GPS Signals Are Being Disrupted in Russian Cities 175
Jamming and spoofing attacks can cripple GPS connections entirely or make something appear in the wrong location, causing disruption and safety issues. Just ask Russia. From a report: New data analysis reveals that multiple major Russian cities appear to have faced widespread GPS disruption during the past week. The signal interference follows Ukraine launching long-range drone attacks deep into Russian territory, and it may act as a way to potentially stop drones that rely upon GPS for navigation, experts say. The GPS interference has "expanded on a scale that hasn't been seen before," says Erik Kannike, a program manager at Estonian defense intelligence firm SensusQ who has been monitoring the situation. "What we're seeing now, since about a week ago, is GPS jamming bubbles covering hundreds if not thousands of kilometers around tactical cities."
The GPS issues were first spotted by the monitoring system GPSJam, which uses data from planes to track problems with the satellite navigation system. The website has logged an increasing number of GPS disturbances in the Russian cities of Saratov, Volgograd, and Penza since the start of December. All of the cities are in Eastern Russia and within hundreds of kilometers of the border with Ukraine. On December 5, GPSJam logged a limited amount of GPS interference in Russia -- the majority of registered interference took place around Moscow, where the Kremlin for years has tampered with GPS connections. However, since December 11, multiple areas of the country have faced GPS disruption, data gathered by GPSJam shows. In addition, wireless data analytics firm Aurora Insight measured an increase in GPS signal levels in the area at the start of December -- a sign that potential GPS interference could have happened.
The GPS issues were first spotted by the monitoring system GPSJam, which uses data from planes to track problems with the satellite navigation system. The website has logged an increasing number of GPS disturbances in the Russian cities of Saratov, Volgograd, and Penza since the start of December. All of the cities are in Eastern Russia and within hundreds of kilometers of the border with Ukraine. On December 5, GPSJam logged a limited amount of GPS interference in Russia -- the majority of registered interference took place around Moscow, where the Kremlin for years has tampered with GPS connections. However, since December 11, multiple areas of the country have faced GPS disruption, data gathered by GPSJam shows. In addition, wireless data analytics firm Aurora Insight measured an increase in GPS signal levels in the area at the start of December -- a sign that potential GPS interference could have happened.
Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:3)
The Global Positioning System satellites are owned and operated by the US government. It makes me wonder if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking.
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Re:Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Informative)
GLONASS. It uses different frequencies than GPS, so it's possible to jam GPS without jamming GLONASS also. (The frequencies are close enough together, centered about 25 MHz apart, that it's possible to jam both from a single fairly standard transmitter.)
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Jamming GPS exclusively probably wouldn't be useless; odds are good that some American and pre-Galileo western European military hardware had GPS exclusivity baked into parts that are nontrivial to switch out without breaking things; but given th
Re:Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Informative)
Uh what? Yes, regional blocking is possible, but although the US invented and made the first GPS system (called GPS), others have made their own GPS systems now. Russia uses GLONASS. Europe has Galileo, and China uses BeiDou.
Re:Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Informative)
The USA is not behind this. GPS signals are insanely weak and very easy to spoof and thus override.
Russia is almost certainly doing it themselves thanks to the threat of Ukrainian drones. If the USA would have the ability to regionally block in Russia then doing so would only impact Ukraine, and we're on their side. Russia will be using GLONASS.
This is also standard practice in warfare when there's a threat of aerial attacks: - Do anything to confuse the situation and throw the aerial attack off target. Jamming navigation is just the latest high tech version of this. I have a photograph here of a completely fake refinery made out of wood and some lights built some 10km closer to the UK than actual German refineries in the Ruhr area during WW2. They apparently worked really well, after British bombers flew many hours at night over a long distance being off by 10km was not such a surprise and thus they dropped their bombs on these fake targets instead.
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The US has preserved the ability to provide selective availability to GPS vis spot-beaming... essentially, they can jam the signal over an area, and then only let the US military use it in that area.
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Spot beaming to provide functioning service to an area otherwise denied would have a profile of a region of the world having shit service, and a region of several thousand kilometers having selective service.
Instead, what we have is GPS working completely normally over a region, and a tight region of kilometers being jammed.
This is the Russians doing it to themselves to try to stop drone navigation.
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This is the Russians doing it to themselves to try to stop drone navigation.
Drone navigation and also JDAM. See headline from today: U.S. planning to give Ukraine smart-bomb kits [washingtonpost.com]
The Biden administration is planning to send Ukraine advanced electronic equipment that converts unguided aerial munitions into “smart bombs” that can target Russian military positions with a high degree of accuracy, according to senior U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The kits incorporate global positioning devices for precision and can be bolted onto a variety of weapons, creating what the Pentagon calls a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. The U.S. military has used the technology on bombs weighing up to 2,000 pounds, usually incorporating it with bomber aircraft and fighter jets.
Seems very reasonable to be jamming GPS in your own territory for that.
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Without aircraft, what can Ukraine do with this assistance?
What do you mean, without aircraft? Most of Ukraine's air force is still flying and attacking Russian targets. They even managed to incorporate HARM missiles [thedrive.com] into their inventory of destruction.
JDAMs will simply be another world of hurt on the Russian invaders, and the results will be glorious.
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I imagine it could make missile and artillery strikes more accurate as well. In addition to potentially making their DIY drones more accurate.
With Ukraine (presumably, I'm not sure if it's been confirmed) beginning to strike targets inside Russia, one of the worst things that could happen for them is that they accidentally strike a civilian target. Right now they have the unquestioned moral high ground and with it widespread international support even among those who have no beef against Russia - one stri
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I never said that is what was going on here. I said the US has the physical capability to do it, contrary to what the GP said.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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The spot beams are for the purpose of trying to make the signal harder to jam (though still pretty trivial for city environments).
In a remote battlefield, bringing up a 100kW transmitter is a bit trickier.
The purpose of the spot beam is not to provide small area denial (since the non-spot beam signal is still readily available), but rather small area denial resistance.
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Are you sure about that? GPS is pretty easy to jam - a tight-beam "signal booster" could just as easily transmit a jamming signal to drown out the wide-beam signal within a targeted area.
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Not necessarily - imagine if you will a standard wide-beam GPS satellite that also has the ability to tight-beam a slightly more powerful scrambling signal at specific locations.
No idea if they can actually do such a thing, and Russians doing it as an anti-drone defense does seem more likely, but it would be a valuable asset to deny GPS access to the enemy in a contested regions. A lot more targeted than the known alternative of reducing the non-encrypted precision of the GPS signal.
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That isn't to say such a capability can't exist, but it sure as fuck wouldn't be demonstrated in a proxy war over hostile territory.
What I was referring to in my post was the officially known spot-beaming capabilities.
Block III GPS satellites have the capability of providing a spot-beamed M code transmission, so that GPS can be made to work for devices with M code decryption abilities even in the presence of local transmitters smaller
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GPS's spot beams allow an increase of up to 20 dB in power for the military signals. They don't by themselves support jamming -- something else would have to do that. The advertised purpose is to allow US military users to have a better likelihood of using GPS when someone else is jamming GPS.
(The signals meant for US military use are encrypted so that it's impractical for others to use them for navigation.)
Selective availability (SA) is now permanently off, but how it worked was by injecting biases into th
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I asked this in another post above, but you seem better informed:
How sure are you about that? After all, the electronics to feed a jamming signal to the spot beam rather than the GPS signal would be trivial to add. Heck, you could even transmit an inverted GPS signal to not just jam but actually "erase" the GPS signal within the target area. You could potentially even "erase" the public portion of the signal while boosting the encrypted military portion.
Re: Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:3)
The only way to geo-block a region, based on my rudimentary understanding of GPS technology, would be in the receivers - you can't 'limit' or 'alter' satellite signal based on the receiver's location.
As the previous post said, this is almost certainly a plain-old radio jamming exercise to limit the ability of GPS-guided weapons/drones/etc from working in so-called "tactical cities".
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Re: Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Interesting)
Break GPS service in some random city inside of Russia?
No, this is certainly people on the ground doing it to try to stop autonomous vehicles from dropping payloads from the fucking sky.
Re: Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:4, Interesting)
You are behind the tech abilities, The USA always had a way to change GPS signals in a selected area.
The satellites are not just non-directional broadcasters.
Citation?
That's not how most people think GPS satellites work. And it seems implausible. So prove everyone wrong.
The closest I think you might be able to come to this, is if only some satellites are visible in the region you want to affect. (Then you could turn on the degradation feature.) But is that even possible? The satellites are in fixed orbits. Is it possible that a receiver -- in the place you want -- could only see the part of the constellation you are going to fuck with?
Re: Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:4, Interesting)
AFAIK the "selective" features of GPS is an on/off switch that degrades the entire system. I mean: it's not "selecting" a geographical area, it's selecting whether the feature is on or off.
Is the arrangement of satellites such that receivers on only, say, some multiple continents, would be affected? It is certainly impossible that something like a country or a city, could be affected.
When I used to fly airplanes a lot, the GPS receiver (on the ground before takeoff) would tell me how many satellites it could see. On the east coast of the USA I could see I think 10 satellites. Which is a lot of the entire constellation.
If this sounds wrong, please elaborate with verifiable technical citations.
Because what people are saying sounds like tin-foil bullcrap.
PS. For additional wrinkles in a military context, there are several different ground-based GPS subsystems (including transmitters) that are used by airliners. There are also of course several other nations' GPS systems.
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How, seriously?
In essence, there are a bunch of satellites spewing out their ID & VERY accurate TimeStamp. GPS receivers receive those signals process them, then generate a location.
You can alter the satellite signals to adjust location accuracy, or stop it from transmitting to reduce the ability of a receiver to generate an accurate location, but I see no mechanism that could only impact a small portion of the earth that "sees" a particular satellite.
Back in the day, the accuracy of certain commercial/
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Not just ID and timestamp, also the very accurate details of their current orbital parameters so you can tell exactly where they were when the signal was sent. I believe the boost in military accuracy is due to a second, encrypted set of more accurate orbital parameters (possibly also a more accurate timestamp).
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Russia will be using GLONASS.
So can Ukrainian drones.
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Yes in fact the GNSS receivers in widespread use on consumer drones are off-the-shelf chips that pick up all the constellations these day and use them in a fix. GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Beidou, etc. My phone gets over two dozen satellites overhead at any one time. They each use slightly different bands. Not sure how they react to jamming and spoofing of some bands.
Re:Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Interesting)
Russia will be using GLONASS.
Everything else you said is accurate but there is something wrong with GLONASS. Either the Russia AF doesn't have the receivers or it is jammed or something else. There are plenty of videos online of Russia pilots using commercial GPS receivers in their fighter jets and helicopters. BTW, the Russians supposedly have a secure military communications network but for some reason their military isn't using that either. I can't really explain why but they will often use commercial cell phones for military communications. It is so bad, they they use runners to pass import secure messages as the Russian AF doesn't seem to be able to communicate securely. Other than the generic, "its because of corruption" I can't explain why. Yes, it confuses me too.
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This issue is limited to the airspace surrounding tactical cities, the easiest way to do that is to deploy jamming transmitters to each tactical city.
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Russia will be using GLONASS.
Everything else you said is accurate but there is something wrong with GLONASS. Either the Russia AF doesn't have the receivers or it is jammed or something else. There are plenty of videos online of Russia pilots using commercial GPS receivers in their fighter jets and helicopters.
Sometimes the answer is as simple as they can't get the (military grade) receivers, so use what they can get. I think almost all militaries have used commercial equipment when the alternative is no location services at all. And in the 1st Iraq war, some US pilots found that commercial GPS apps were better than what was available in their aircraft (the US military learned that lesson, but perhaps not all countries did).
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There are plenty of videos online of Russia pilots using commercial GPS receivers in their fighter jets and helicopters.
That doesn't preclude the use of GLONASS. Most commercial receivers these days are at least tri-band with many having support for BeiDou and QZSS as well.
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I have a photograph here of a completely fake refinery made out of wood and some lights built some 10km closer to the UK than actual German refineries in the Ruhr area during WW2. They apparently worked really well, after British bombers flew many hours at night over a long distance being off by 10km was not such a surprise and thus they dropped their bombs on these fake targets instead.
Ha. I just the other day stumbled on a photograph of one such fake site, taken after the allies dropped fake wooden bombs on it. (showing their sense of humor -and acknowledging that they knew it was a fake...)
It was very cool to see the pics.
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Ha. I just the other day stumbled on a photograph of one such fake site, taken after the allies dropped fake wooden bombs on it. (showing their sense of humor -and acknowledging that they knew it was a fake...)
It was very cool to see the pics.
It didn't always work, but the site in question I'm talking about got bombed properly 3 times before the Allies hit the correct target. It's a lot of fun doing projects at a oil refinery which has 100 suspected bombs in the ground, and around 2/3rds of the time they actually find one when doing excavations in the suspected locations.
Re:Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:5, Interesting)
In America too: Prop Town: The Fake Rooftop Suburb that Hid a Whole WWII Airplane Factory. [99percentinvisible.org]
Hiding the REAL targets (Score:2)
Okay, so the FP didn't completely derail the discussion, but why did you propagate the bogus Subject?
Anyway, my thoughts along the same lines are in my other comment. No Funny in this long discussion so I'll we wandering off now...
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I have a photograph here of a completely fake refinery made out of wood and some lights built some 10km closer to the UK than actual German refineries in the Ruhr area during WW2. They apparently worked really well, after British bombers flew many hours at night over a long distance being off by 10km was not such a surprise and thus they dropped their bombs on these fake targets instead.
Not just WW2.
Ukraine claims Russia hasn't destroyed a single HIMARS while Russia claims to have destroyed more HIMARS than the US has even sent.
Why do the Russians think they've destroyed so many? Because they're blowing up wooden decoys [theguardian.com].
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The Global Positioning System satellites are owned and operated by the US government. It makes me wonder if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking.
I think they obviously have the capability to degrade service for an area or region, but I don't think they're doing it here.
For one reason, there's no reason to screw with GPS coverage in Russia since the actual fighting is happening in Ukraine. The only one who is militarily harmed by poor GPS in Russia is Ukraine who is trying to send drones after military targets in Russia.
The other reason is that Russia has its own satellite network called GLONASS [wikipedia.org]. There's still probably a bunch of GPS stuff since they
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I think they obviously have the capability to degrade service for an area or region, but I don't think they're doing it here.
I strongly suspect you are wrong. Without control of the receivers, how can this be accomplished?
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if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking
Yes. regional degradation is reported from time to time in NOTAMs [faa.gov].
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if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking
Yes. regional degradation is reported from time to time in NOTAMs [faa.gov].
I'm a (private) pilot based out of Washington, D.C., and I see those NOTAMs all the time. You misunderstand what is going on there.
This is nothing to do with the satellites. It is simply jamming in the area, using transmitters on the ground.
It is what Russia is doing right now to prevent Ukraine drones from working deep in Russian cities.
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" It makes me wonder if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking."
So that food delivery drivers don't find their clients?
The Russians are afraid of Ukrainian drones.
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https://www.gps.gov/systems/gp... [gps.gov] 'Selective Availability' has always existed though it was turned off in 2000.
Re: Wondering if the US is behind it (Score:2)
Show everyone where the best targets are! (Score:2)
That was a really trollish FP, even if you signed it.
Quite obvious what is going on here. Putin doesn't know how his bases were hit, so he is trying to cover the case that the drones were flying on GPS. But it's a pretty risky counter-tactic because it could also give away the locations of the assets Putin is most concerned to protect.
Obvious extensions? How about different fake target locations depending on which GPS system the drone might be using, so Putin can learn which technology is being used? Howeve
GLONASS or GNSS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Both (Score:2)
Almost every GPS receiver I've looked at nowadays can use both GPS and GLONASS, as a combination of both can yield nearly instant location fixes. I'd be surprised if a modern drone isn't using both, and I'd be equally surprised if Russia is also jamming GLONASS as they kind of rely on it for everything.
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The Russians presumably have more control over GLONASS, perhaps even being able to perform some sort of tracking - which an aggressor certainly wouldn't want.
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Positioning is done by the receiver on the ground. There is no tracking of use.
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And let's not forget Galileo and BeiDou as well.
China, Europe, the USA and Russia all have their own GNSS.
Re: GLONASS or GNSS? (Score:2)
If their enemies miss lies and drones rely on it to attack Russia, then yes, it does make sense.
During previous wars, it was quite common for invaded countries to takedown road signs, so it would be harder for the enemy to find their next targets/major cities/etc.
Russia jamming GPS/GLONASS (?) to render hi-tech weapons less effective makes perfect sense.
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It wouldn't make sense to build a satellite navigation for national security purposes that you couldn't *selectively* jam. The problem is that at some point your society becomes so dependent up on it that a disruption is worse than a modest bombing campaign.
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Ya, that sounds way worse than a hellfire hitting your fucking house.
Your perspective is enlightening.
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Are you serious?
Do you imagine people are so dependent on GPS that without it parcel deliveries stop, cabs are abandoned on the side of the road, and no one has any idea how to get anywhere?
Somehow we functioned as a society before GPS was deployed, if we lost it for a few days, society wouldn't crumble.
Jamming Not Required (Score:2)
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The errors you inject impact GPS accuracy for every device that uses that satellite (along with others) to calculate current location - rather than simply impact a few hundred square kilometers around a tactical city, as reported here, instead all of Europe and the Middle East (for example would be impacted - based on the estimated footprint for a satellite. Of course, I suspect many "serious" GPS receivers would reject/not consider data too far off compared to other satellites, so you'd likely have to tink
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The errors you inject impact GPS accuracy for every device that uses that satellite (along with others) to calculate current location...
I'm no expert so I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that was the intention, at least in the early days. GPS was initially created for military use. To prevent enemies from benefitting from the technology, there was a mode which could be enabled (in times of war, for example), that would make it inaccurate for everyone other than the military.
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The standard signals provided a random error to the transmitted clocks.
A correction factor was available, but encrypted.
If you could decrypt the correction factor, then you could recover accurate times from the satellites, providing a good signal.
Without the correction factor, you still had times, there was simply an error bar on them, increasing the error in your positional calculation at the receiver.
The problem of course, is that mode means that everyone exce
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The problem of course, is that mode means that everyone except for the military has a shit signal, across the coverage area of the entire satellite.
Which is exactly as intended. If WWIII broke out, they wouldn't give a damn about some random civilian being impacted by crappy GPS. I'm not even sure whether, in the early days, they would have envisioned how widely adopted GPS navigation would become. Did they anticipate a GPS receiver in every mobile phone, or built-in to the dashboard of cars?
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The distinction was pointing out to demonstrate that's not what is happening.
As for whether they envisioned how widely adopted it would be? I'm quite certain they did.
Even in the early days civilian GPS was a rapidly booming market. It has kept pace with the miniaturization that has happened everywhere else.
My roommate and a friend of his started a company producing "small" GPS receivers in the 90s (about the size of a car DIN, really), and they weren't the only o
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It makes perfect sense.
No positioning system works over the Kremlin, and it's been that way for a very long time.
You block GNSS systems when you want to make sure that autonomous vehicles (missiles, drones, whatever) cannot hit their target within that region.
GLONASS has been a staple of even the cheapest GPS receivers for decades.
It's just another set of clock signals to use for triangulation.
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I suspect GNSS signals are simply jammed at the kremlin, you can't "prevent" a satellite signal from being transmitted to certain geographic area from space - the signal is receivable anywhere there is a clear path between the satellite and the ground station.
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Jamming is absolutely done at the ground level, where it's simplest to do.
With current GNSS systems, a 100W transmitter is an flatly unbeatable jam, and it's easy enough to fit one of those in a truck.
There are a limited amount of very new satellites (GPS Block III) that can provide a 20dB spot signal to areas that make them much harder to deny (requiring a ~100kW transmitter) but still not impossible for fixed positions.
Coverage of the spot signal is of course also
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it's easy enough to fit one of those in a truck
Truck? 100 Watts is a desktop ham transceiver. Smaller if you are so motivated.
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Or do you imagine we strap desktop HAM jammers to little infantry dudes, along with the 600Wh batteries to keep it running?
GNSS is the generic term (Score:3)
GNSS is the overall term used for Global Navigation Satellite System. GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (EU), and BeiDou (China) are the widely-supported GNSS implementations.
WWIII (Score:3)
Inching ever closer to WWIII...
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We are already in it. Putin is insane along with everyone around him apparently. Listening to anything they have to say is pure lunacy. Same with Xi.
Nukes are the one and only thing keeping a lid on this, but they will probably also be the thing that ends up busting it wide open too, because they are just. that. dumb. and giving them time to fuck around is not going to help.
The fuckers are torturing kids man, torturing.....not even nazis did that shit. Not anymore than any other nation. Orcs are special tho
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I don't think Putin or those around him are insane. They do believe in a Manifest Destiny for Russia, and that's much of what led to this. They know that using nukes is a hard line that will result in direct US action, which is why they won't use them. Putin knows he's losing this war, and he knows if he loses, he's likely done for, so he's looking for a way out, and hasn't found it yet.
The US is also doing everything it can to stay out. I suspect that missile that killed two people in Poland was Russia
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IMHO, believing in a Manifest Destiny, any of them, IS being insane.
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Inching ever closer to WWIII...
Russia already lost conventional war, even before starting active engagement against NATO troops. Russian casualties and loss of tech is so substantial that even if hostilities to end right now, they will not be capable to do militarily anything for considerable time. According to credible reports, Russian troops are now mostly conscripts using Soviet-era equipment and tech (that was taken out of Long Long term storage). Anything remotely modern is already lost, due to sanctions they have no way to replace
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Nukes is all that is needed to ruin the world and they have working nukes.
Western Russian not Eastern (Score:4, Insightful)
Eastern Russia is a long long way from Ukraine and the cities are in Western Russia.
'Eastern Russia' comes from article so not a slashdot fault, perhaps the GPS jamming was impacting the writers sense of direction!
Seriously it's not difficult to check things like this.
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Thank you. Came here to say the same thing.
But hey, it's Wired. We'd expect nothing less.
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I sent the author an email describing the error and they have updated the article(not sure if the update was due to my email or if other people noticed the mistake).
At the end of the story there is now this text:-
Update 2 pm ET, December 15, 2022: An earlier version of his article inaccurately described the location of the cities affected by the GPS disruptions. They are all in western Russia.
Interfering wit GPS/GLONASS (Score:3)
If you want to interfere with GPS/GLONASS you need only deploy small transmitters that block out satellite signals, so that the receiver can't 'lock' on to enough satellites to determine actual location.
You would only impact receivers in the immediate area, based on the power/signal of your jammers - there's no need to hack/attack GPS infrastructure, just jam the 'birds' and deny devices a location 'lock'.
Re:Interfering wit GPS/GLONASS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Russsia has already shown that the can not only jam GPS over a fairly large area, but also spoof the signal
Honestly there's nothing to show here. You can find code up on github and open source projects on how to spoof GPS signals. All you need after that is a transmitter.
Alternate Systems (Score:3)
Ukraine will now look into alternate systems for their drone targeting systems. There were stories about using Starlink as a GPS alternative, which might have a stronger signal, but they really need off-the-shelf solutions to incorporate quickly into their weapons. Fortunately there are several other systems to choose from. Apparently most cell phone chips are designed to work with multiple systems. So now the question is whether the report of GPS interference is really just GPS or all similar systems. My phone is currently seeing 7 American satellites, 4 Russian, and 1 European. My guess is that the signals are similar enough that any jamming is messing with all of them, but the press isn't technical enough to report correctly.
Re: Alternate Systems (Score:2)
How about that. (Score:2)
Ukraine has managed to bomb Russia back into the Dark Ages.
A Russian here (Score:2)
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I can confirm GPS barely functioned here in a major one million city last week - my smartphone behaved erratically and often showed my location off by at least half a kilometer or more.
Thank you for checking in, AC. While I'm sure it's no surprise that the general Slashdot consensus isn't a fan of your government's actions, I'd like to take a moment to express my hope for the safety of the citizens of Russia, many of whom are indirect victims of this conflict as well. May you and your family be safe, and stay warm this winter.
Proof-of-Need for that new .gov SAT (Score:2)
Here USA have olde reliable GPS vulnerable to tech able to muck with its QoS.
History will bookmark this divergence between the nations that have and havenots.
Use stars and compass when you can (Score:2)
Sun/moon/starts + compass + landmarks = a pretty good estimate of where you are.
Add in a known starting point and continuous measurements and you can be even more accurate.
If you are going as fast as a typical cruise missile, you will need a fast computer to keep up though. But it's doable.
Ukraine was able to hit strategic bombers (Score:3)
What does it mean? Well, for one that Russian strategic bombers, that suppose to be part of nuclear strike capabilities, are essentially defenseless and could be hit with an old-school Soviet tech. This means that at least one of the nuclear triad (they are: strategic bombers, nuclear subs, and ICBMs in silos) is a joke that would be trivial for NATO forces to destroy. This is important, because it demonstrated that Russia is a lot less capable of MAD than previously thought. If the rest of triad is in the same shape, they are about as dangerous as North Korea.
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As a retaliation, Ukraine used jet-powered drones, supposedly (hard to verify, but that is what claimed) USSR-era tech with updated guidance systems to hit back at multiple airfields where these bombers were based.
News from today says Pentagon is expecting to send JDAM electronics to Ukraine. Maybe they already had.
essentially defenseless and could be hit with an old-school Soviet tech. This means that at least one of the nuclear triad (they are: strategic bombers, nuclear subs, and ICBMs in silos) is a joke that would be trivial for NATO forces to destroy.
Certainly not a good look. If they didn't detect and intercept a cruise missile, then an F-35, B-2, or B-21 might just waltz in and out. But Russia may have planes hiding somewhere you don't know about.
If the rest of triad is in the same shape, they are about as dangerous as North Korea.
I think that's an assertion too far. Russia has lots more warheads. If any of the ballistic missile submarines still work, they're a huge threat. And oddly, for all their bluster, lunacy, and occasional isla
Do they really care GLONASS (Score:2)
Which GPS? the USA one, of course (Score:3)
Russia is using transmitters on the ground on some cities to jam "GPS", and people wonder which country's GNSS they are jamming.
My guess is that it's really just the actual "GPS" system of the USA. Because Russia wants to disable drones from Ukraine. And I bet those drones are only using GPS.
Alternatively, Russia could also be degrading their own GLONASS. Assuming that works like ours, that means their military would still be able to read the encrypted high-precision data. But Ubereski-Eats drivers might have trouble, maybe.
IFF spoofing ? (Score:3)
Rumor has it the Ukrainian have managed to decode and spoof the Russian IFF signals. Do not forget Ukraine used to make 40% of Soviet military hardware.
So maybe if the the Ukrainian drones manages to hit that far in Russia it is because the drones were equipped with transponders that allowed them to pass for Russian planes. If true it shows the Russia defense to be very vulnerable.
P.S. IFF: The crypted radio that is used to identify yourself as a friendly to your own army.
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It is true that with a simple enough flight plan, a purely inertial navigation system can provide pretty good results (~0.1%) it's not good enough for what we'd consider "smart weapons" today, and it completely falls apart if your flight plan is complicated (too many competing vectors of drift)
Removing global positioning capacity is an effective way to make drones ineffective as smart weapons, turning them more into terror
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Removing global positioning capacity is an effective way to make drones ineffective as smart weapons, turning them more into terror devices, which I suspect Ukraine is trying to be careful not to do, since their partners generally unfavorably look upon terror bombing campaigns.
Solution: a spotter to paint the target with a laser when the drone gets in range.
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I didn't mean to imply there aren't solutions.
It's a cat and mouse game, and at the end of the day, it gets pretty hard to stop the good ol' analogue system of a spotter.
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But it's worth keeping in mind, Ukraine is using military drones. They're not quadcopters.
What I do know, is that using inertial guidance to drop bombs in shared civilian/military areas is a way to make enemies out of your friends.
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While you are at it, add an FM antenna and use it for backup triangulation... or go wild and crazy and do it with cellular.
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Inertial/compass navigation doesn't help much
For commercial/consumer grade this is probably true. There are military grade systems that perform much better. How much is classified.
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But ya, it would have been nice if they'd dug deeper and answered that for us.
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What?
The only transmitters used for GPS are in the satellites, not in the missiles/drones
GPS location is passive, based on the signals it receives from multiple satellites.