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Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

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Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#101

Post by sokoloff »

bb88 wrote: post #98
sokoloff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.

If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military. If you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.

In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#102

Post by pigggg »

michaelt wrote: post #42
jshier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

Eh a month or two before the October 2023 Israel conflict - there were many reports of GPS jamming in the middle east impacting air transport aircraft. To the point where it basically caused various failure modes that shouldn't have happened with avionics (think the things you'd expect in a fuzzing scenario). It was pretty eye opening example of just how poor modern avionics are (and their integrations) when they get unpredictable inputs & the dependant downrange systems that rely upon that data.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#103

Post by Gigachad »

michaelt wrote: post #42
jshier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

GPS jamming is fairly detectable right? I wonder if we could create some crowd souced map of jammers. I think this kind of already exists as fairly course data but if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home and wired them up to note every time their location lock is lost or moves. It could create a hyper detailed map of where the jammers are and track them moving in realtime.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#104

Post by Gigachad »

Terr_ wrote: post #89
1718627440 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is already done by the two big smartphone OS vendors.

They record spots for all wireless access points too, unless you opt-out by naming them certain ways and the surveillance-capitalism company decides to honor it. (e.g. The _nomap suffix.) I hope some future Wifi standard makes it much easier to anonymize or obscure persistent access points.

That's always existed with Hidden SSID. If you are particularly paranoid you can set it up like that. But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#105

Post by nomel »

numpad0 wrote: post #81
nomel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the starlink clocks could continuously calibrate from gps? Clock drift is usually a slow thing (like thermals). Their inter-satellite data links have all sorts of relative clocking info.

IIUC, GPS picks one satellite and 3 more to establish time differences between the first one and the other 3. There's only one point in universe where the set of differences would match what was observed, given the broadcast orbital data of satellites, and that gives the location of the receiver. It's like you are provided radii and center coordinates of 3 circles on a paper that intersect at 1 point and you are to m…

Coherency is a state. My question is if that state can be achieved by just tuning the individual clocks/locations based on GPS as a master. And, there's other tricks, with all the inter-satellite communication [1].

And, there's a contextual difference here between civilian GPS and military GPS. Much of the precision in the existing GPS satellites is to support the military use of GPS, with intentionally error injected into the civilian side.

And, by the nature of the hostile environment the military operates, military craft don't have as strong of a reliance on something that's ephemeral, like a GPS signal on a battlefield.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05302

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#106

Post by monster_truck »

Hizonner wrote: post #19
djoldman wrote: post #12

No worries in the long run; similar to the "energy crisis," new inventions and technology will mitigate the issue: Quantum Compass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass Also see: https://www.sandboxaq.com/post/sandboxaq-and-acubed-achieve-...

I'm sorry, but a multi-kilogram (at a guess), five-figure-priced (at a conservative guess) device with kilometer-scale error (per their actual press release) is not a substitute for a GPS. And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up…

Datasheets that look like that are a pretty strong indicator you're dealing with something that is giga export controlled, not as in "can only go to some countries, you have to declare it and theres a LOT of paperwork", more "attempting to, or even making plans about trying to leave the country with one is a pile of federal crimes"

Virtually anything navigational that cannot be easily or reliably jammed falls into this category far before meeting any of the accuracy/drift requirements.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#107

Post by aidenn0 »

yjrpnz440v0b2n1 wrote: post #75
donohoe wrote: post #32

What I want is a tiny portable bluetooth jammer for those who insist everyone in public must be listening to their music. Sadly they are too clunky to haul around each day.

how i even make a clunky one ? need one for a neighbor in 3rd world country with lowest civic sense. i tried that esp32 that uses nRF24 but it doesnt seem to jam all the time. i heard about hackrf one dont know if its can properly do that.

You can brute-force jam the entire 80MHz range. However, it would require roughly 13dB more power compared to jamming a narrow-band signal.

In theory, you could try to exploit the adaptive frequency hopping that bluetooth does, nudging it to switch to specific bands, which you will then jam; this could save on energy, but I don't know if anybody's done it.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#108

Post by matheusmoreira »

michaelt wrote: post #42
jshier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like we'd need a modern version that's less susceptible to jamming, otherwise aren't we just replacing one jammable service with another?

There are two types of GPS jamming. There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones. Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers. Delivery drivers don't…

> boss watching over their shoulder all the time

Sounds like the root cause to me. It should be illegal to use GNSS to track employees, or anyone really.

Jamming is starting to sound a lot like self-defense against surveillance.

Re: Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

#109

Post by Terr_ »

Gigachad wrote: post #104
Terr_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They record spots for all wireless access points too, unless you opt-out by naming them certain ways and the surveillance-capitalism company decides to honor it. (e.g. The _nomap suffix.) I hope some future Wifi standard makes it much easier to anonymize or obscure persistent access points.

That's always existed with Hidden SSID. If you are particularly paranoid you can set it up like that. But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped.

> That's always existed with Hidden SSID. If you are particularly paranoid you can set it up like that.

It's actually the opposite, a hidden SSID will backfire and hurt your privacy when it comes to phones and laptops.

With a normal network, your phone can passively listen for when it approaches MyHomeNetwork and then connect. If you change that to a 802.11 hidden SSID, then whenever you aren't connected your phone will be constantly emitting a very distinctive mating-call: "Any hidden networks? Hello, if you're MyHomeNetwork, please then let me in." That makes it easy for someone to uniquely identify your phone as it moves around, and it also takes up more battery power with the often-fruitless transmissions.

Both issues could be reduced by restricting it to only auto-seek the SSID based on other clues, like GPS regions or neighbors' public SSIDs, but that usually isn't a feature.

> But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped.

How often do you reset/rename it? Surely it's at least weird that some big companies, via sensors carried by your neighbors, know you moved your apartments from X to Y even when you don't use any of their products.

Some phone-apps will have access to the network name too, but that seems just marginally worse compared to other identifying info they could track and exfiltrate.

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