IIR
One can tell that this is 'from far away'. Europe was hoping that Russia, in their own interest would pursue peaceful cooperation, even when Putin was already talking about 'spheres of influence'. When Russia invaded Georgia, Europe turned the blind eye and was still hoping for peaceful relations with Russia. When Russia annexed Crimea, same thing. Even when Russia was pulling together forces along Ukraines border and the US pulled out their personnel from Ukraine, there were still many voices in Europe that Russia would never invade Ukraine. We can all be lucky that Ukraine wasn't as naive and prepared for this moment, otherwise Russia would probably have invaded a couple more countries by now.
It's been known that Russia does GPS interference near their Western border and the Baltic down to Ukraine for several years now. It's something airline pilots prepare for now, and expect.
Not sure why this is being couched as novel or surprising.
The novel aspect is that it is being conducted by a satellite, rather than a ground station. Which is an escalation in sophistication which makes counter-jamming much more difficult and also gives global reach to the jammer.
Was responding to many of these comments, which read as if the commenters haven’t heard of this before.
The top comment in this thread is some dude asking if we can ‘do something now that we know the source’ lol.
We’ve known the source for 5 years. The fact this particular jamming originates from a Russian satellite and not Russian terrestrial-based equipment doesn’t change much. And while it’s unconvenient for planes and affects separation minima, planes have inertial systems and pilots deal with this easily. It happens in many places around the world, actually, although the Russians are definitely the worst offenders.
TLDR: Russia is jamming GPS and GNSS over Europe, purposefully, using a constellation of military satellites, part of the Russian nuclear program.
Theory is that Russia has been constantly practicing to totally disrupt GPS and GNSS (and the Chinese system) across all of Europe since 2014. Practicing to deploy electronic warfare not across a warzone or even a country but an entire continent.
>This paper analyzes and identifies a space-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference source that has caused scores of powerful transient wide-area interference events over continental Europe, Greenland, and Canada since 2019. While terrestrial or near-terrestrial sources are primarily responsible for the recent uptick in GNSS interference worldwide, space-based interferers are of special concern given their potential for vast geographic reach and their portent of a qualitative escalation in GNSS interference. Based on data collected between 2019 and 2026 from a network of terrestrial GNSS reference stations, this paper (1) develops a received-power-based detection framework; (2) details the spatial, temporal, and spectral patterns of wide-area interference events caused by the source; (3) presents and analyzes identification techniques that blend received-power and time-difference-of-arrival measurements; and (4) applies these techniques to confidently identify the GNSS interference source as a constellation of Russian early warning satellites in Molniya ("lightning") orbits.
Playing Devil's advocate, given how much firepower Russia has, why is it so soft on Ukraine. I mean what is the endgoal for Russia here? Tire out the US/NATO Empire just as US did to Soviets in Afghanistan. I sometimes feel like all these events are orchestrated as Simon Dixon talks about them in his videos.
Russia is throwing most of its deployable conventional firepower on Ukraine and whatever robots, KABs, missiles and drones it can manufacture. It is their manufacturing capability which is limited.
Have you seen the Oryx list of destroyed equipment? The defunct Soviet Union produced a shitton of armored vehicles, Russia inherited most of them and they all got burnt in Ukraine.
It may not have attacked intentionally the EU yet, but a week ago there was an incident when a Russian drone apparently strayed away from whatever Ukrainian target it may have had, and it hit an apartment building in the city of Galati, in Romania, in the EU, injuring two people.
In the past there have been other incidents with Russian weapons reaching the neighboring countries from the EU, like Poland and Romania, but this was the first time when they hit a populated area, causing human injuries.
The linked article disproves your claim. It seems you're mistaking the naval drone incident, which did not cause casualties, with the Russian drone strike.
> The country's defence ministry said the drone had self-detonated near an oil terminal without causing any casualties, although authorities have said it caused considerable damage to a ship and warehouses.
> Ukraine later confirmed one of its naval drones had been involved, saying it had been knocked off course by Russian electronic interference. Moscow has yet to comment.
> It also comes a week after two people were injured when a drone hit a Romanian apartment block in the eastern city of Galati - close to the border with Ukraine.
> Romanian officials said they had confirmed it was a Russian drone but Moscow said "accusations" of its involvement were "unsubstantiated".
You can likely bet that Space X with their thousands of sats deployed in space already has among them a few hundred stealth US military sats strategically placed and ready for the command to deal with the few Russky sats causing these problems ... think our Space Force.
This thread seems an intended call for all NAFO warriors to quickly gather with anti Russian speech. Fair enough, there's a war, GPS jamming is to be expected. Maybe annoying for some, but a need for others. Hope the war to not escalate further, it will be more than GPS inconvenience.
Mildly interesting, and highly likely related. A cluster of 5(?) Ukrainian marine drones wound up today outside and around of Constanta off the coast of Romania with one detonating in the port and the rest detonating... somewhere around. Que here noisy exposion in port:
https://youtu.be/Y8kdneBU_3Q?si=cr07TeMnxJTG-3TM&t=17
No significant damage.
The Ukrainans apparently lost control of the drones and they wound up there. My pet theory is that Russian EW jammed the control signals and guided the GPS jamming walking them to Constanta. I'll admit, if it was intentional (it seems so) it's pretty damn' impressive work from Russian EW.
Interesting to see that they are able to identify the specific satellite. I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Working on construction projects on the Romanian coastline (just South of Ukraine) and on the Polish continental waters (just West of Kaliningrad) we experienced jamming on a daily basis.
That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right? Unless it is very carefully aimed which seems unlikely since it is also trying to cover a very large volume.
>must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
They don't give a fuck.
Was watching a youtube video by a russian the other day talking about war & sanction impact and things like ride sharing apps literally say on screen the location is going to be wrong and to select pickup spot manually. It's just assumed to be fucked as a given even at an app development level
They don't even have internet anymore...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr510de17jlo
Bit of a reach, their internet may be restricted to a degree, but they sure do have internet... my partner calls and video calls their family back in Russia daily from half way around the world.
it's broken in the most retarded and cowardly way imaginable, which is perfectly representative of Putin's regime. they no longer block things via a kangaroo court order, but throttle and/or allow a few kilobytes to go through before cutting it off. Cloudflare is summarily blocked, breaking nine out of ten random websites, likely to habituate the population to the inevitably coming Great Cuckwall.
do not ever give up your guns, my American friends.
"Do not ever give up your guns", har-har. In the guerilla stage of the Second Chechen War one of the ways to deal with the insurgents who would barricade in a building was to drive a T-72 to it and fire a couple of HE shells at it. The house would fold in like, well, a house of cards; I believe there even used to be recorded footage on YT. I imagine a single fragmentation shell would be enough for an average American house. My point is, in the modern days having small firearms is not really going to help you against a government who would be willing to use its military on its own territory; you'd need automatic weapons and artillery at the very least, and a lot of foreign funding and training as well. Even then...
what was the outcome of the First Chechen War?
Why, the Second Chechen War.
okay, let me rephrase that: would it have taken two wars to subdue that tiny, sparsely populated country had that country been armed with nothing but sticks, stones, and Molotov's?
Does ukrainians and romanians give a fuck, 'cause not many russians live in the north-west part of Black Sea? And the jamming there's from who?
Yes, it's very wide spread and not carefully aimed at all. It's also not done by satellite but a ground based station.
https://gpsjam.org/
That covers most of Poland, wtf
Not only Poland, they have jammers around St Petersburg as well which affects Finland, there have been reports about boats losing GNSS reception in Swedish waters, etc. This has been going on for years.
Don't worry though, it's been condemned in a sternly worded letter: https://www.icao.int/news/icao-assembly-condemns-gnss-radio-...
Why wouldn't it?
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
Not on regular Russians, mind. Their ruling class. They're still free to move about the continent, make investments, do whatever. Currently Europe seems to be more interested in breaking away from the US than dealing with the power that has killed hundreds of thousands on their own continent.
Maybe there are reasons Europe is pulling away from the US?
The current US president has threatened to invade European territory, is attempting to impose Russia's preferred "peace" plan on Ukraine, and has recently relaxed sanctions on Russia. He also consistently denigrates the military support Europe's given to the US in the recent past. The US has basically cut aid to Ukraine to zero, while Europe continues to supply them, which is currently the best way of dealing with Russia, sucking their military power into a war their not going to win.
And?
When the Russians invaded Georgia in 2008, Europeans inked a deal for a second gas pipeline with them, Nordstream 2. When they annexed Crimea in 2014, Europeans went to the Sochi Olympics (which happened that same year) and went to the World Cup in 2018. And this is before you take into account the dozens of smaller incidents.
Those aren't "threats to invade European territory", not even ones that were ignored by the military. Those were shooting wars that got people killed and redrew the map in Eurasia. Europeans continued to do business with Russia more-or-less unimpeded until 2022. Many Russians still live, work, and do business in the Schengen area.
The US Congress passed a bill to fund Ukraine this week. [0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-ukraine...
The (misguided IMO) idea was that buying their gas and integrating them into world markets would strengthen ties and liberalize them in the medium term.
Nobody believes that anymore, post-2022.
Remind us, why US Congress funds a country on literally the other side of the planet?
> They're still free to move about the continent, make investments, do whatever
Except that's not true at all, is it? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
It's not completely true, but there are hundreds of thousands of visas given to Russian tourists each year by European countries, something that's hopefully will get corrected soon.
> According to data cited in Wednesday's letter, which was seen by Reuters, 477,878 Schengen visas were issued to Russian citizens for tourism in 2025, up from 440,558 in 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/world/sweden-urges-eu-tighten-rules-...
It should have been the very first thing to go.
Europe seems to be interested in neither. As a rule, elites in any country are not concerned about hundreds of thousands of their citizens being killed. I have yet to be proven wrong.
US has got itself compromised by Russia. US president is a Russian asset. Breaking away from unreliable former ally is the logical thing to do for Europe's security.
Funny how Ukraine situation started improving once they have severly limited sharing information with the US.
How far is the horizon from the tallest antenna mast in Kaliningrad?
Why is Ukraine not jammed in this map? Shouldn’t that be Russia’s priority?
They would be jamming their own glide bombs and drones then. It would be more useful to jam Russian airspace to defeat Ukrainian drone attacks.
GPS interference is estimated from ADS-B data which is broadcast by airplanes so that they can be tracked. The lack of data over Ukraine is because their airspace is closed to civilian flights.
The GNSS jamming in Ukraine is mostly from Ukraine themselves, to defend against Russian drones and guided bombs.
Just as Iran jams GNSS, and Venezuela jammed GNSS ahead of the attack. Didn't really help though.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/nasa-satellites-can-...
Probably because Wester jammers are used from ground and drones have antennas on the top side. For comparison, Russian satellite can jam the signal from above and on a large area. Russian technology is superior.
If Russian GNSS receivers wasn't affected they wouldn't need fiber optic drones, Ukraine is jamming both the small and large drones. Russia have both their own Kometa system to try to filter out the jamming signals, and plenty of Chinese tech as well.
Russian technology is very dependent on both western and Chinese tech, yet they couldn't even defend their own oil refineries in St Petersburg or make any relevant progress along the front in years.
To be fair, USA also could not defend their allies and their bases, and didn't move the frontline in Iran as well. And if Iran buys a submarine capable to launch missiles from a friendly country the situation might get worse.
No one gives a fuck what russian residents are thinking about it. And if they start to talk about issues - police will quickly force everyone to shut up.
Thats true, but its also true that most russians support this war. Maybe they dont say it, but they are the soldiers in the trenches, mechanical engineers building missiles, software developers building their military software, Oil/NG workers that fund the war and so on
The soldiers in the trenches now are mostly recruited from convicts/suspects who want to get a pardon, and volunteers lured by large salary and bonuses, and loan repayment suspension. Most prefer to support the war from the couch.
I'm sure that if you ask any of them, they would say that they don't have a choice. Same as western IT developers that continue to support the enshittification of the internet. They don't have a choice. /s
Russians got used that GPS in Moscow and St. Petersburg often shows wrong position (I did not observe it because I never enable GPS though). We also have mobile Internet shoutdowns which are more annoying than GPS spoofing.
I’ve briefly been somewhere for a few days with significant GPS interference, and yes, basically phone navigation doesn’t work reliably.
For me it was a minor annoyance while driving but presumably any apps that rely heavily on GPS (Uber, food delivery) just wouldn’t work very well or at all
Jamming in general will affect everything using those frequencies (and potentially more besides) in a given area, so if you're using it you're weighing up the effects it'll have on your stuff as well. (early in the current Ukrainian invasion, reportedly Russian electronic warfare units were screwing up their own side more than the Ukrainians)
Kaliningrad is one big military base.
Doesn't sound like you have actually been there. Military is a major employer, but in a territory inhabited since 1944 there are generations of people born there who didn't see a reason to live, the same foreign gastarbeiter as in any Russian city, etc. I.e plenty of ordinary people who could be inconvenienced.
I don't think you meant it like that, but Kaliningrad, or Königsberg is inhabited since a bit longer. For example Immanuel Kant lived and taught there.
Obviously. But since the Russian occupation infamously expelled the natives completely, when I talk about “inhabited since 1945” in the context of people living there now, I’m obviously referring to the Russian population.
Also the birth place of graph theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...
reason to leave, sorry.
Do you believe Putin cares who he inconveniences?
>That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?
Russia does not care, nor does it care about its population.
Where are you from?
I ask because you have western privilege, like me, and assume our governments care about its people. Why I lucked out being born in Sweden, the more I learn about the world, the more I am convinced I lucked out ahahaha.
1) with the exception of probably a few pensioners (who also depend on gov’t funding), everyone in the area is dependent on the military. It’s a giant military base in the middle of nowhere.
2) anyone not military (and hence in on it), is a pensioner or the like and won’t give a shit about GPS.
This is not a thriving urban metropolis or tourist location.
Why lie? It _is_ a tourist location, with > 2mln tourists annually (for their 1 mln permanent population). It also has quite a diverse economy, with Avtotor being a major car assembler (though not quite what it was pre-war), a fishing industry, amber mining, a TV manufacturer, &c. With a significant military presence, of course, but "giant military base in the middle of nowhere" is just ridiculous.
Crazy what the Russians destroyed... (you?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg_Castle
Yes, we Russians are entirely responsible for British carpet bombing.
(I, of course, do not agree with the decision to demolish the remaining ruins in 1968; it could have been handled better.)
Hey, old military installations (albeit ancient) are still a type of tourist attraction lol.
Most places in Russia are hunting and fishing locations too, hah.
The city has half a million residents and the oblast has a million residents. There's restaurants, museums, grocery stores, car dealerships, parks, zoo's, malls, stadiums, factories, train stations, an airport, ports etc etc. It's a real place.
I never said it wasn’t.
Killeen, Texas is also a real place.
How many people do you think don’t have at least a 2 degree connection to the US military?
Do you think anyone there is going to think twice about going along with what the military is doing? Or could if they wanted too?
And Killeen is far, far less isolated geographically.
It is like saying Detroit is military base because there are some military related buildings.
Uh huh
It is not. I.e. there is one of the largest passenger vehicle assembly line Autotor.
Russia is constantly GPS jamming EU.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx3ly54veo
So funny seeing non-EU people and/or people friendly to Russia comment (not you)
Carry on!
Yeah, same with traveling by boat in the Baltic Sea, been continuously GPS-jammed since 2022 or something annoying like that, basically the entire South East-coast of Sweden been unnavigatable with GPS since then.
>I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Russia signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1967, this may be a treaty violation of this or other treaties, something like that or retaliation regarding it may be possible.
You can hack the satellite, or use other electronic warfare options to jam or interfere with it's operations.
You can shoot it down with a missile.
The X-37B is in space right now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.
So Russia may be in violation of a treaty, treaties. I'm shocked.
They were in violation of the INF treaty too years before the US pulled out...
source? trust me bro?
If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).
No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.
> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years
I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.
LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643
[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
90% of starlink satellites are >400km in altitude. They aren't in very low earth orbits where that intuition even might be correct. They're above the space station.
I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.
I've thought about this before - do you actually need to "shoot it down" (make it explode)? What if you just nudge it a little and either make it spin or change its orbit? If your missile can reach the satellite then these seem like things that should be possible, no?
Depends, if you nudge it only a little, its own onboard stabilizers / thrusters should be able to correct it. It'd have to be more than its own systems can correct for.
There are tug boat style satellites now, one could grab it and force it to Earth.
Nudge it long enough to deplete it's fuel reserves? Or just wrap the emitting antenna in tin foil...
> You can shoot it down with a missile.
Obviously a bad idea, but frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability.
I wonder if the US already has such weapons in orbit.
> frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability
Realistically, how many people could do this ?
This is not something individuals should be doing.
If you gave me a million dollars, I could do it. Someone else would have to aim it, but it shouldn't be that hard to do.
I assume that satellites have protection against that - because of solar flares.
Kessler event oops, you know. I guess I know someone with several disposable satellites, I wonder if they could be bothered (but I guess not)
Related Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely. Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already. Therefore, the disruptions must either be regular tests of the capability, or just actual communication. Right?
> The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely.
Is it? If it is an early warning system, could it be jammed briefly so it would fail to warn, couldn't it? It will be a global disruption of GPS, but a brief one and I'm sure people wouldn't be concerned of it due to other news.
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless
Do you believe that cutting sea cables is a sensible action? Or sending drones to neighbors? It is what they call "hybrid asymmetric warfare", I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but presumably it may let them take over the world or something.
Probably they just strive to normalize deviations, to boil frog slowly. When people become used to some stupid actions they widen their repertoire, until everything short of tanks crossing the borders became just normal news noise nobody reads twice.
AKA Salami Tactics, famously referred to in the UK sitcom "Yes, Prime Minister"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
There is definitely value in having a demonstrated as opposed a simply supposed capability, though. And actions that are 'almost-certainly-but-not-completely-provably-us' is very much something Russia likes to do.
(One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go)
> One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go
GPS is suprisingly low power. I believe the satellites themselves transmit between 20W and 50W, and in general the signal is quieter than the background noise threshold. It's only by correlating with the PRNG stream [1] that the data signal can be detected at all [2].
[1] The PRNG stream is 1023 bits at 1.023Mbps, so repeats every 1ms, and only autocorrelates with the correct stream when they are aligned. When the streams are not aligned, the data looks like random noise, and each transmitter has a different LFSR configuration to provide a different sequence such that each stream has a low level of correlation with another.
[2] The PRNG stream bits at 1.023Mbps are exclusive-or'd with the data stream at 50bps, so when the decoder is using the correct PRNG and sequence offset, exclusive-or'ing with that produces detectable long pulses at the expected 50bps.
FWIW this is how almost every communication system works. They're all weaker than background noise (e.g. sunlight) but you extract them by correlating with some kind of carrier signal (often but not always a sine wave)
Err what?
No, conventional radio broadcasts can be received with a low noise amplifier and a tuned filter.
The received GPS signal, at ground level, is lower than the thermal noise floor. And the 1.023MHz code is modulated on the RF carrier anyway.
> and a tuned filter
So correlating it with a sine wavelet?
No? Old AM radio required only rectification. You can receive it with accidental diodes.
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already.
Forget "state actors", truck drivers have taken out entire airports with GPS jammers:
* https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...
People like the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation have been trying for years to get some kind of GNSS backup accepted:
* https://rntfnd.org
China has certainly put their money into resiliency (both navigation and timing):
* https://www.gpsworld.com/china-completes-national-eloran-net...
* https://rntfnd.org//2026/03/19/china-has-built-a-triad-of-sa...
* https://rntfnd.org/2023/11/28/china-eloran-used-for-critical...
Some folks are certainly cluing in: South Korea has (e)Loran and the UK and France are joining up with them:
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/04/30/the-uks-system-of-systems-appr...
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/11/12/s-korea-leads-meeting-with-u-k...
Celestial Navigation is also doable even in daylight nowadays, e.g. https://sodern.com/en/ranges/astradia
Will that come as an option for my RAV4 or F-150? How about my Cessna?
Will it help keep my NTP/PTP masters sync'd?
It's been doable since the 1940's.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2981843A/en
The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate.
Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation as its line-of-sight only. But if the sun threw a Carrington event (or worse) at us, I think a lot of western aviation could carry on.
> The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate. Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation […]
I'm aware of the FAA's MON, Minimum Operating Network.
Exactly: that doesn't help boats. Or people in cars. Or farmers:
* https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
It doesn't help those that use GNSS for precise timing (TCXOes can only 'free run' for a finite amount of time before drift compounds 'too much').
A lot of these were getting dismantled until quite recently, but given recent developments they should obviously be kept
> A lot of these were getting dismantled until quite recently, but given recent developments they should obviously be kept
The FAA has always planned for keeping a non-GNSS-based infrastructure:
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/acf/medi...
* https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2012/08/21/2012-20...
* https://download.aopa.org/epilot/2012/120112VOR-MON-White-Pa...
* https://flighttrainingcentral.com/2017/03/legacy-navigation-...
Iridium has launched its own alternative positioning and timing system now https://www.iridium.com/iridium-pnt
Unless the actor happens to be a state that puts a great deal of emphasis on flexing & appearances regardless of how pointless it is
Why these capabilities, if they exist, were not used to send Iranian drones to a wrong target? Maybe because they do not exist. Israel definitely would be happy if thousands of drones were rerouted to a neighbour country or into the sea.
Are there any credible reports of Iran hitting any intended target smaller than a city? Because the drone doesn't need to have GPS for that.
Even if that's for communication, repurposing it for mass jamming shouldn't be that hard. It already has this effect. Unless it's low power satellites that wouldn't be able to sustain radio signal in anything longer than short bursts.
Or actual jamming mistargeted for some reason, or used because it was deemed necessary.
Repeatedly, over years, only for 2 to 5 seconds at a time? Seems unlikely
yeah, I have to admit I was commenting on possibilities here without having gone into the article yet -- having now looked for real, I agree that the disruptions don't seem very useful for actual jamming and repeatedly like this for years across satellites and bands in this specific way doesn't make sense for some mistaken targeting either.
There is a very good reason to do this. Suppose you had a device that would make the shoplifting detectors at stores go off. The first time you did it everyone would get hassled. And the second time and so forth. But if you kept doing it eventually the employees would stop caring. Then you just walk out the door with your stuff.
>Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless
No, Russia does these "tests" all the time to see and gauge the reactions. Ex flying just a bit into EU airspace.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/05/nato-fighters-interce...
Why is the video out at the same time as this article?
Also the user posting this article on HN was only created 5 hours ago.
Is the US planning for war with Russia and are manufacturing consent again?
Because the video is based on the research done in this article, it even specifically calls out the article's authors in the description
Is that normal? To promote a research paper in ArXiv so heavily? I think the parent comment’s concerns still apply, saying a large, well-funded YouTube channel is specifically releasing coordinated content to promote this prompts more questions than it answers, in my mind.
Yes it is common, just not always to the scale of a Veritasium video. Usually it’s just the press office for a university putting out a press release or a summary article in Scientific American.
But in the case where the story is interesting to a larger audience, having a push behind a story across non-academic media is not unheard of. If you can get some media coverage of an academic topic, it can be very beneficial to the researchers’ careers. One goal for a researcher is to bring notoriety to their research, to their institution, and to the field in general. This is the main motivation I see.
The authors may have pushed the arxiv paper out earlier due to the timing of the release of the video.
It doesn't sound that conspiratory: someone of the millions of subscribers of Veritasium watches the video and thinks that is good content suited for HN, but instead of linking the video itself (rarely video links raise upvotes here) it links the primary source.
But even if the paper was "promoted" (i.e. a link submitted), what is bad about it? People seem to find it interesting, and unless there are upvoting bots involved, posting links is the raison d'être of this site.
Am I correct it looks like this was published 3 days ago? They made that video.. in essentially 2 days?
I doubt it based solely on that there are multiple interviews including from one of the paper’s authors. Given that Veritasium is a very well known channel at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they were contacted instead and then roughly coordinated the timing of the paper and video release together.
Russia is currently waging a huge war with europe. While your country is helping them just like they helped nazis in ww2
The video did not settle on the jamming of von der Leyen plane on approach to Plovdiv, but AFAIR it was a (likely unintentional) lie.
Never acknowledged by von der Leyen nor by her press secretary because it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office.
Why downvotes?
Here's the press conference where it was announced: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/media/video/I-276341
FlightRadar24 disproved the story shortly after: https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1962565122326700178
TLDR: Neither von den Leyen nor her office knew about ADB-S nor about the multiple services that collect ADB-S broadcasts and republish, and there was none around who could stop them from announcing an embarrassing lie.
> Why downvotes?
Probably because some missing mention of some specific thing you care deeply about doesn't imply "lack of basic world knowledge" for an entire political office, really strange thing to say and most likely why people are downvoting. It's neither kind, curious and definitively a snark/swipe that doesn't really add anything to the point you were trying to make.
I think you normalize the deviation, here.
If you listen to the press conference, Podesta (the press secretary) spoke about the plane circling and not being able to land. When preparing the press conference, she should have checked if this obvious lie can be obviously disproved, but she did not. This probably means that she did not know this was a lie, but then someone who ordered this to be announced knew.
My bet is that von der Leyen or her close aide told Podesta to announce the lie in these terms, and the thing that worries me as a European is that there was none to warn these war-mongering ladies that they are making a mistake. This whole situation screams for an intern that sets up the mics and has a callsign and who can stop Podesta as she walks to the pied de stal of shame and explain that the position of planes is monitored all the time and is public information.
But I bet that all their interns are servile 3rd generation eurocrats.
P.S. The whole press conference (and many others) are fascinating to listen to. The language these people use is softened by the media. What do you think von der Leyen was doing on that plane? She was going "along the frontline" to inspect our preparedness for war where "the frontline" is the Eastern EU border.
P.P.S The story made rounds in EU circles, and there was a parliamentary question offering a chance to apologize, but von der Leyen chose to ignore it.
> I think you normalize the deviation, here.
I don't care about Ursula von der Leyen nor her plane, merely explaining that if you try to extrapolate that a group of people don't have "basic world knowledge" based on not knowing a specific technology nor how/why it's used, the community is actually doing the rest of us a favor by downvoting it.
Want to discuss her office's use of a plane and how it's related to inspecting ammunition factories or whatever tirade you're going on about? Do create a new submission where that can be discussed, hardly related to the interesting story and methods of trying to track down GNSS interference.
"the community" is a very small privileged group, hope you know that.
It's a 9 months old story, even the MEP who wrote the question got over it.
I raised it because it was mentioned in the Veritassium video, but they stopped short of calling it a lie. They wanted to stay on topic, but the beauty of HN is that we can wander slightly off-topic and discover curious facts without being punished.
Yeah, curious facts like "it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office". Go outside brother, and get some fresh air before that too disappears :)
I wonder why they call this specific discovery “jamming”. What they found is a relatively rare burst transmissions over roughly 5MHz of spectrum of something looking like a 12ms cyclic prefix with spacing related to 150 seconds multiplies. I would suspect it is some sort of sync or data close to L1 GPS frequencies, that as a side effect causing lower CNR for the GPS receivers. Btw it is only 10dB, which also I can’t really call “jamming”.
Overall it seems to be an overfitting the observation to the wider intent of a malicious actor.
> I wonder why they call this specific discovery “jamming”.
Because it jamms.
I do not see any discussion of the power required for such wide-area jamming. Even as the useful GPS signal is quite weak at the ground level, this satellite would require power in kW range, right?
Satellites have multi kW solar panels
Being on a Molniya orbit probably also helps: the apogee is at nearly 40000km, but the perigee is on the order of 1600 (according to the EKS wiki page), so outside of their primary observation points of their orbit they are quite close to the earth and thus have a ton of blasting ability for satellites with geostationary comms capabilities.
TLDR (conclusion from the paper): "By a combination of these techniques the satellite Cosmos 2546 (NORAD ID 45608) was identified with high confidence as one source of the interference. Further analysis pointed to the Russian Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema, an early warning constellation to which Cosmos 2546 belongs, as collectively responsible for the wide-area transient interference causing GNSS degradation across Europe since 2019."
Additionally:
> Note that Cosmos 2546 was launched in May 2020 and so cannot be responsible for the interference events that occurred in 2019. Moreover, Cosmos 2546 was not over Europe during some interference events after May 2020. But during all events on the 75 days shown in Table 1 there was at least one EKS satellite above a 35∘ elevation angle with respect to every reference station that observed the interference. Thus, it is highly probable that the EKS constellation is collectively responsible for the wide-area transient GNSS interference events noted since 2019.
Hmm - the timing is uncanny that only 2 days ago I started building a dead reckoning system.
GPS jamming has been happening for years and it's not like dead reckoning is an insane new concept
what are you saying? nothing of what you said is new or unknown.
Your local cellphone towers already provide a more accurate position beacon signal for GPS modules in most parts of the world. Additional RF beam-forming in G5+ systems also make it impractical for lamers to jam long-distances due to limited coherent signal propagation.
Indeed, amateur Hams have caught Russian ships jamming/spoofing local port traffic several years before the various official overseas conflicts started. Not sure if it is government sponsored, or just various smuggling schemes like some ships spamming China harbors. =3
Agreed about cellphone towers providing accurate position, but not with enough precision and highly dependent on the number of towers in the vicinity.
What i started building is for a highly unlikely scenario which is ; no internet + no GPS + no cell tower.
I have this idea that I'll get Bosch 9-DoF sensors onto every lane of every road, at least twice a month, then any other thing on a road can use a Shazam - like waveform lookup to determine where they are.
I didn't come up with this for dead reckoning, it's more for, um, autonomous cars to be able to avoid potholes and stuff.
There's a live map too: https://gpsjam.org
That has nothing to do with the article, which is about satellite based interferences.
As an ordinary person reading all of this from far away, it seems that some Europeans are addicted to war. If there is not enough, new ones are started from all sides. There is no "good guys" in these comments.
from a cold-war diplomat interview "What I experienced in the decades of my service was that each side constantly assumed the worst of the other. In each situation, if anyone had doubts they would make stories about the intentions of the other. .. If somehow people could stop doing this, much suffering could be reduced".. something like that, IIR
One can tell that this is 'from far away'. Europe was hoping that Russia, in their own interest would pursue peaceful cooperation, even when Putin was already talking about 'spheres of influence'. When Russia invaded Georgia, Europe turned the blind eye and was still hoping for peaceful relations with Russia. When Russia annexed Crimea, same thing. Even when Russia was pulling together forces along Ukraines border and the US pulled out their personnel from Ukraine, there were still many voices in Europe that Russia would never invade Ukraine. We can all be lucky that Ukraine wasn't as naive and prepared for this moment, otherwise Russia would probably have invaded a couple more countries by now.
glad it's getting more coverage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48246794
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309667
It's been known that Russia does GPS interference near their Western border and the Baltic down to Ukraine for several years now. It's something airline pilots prepare for now, and expect.
Not sure why this is being couched as novel or surprising.
The novel aspect is that it is being conducted by a satellite, rather than a ground station. Which is an escalation in sophistication which makes counter-jamming much more difficult and also gives global reach to the jammer.
You could actually try reading the paper first before posting comments like this.
Was responding to many of these comments, which read as if the commenters haven’t heard of this before.
The top comment in this thread is some dude asking if we can ‘do something now that we know the source’ lol.
We’ve known the source for 5 years. The fact this particular jamming originates from a Russian satellite and not Russian terrestrial-based equipment doesn’t change much. And while it’s unconvenient for planes and affects separation minima, planes have inertial systems and pilots deal with this easily. It happens in many places around the world, actually, although the Russians are definitely the worst offenders.
TLDR: Russia is jamming GPS and GNSS over Europe, purposefully, using a constellation of military satellites, part of the Russian nuclear program.
Theory is that Russia has been constantly practicing to totally disrupt GPS and GNSS (and the Chinese system) across all of Europe since 2014. Practicing to deploy electronic warfare not across a warzone or even a country but an entire continent.
Saved you a click:
>This paper analyzes and identifies a space-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference source that has caused scores of powerful transient wide-area interference events over continental Europe, Greenland, and Canada since 2019. While terrestrial or near-terrestrial sources are primarily responsible for the recent uptick in GNSS interference worldwide, space-based interferers are of special concern given their potential for vast geographic reach and their portent of a qualitative escalation in GNSS interference. Based on data collected between 2019 and 2026 from a network of terrestrial GNSS reference stations, this paper (1) develops a received-power-based detection framework; (2) details the spatial, temporal, and spectral patterns of wide-area interference events caused by the source; (3) presents and analyzes identification techniques that blend received-power and time-difference-of-arrival measurements; and (4) applies these techniques to confidently identify the GNSS interference source as a constellation of Russian early warning satellites in Molniya ("lightning") orbits.
tl;dr - it was Russian satellites
How unsuprising.
This tl;dr is actually in the tl;dr on the linked page. We're doing tl;drs for tl;drs now?
Not a new concept. From Matt Might https://matt.might.net/articles/peer-fortress/
"The scout delivers a flawless summary of your abstract."
In the future abstracts will be called Tilldars and no one will remember it came originally from trying to pronounce "tldr"
it should be right in the title tbh, not after some 150 words of prose
Being engaged to warfare with Russia and being jammed in response. So weird.
Russia is the aggressor. What do you propose?
Playing Devil's advocate, given how much firepower Russia has, why is it so soft on Ukraine. I mean what is the endgoal for Russia here? Tire out the US/NATO Empire just as US did to Soviets in Afghanistan. I sometimes feel like all these events are orchestrated as Simon Dixon talks about them in his videos.
https://www.youtube.com/@SimonDixon21/videos
Are you joking? Russia has thrown everything it has at Ukraine for quite some time.
Russia is throwing most of its deployable conventional firepower on Ukraine and whatever robots, KABs, missiles and drones it can manufacture. It is their manufacturing capability which is limited.
Have you seen the Oryx list of destroyed equipment? The defunct Soviet Union produced a shitton of armored vehicles, Russia inherited most of them and they all got burnt in Ukraine.
In which way is Russia being soft on Ukraine?
Russia attacked Europe, this is just another reminder that they are our enemies and we should be sabotaging their systems in turn.
Relax, Russia didn't attacked Europe yet (if you mean EU).
It may not have attacked intentionally the EU yet, but a week ago there was an incident when a Russian drone apparently strayed away from whatever Ukrainian target it may have had, and it hit an apartment building in the city of Galati, in Romania, in the EU, injuring two people.
In the past there have been other incidents with Russian weapons reaching the neighboring countries from the EU, like Poland and Romania, but this was the first time when they hit a populated area, causing human injuries.
That was not a Russian drone in Romania. Ukraine has admitted it was theirs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c707098wkzpo
The linked article disproves your claim. It seems you're mistaking the naval drone incident, which did not cause casualties, with the Russian drone strike.
> The country's defence ministry said the drone had self-detonated near an oil terminal without causing any casualties, although authorities have said it caused considerable damage to a ship and warehouses.
> Ukraine later confirmed one of its naval drones had been involved, saying it had been knocked off course by Russian electronic interference. Moscow has yet to comment.
> It also comes a week after two people were injured when a drone hit a Romanian apartment block in the eastern city of Galati - close to the border with Ukraine.
> Romanian officials said they had confirmed it was a Russian drone but Moscow said "accusations" of its involvement were "unsubstantiated".
They said Europe, why would you assume the EU?
The GPS jamming has been measured since 2019.
You can likely bet that Space X with their thousands of sats deployed in space already has among them a few hundred stealth US military sats strategically placed and ready for the command to deal with the few Russky sats causing these problems ... think our Space Force.
Completely different orbits to make this possible
This thread seems an intended call for all NAFO warriors to quickly gather with anti Russian speech. Fair enough, there's a war, GPS jamming is to be expected. Maybe annoying for some, but a need for others. Hope the war to not escalate further, it will be more than GPS inconvenience.
"aybe annoying for some, but a need for others."
Who needs it? Russia? I guess Russia does not need war but it started it anyway.
you think only Russia does GPS jamming?