Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 256 posts

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#41

Post by raverbashing »

nutjob2 wrote: post #13
colechristensen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 no…

> 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.

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)

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#42

Post by sam_lowry_ »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #9
yladiz wrote: post #3

Related Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA

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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#43

Post by ordu »

sippeangelo wrote: post #5
yladiz wrote: post #3

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 communica…

> 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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#44

Post by Thlom »

lazide wrote: post #29
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#45

Post by ralferoo »

rcxdude wrote: post #35
sippeangelo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communica…

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 GNS…

> 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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#46

Post by lazide »

Thlom wrote: post #44
lazide wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#47

Post by Scroll_Swe »

sippeangelo wrote: post #5
yladiz wrote: post #3

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 communica…

>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...

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#48

Post by akho »

lazide wrote: post #29
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

#50

Post by u8080 »

lazide wrote: post #29
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It is not. I.e. there is one of the largest passenger vehicle assembly line Autotor.
Post reply on HN