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France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

lemonde.fr

131–140 of 571 posts

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.

This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.

You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#132
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be jammed.) But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone. An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's…

Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.

> Iran has their own satellites.

It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#133
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

You don't even need a free account on flightradar24 to track its planes, at least two launch from it and pattern circle around it almost daily.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need. That's why satellites use radars and scientific instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or even subs underwater.

Those suffer from the same problem. There's a lot of ocean, and if you don't know where to look then you won't find what you're looking for.

Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial.

Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#135
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy satellite imaging. Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.

Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-... : “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”

Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#136
post #77

I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?

Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#137
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.

https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#138
post #38
post #10

Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.

I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.

You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#140
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it would be enough to get more capable assets into the right area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they atta…

Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime surveillance.

They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships was sunk near Sri Lanka.
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