Why the reluctance? I do not think there is much love lost in regards to Russia.
Appeasement of someone like Putin is always a mistake.
So far every time the West calls his bluff he cowardly pretends nothing happened, be it HIMARS, Storm Shadow and HARM missile shipments, tank shipments, AWACS support, you name it.
He only attacked Ukraine because he hoped to win in a week, and this wouldn't have happened if the West armed Ukraine earlier. The desire not to escalate with Putin cost Europe a war.
However, this is all playing chicken. Whenever they were facing actual opposition, they backed down.
Also, are you aware of this?: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-09/news/us-completes-in...
As for INF, US withdrawal was a response to Russia testing infringing missiles first.
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691521600/russia-pulls-out-of...
Sensational out of context drive by sound bytes from the likes of Guardian, Fox News, Twitter and video gammer subreddits are not sources - they’re click bait.
Months and months of this nonsense now.
Do you really think Solovyov and Simonyan are broadcasting it without official approval?
Show me any actual authoritative source not from social or drive-by media pointing out where the official Russian position is some kind of first strike.
NATO in a certain way is based on that as well. If it fails a single test regarding article 5 after someone challenges it, it becomes instantly worthless.
The danger as I see it currently is that the West is tired of war and it’s an opportunity for Putin to challenge NATO. Attack a small village in a Baltic state. Are Americans and Germans and the British going to risk their lives for a small village in a Baltic country? I hope they would, but I realistically don’t see it. And that one non-response would make NATO worth less than the paper the agreement was printed on.
But somehow much of the world pretends not to notice and only does whatever is convenient at the moment (buy Russian oil/gas, do business in Russia, stay "neutral", etc). I find it incredibly depressing, I thought that surely in the 2020s our civilization would have progressed further.
Russia will play the slowly boiled frog game to their advantage — GPS jamming is just the beginning. We will likely soon see further small incursions, each one ever so slightly larger than the previous one. And we'll hear Mr Scholz say something about doing something, but we won't see him actually do anything. Mr Macron will use grand words and do nothing as well. Austria will "declare neutrality" (easy to do when you have other countries as buffers from the aggressor).
As someone currently living in the EU close to Ukraine, I find all this very sad.
I always wonder why people expect of others what they refuse to do themselves. Luckily though, this does not depress me, but rather amuses me to no end, especially when people try to justify their naughtiness with "facts".
> As someone currently living in the EU close to Ukraine, I find all this very sad.
Indeed, what a shame it is.
As the song goes:
>> You can't always get what you want
>> But if you do not try ever, well, you might find
>> You get what you deserve.
Something like that anyways, I'm just going by memory.
> I haven't the slightest idea what point you're trying to make
This human was criticizing other humans for "pretending", but they themselves are pretending (well, technically something more like engaging in ~hallucination, Naive Realism based cognition, Meme Magic, etc). They desire and recommend that others (the members of their various outgroups I suspect, purely coincidentally) think better, but if one was to ask them to do the same, they would assert that that is a false accusation / invalid request (because their thinking "is" without substantial flaw, ~"thinking perfectly is stupid, why are you suggesting it lol", not realizing that no such suggestion was made).
~All humans behave this way (I dare you to respond, so a demonstration can be made that proves my point (though it would be fairly pointless outside of having fun, at least at this point in time)), due to the conditioning we receive from birth, and every single day of our lives, all without our realization.
I was kinda making a joke, but it is a joke in at least two ways.
The US has made more than its fair share of policy missteps. But to try and argue that the actions of the US somehow “forced” Russia to invade its neighbor and former satellite state to rid it of “nazis” (Putin’s quote not mine) is absurd.
Hmm. I think there is not much point in discussing
That doesn't mean people don't care about the people though. Human suffering is always bad.
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.
GNSS, GPS plus other constellations depends on the receiver. Even drones or consumer ones support that these days, some bigger drones even support L5 bands.
So your 100 dollar drone very likely has a receiver with more features than a 100 million dollar airliner. And that drone is probably made recently, but airliners fly for 30 years.
I know older long-range planes from the 70s and 80s had excellent inertial navigation systems.
Not quite as good as GPS, but good enough to know the location of the plane within a few nautical miles. The main problem is that inertial navigation systems drifted over time and required constant recalibration from the crew whenever they had a fix from real navigation beacons and errors could be catastrophic (especially when skirting the edge of Soviet airspace).
I've always wondered if modern avionics suites kept the older style inertial navigation systems as a backup to GPS, or if the systems were deleted when everyone switched to GPS.
I think it would be smart for larger planes to have a modern inertial navigation system that constantly recalibrated off GPS, ready to take over in the case of GPS jamming or spoofing.
https://ops.group/blog/gps-spoof-attacks-irs/
https://aerospace.honeywell.com/us/en/about-us/blogs/spoofin...
I understand that current civilian aircraft wasn't designed with that in mind though.
Practically that was what happened all the time before GPS. You would fly for a few hours over the ocean with no ground based reference, having a reasonable but not perfect INS location. Then get close to the coast where a DME/DME fix was done which updated the INS position as a big jump of up to a few miles.
Filtering GPS updates that are too far "off" the INS state would be an almost opposite design to the original assumptions that DME and GNSS are highly accurate.
Modern aircraft will also set the known position based on the runway you're taking off from. And when airborne they'll pick up a DME/DME fix and update the location. So while it's procedure to set the known starting location at the gate, there are also other sources.
It might be sampling bias. More military aviation with erratic movement and also planes turning off and on their transmitters.
To measure GPS jamming, you should measure from a fixed object. Trying to do that with planes is unnecessary hard.
If you look at that for a few seconds, you'll see that it's almost entirely civilian passenger aircraft that are not making erratic movements, and that are near conflict zones.
Detecting GPS jamming with planes actually works a lot better than from a fixed terrestrial object, because 1. They have greater sensor range, 2. There are lots of them, 3. They move and cover lots of area, 4. they cover e.g. parts of the Black Sea where it would be more difficult to put a ground-based sensor.
I was curious how powerful should a jammer be to completely actively substitute GPS coordinates in a city so large.
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?")
"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."
There are heuristics you can use that allow you to make a pretty good guess about whether jamming is happening based on signals from just one or two aircraft, and have worked well on GPSJAM for the past couple years.
With regard to localization of GPS jammers, yes you can do direction finding of the emitted signal directly, but that's easy mode. For a fun challenge, do it based just on observations of the ADS-B data from affected (and unaffected aircraft). Here's one approach from researchers at the GPS laboratory at Stanford, "GNSS Interference Source Localization Using ADS-B data": https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...
I have some other ideas about how to do that localization.
https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1764054377982308484
"Do aircraft systems really only use GPS and not the full constellation of navigational satellite systems?"
ADS-B doesn't tell you what navigation system is, but my understanding is that most aircraft are still using GPS. Maybe someone who works on aircraft avionics will chime in. A few years ago I did see data that distinguished between different GNSS, and GPS was experiencing more jamming than the others. I assume as multi-network systems become more and more common jammers will just target all of them, if they're not already.
"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."
That's right, no (or few) flights over Ukraine with ADS-B transponders means no data. I actually first started mapping GPS jamming on Feb. 14, 2022 (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=45.00000&lon=35.00000&z=3.0&date=202...), because I thought it might give me an early warning of the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine. It didn't work out that way--there was no indication of interference right up until Feb 24., and then all civil aviation stopped and there was no more data for that region (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.18928&lon=33.51687&z=3.9&date=202...).
As some of you have noticed, GPS jamming is highly correlated with conflict zones. Some conflicts are higher intensity than others--for example, I think the airspace around Cyprus has been jammed for years (since 2018 maybe?), and I get the feeling it's more harrassment than anything else (maybe someone more geopolitically savvy than me knows more).
"I see 2 red cells on the US/Mexico border right about Texas/Coahuila region". Someone always says it's cartels, and the evidence is that it's much more likely to be U.S. military testing and training. First, the interference is always in the Laughlin and Randolph military operating areas (MOAs) (https://imgur.com/vieGhgN). Second, the interference usually runs during the week and takes weekends off--which I doubt cartels do, but that's the typical pattern seen for military exercises.
"am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?"
From 2/24/2022 until 3/19/2024, gpsjam.org was the only site with regularly updated GPS jamming maps. On Twitter, @auonsson (https://twitter.com/auonsson) and @rundradion (https://twitter.com/rundradion) have been posting geospatial and other analysis of similar data for the past several months at least, and @x00live (https://twitter.com/x00live) has looked at ADS-B and GPS interference for a while too. (I'm not even going to try to catalog academic or government efforts, though I will mention HawkEye 360's satellite based GPS interference mapping: https://spacenews.com/hawkeye-360-gps-ukr/)
"If line of sight to the jamming antenna is required to be jammed, why do aircraft not have a downwards shield so that they only receive GPS signal from the sky (satellites) and not from jammers (coming from the bottom hemisphere)? Or is the jamming signal so many orders of magnitudes stronger than the satellites that there's always going to be some gain no matter how good the shield is?"
Yes, GPS signals are so weak (below the noise floor!) that it's just super easy to overpower them with terrestrial (or airborne) jammers. But there are special antennas and other techniques for building jam-resistant systems, e.g. "controlled reception pattern antennas" (CRPA): https://www.gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-th... But I think the main reason most civilian aircraft systems aren't jam resistant is because they didn't need to be--For the past several decades GPS jamming has been a much smaller issue than it is now, and I don't think there was sufficient reason to spend time and money on what would have been an over-engineered, mostly unnecessary system. But the situation is changing, and I expect anti-jamming to become a more significant concern by equipment manufacturers and aviation authorities.
[Edited to add:]
"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."
From the GPSJAM FAQ: ""I live in one of the red zones and my GPS was fine?"" (https://gpsjam.org/faq/#i-live-in-one-of-the-red-zones). Yeah, the answer is, as you mentioned, aircraft fly at higher altitudes, so they get much longer line of sight to the jammer.
On the general idea of using ADS-B to map GPS interference, when I thought of this idea I was pretty excited. I realized that if you had access to worldwide ADS-B data, which ADS-B Exchange graciously gave me as part of my Advisory Circular project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661), you could also make a worldwide map of GPS jamming, and I hadn't seen anyone do that before (later I found some researchers who realized you could get GPS jamming information from ADS-B, but they only looked at a couple aircraft).
I just think it's pretty neat that even though there were multiple companies devoted to processing, analyzing, and selling ADS-B data, and ADS-B data is not all that complicated, none of those companies had realized this new way of using it. Sometimes there's gold left even in data that you think must have been completely mined out.
Even specifically looking at ADS-B data as it relates to GPS interference, there's still lots to be done! FR24 is mapping jamming, but I don't think anyone else has made worldwide maps of spoofing (yet!): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1770515361739493488
[Edited to add more:]
With respect to safety issues, yes, aircraft have redundant navigation systems. But GPS is one of the important layers that add safety to aviation, and it is not at all normal for entire countries or even larger regions to lsoe GPS while still maintaining passenger flights. This Eurocontrol presentation, "GNSS Interference and Civil Aviation", has lots of details: https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...
From the presentation:
There have been close calls due to lack of GPS. It increases workload for both pilots and controllers, which is a safety issue by itself. Despite a lot of airlines and government aviation agencies saying everything is fine, they're not really prepared for a world with frequent GPS denial, and everything is not fine. Industry and government are organizing emergency meetings about how to handle this in a less ad hoc way than they have been so far (commercial aviation is kind of the opposite of ad hoc).