When I wait for relatives/friends to land in Turkey, I always get a mini heart attack because either plane drifts like Fast and Furious or disappears completely from map and ask myself, is this real this time? Sometimes I have nightmares about it, I see the planes just falling down from the sky spontaneously because of the stress that GPS jamming induced to me over the years.
Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
161–170 of 299 posts
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#162I've been working on mapping GPS jamming using ADS-B data for a couple years, and I'll try to address questions and points brought up here based on what I know. Relevant previous posts on HN: 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106 (From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?"…
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Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#163Most of these GPS-jammed zones are, obviously, near areas of active conflicts (Ukraine, Myanmar, Isreal/Palestine, Kashmir, etc). But what's going on in Western Australia? And South-west Texas?
I crosschecked with google Maps and I belive the Jindalee Operational Radar Network in Laverton is stationed there. Maybe that has something to with the interference. A 560kw transmitter is no joke.
I guess south-west Texas is most likely also military. E.g. the Naval Air Station Kingsville is not far away.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#164So how should I interpret this? The map lacks geopolitical boundaries, so it's hard to interpret. There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there. There's a big red blob over Turkey, is that maybe the southern edge of the reac…
Yea, oddly, if you go back to like august, there's still a bunch of red over the Mediterranean, parts of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. so it's not totally clear what that is. I've heard anecdotally that gps has gotten unusable in Israel in recent weeks but it's not clear why that's changed based on the mapping information we're seeing here.
Northern Israel is completely jammed. There's talk of Israelis getting matched on Tinder with women from Beirut.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#165Interesting - as I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine. All the local services that rely on positioning via phones seemed to work fine as well. I wonder how the jamming works - is it just for higher altitudes or maybe it only affects GPS and my phone also uses GLONASS or something?
Aircraft fly higher, which means they pick up ground radio signals from much further away - both good (ATC communication, ground-based navigation beacons) and bad (intentional jamming).
On the ground, the radio horizon is about 20-40 miles. In the air, the radio horizon is about 200-400 miles.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence. Could you use RTLSDR triangulation to hone in on granular lat long of jamming sources? https://www.rtl-sdr.com/detecting-gps-jammers-in-augmented-r... https://www.rtl-sdr.com/kiwisdr-tdoa-direction-finding-now-f...
With synchronized receivers you could do some rudimentary direction finding. Note that synchronizing SDRs is much more achievable if they're physically nearby (e.g. can run a cable between them for a common clock) vs if they're physically distant observers (can't exactly use GPS time for synchronization if you're measuring GPS interference)
> can't exactly use GPS time for synchronization if you're measuring GPS interference
Can other GNSSes (Galileo/BeiDou/GLONASS/etc) give usable timestamps? Seems like it'd be tricky for a jammer to target all of them simultaneously. (Of course, since they'd be on a different band, unless your SDR is wideband enough you'd need two RX heads which gives you potential issues with phase drift between the tuning VCOs even if your sampling is coherent).
Perhaps a sufficiently directional antenna/phased array (for getting an actual satellite signal) as well as an omnidirectional one (for picking up the jamming signal) could get you somewhere...
Or perhaps one could look at computing AoA at each receiver site (using MIMO-y techniques, e.g. Kraken/KerberosSDR) and triangulating based on angles instead, which wouldn't require synchronizing physically-distant sites at all...
The problem definitely seems soluble, though I don't have the technical background to know how realistic that is.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#167I've been working on mapping GPS jamming using ADS-B data for a couple years, and I'll try to address questions and points brought up here based on what I know. Relevant previous posts on HN: 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106 (From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?"…
I'm not a NATO strategist or anything, so I'm adding this as a child comment, but I think the big story in the GPS/aviation world these days is probably Russia's n̵e̵a̵r̵-̵c̵o̵n̵s̵t̵a̵n̵t̵ frequent jamming of GPS over Poland, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Lithuania. Degrading and even neutralizing strategic infrastructure in EU and NATO countries, significantly affecting commercial aviation at the least, is a big deal. There's some reluctance to say it's Russia doing the jamming, though that seems to be the consensus among experts. I assume governments know with 100% confidence who it is.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#168Most of these GPS-jammed zones are, obviously, near areas of active conflicts (Ukraine, Myanmar, Isreal/Palestine, Kashmir, etc). But what's going on in Western Australia? And South-west Texas?
I crosschecked with google Maps and I belive the Jindalee Operational Radar Network in Laverton is stationed there. Maybe that has something to with the interference. A 560kw transmitter is no joke. I guess south-west Texas is most likely also military. E.g. the Naval Air Station Kingsville is not far away.
Huh I had no idea Australia had a big OTH radar network. TIL!
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#169I've been working on mapping GPS jamming using ADS-B data for a couple years, and I'll try to address questions and points brought up here based on what I know. Relevant previous posts on HN: 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106 (From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?"…
Who is jamming around Tallinn area? Also is GPSIII just as susceptible to jamming?
Hawkeye + SAR data would be pretty interesting for ship tracking. I think I've seen some papers here before, but nothing interactive like your site. I think open SAR data is not quite realtime yet, but hope soon is.
Re: Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
#170Most of these GPS-jammed zones are, obviously, near areas of active conflicts (Ukraine, Myanmar, Isreal/Palestine, Kashmir, etc). But what's going on in Western Australia? And South-west Texas?
According to this study (https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...), the Texas spot is the US Military doing aerobatics training, causing the training aircraft to repeatedly report signal loss.
My guess is that the spots in Western Australia are the same thing, given the nearby RAAF training bases.