Working on construction projects on the Romanian coastline (just South of Ukraine) and on the Polish continental waters (just West of Kaliningrad) we experienced jamming on a daily basis.
For me it was a minor annoyance while driving but presumably any apps that rely heavily on GPS (Uber, food delivery) just wouldn’t work very well or at all
They don't give a fuck.
Was watching a youtube video by a russian the other day talking about war & sanction impact and things like ride sharing apps literally say on screen the location is going to be wrong and to select pickup spot manually. It's just assumed to be fucked as a given even at an app development level
do not ever give up your guns, my American friends.
Don't worry though, it's been condemned in a sternly worded letter: https://www.icao.int/news/icao-assembly-condemns-gnss-radio-...
The behavior will continue until a consequence is imposed.
Not on regular Russians, mind. Their ruling class. They're still free to move about the continent, make investments, do whatever. Currently Europe seems to be more interested in breaking away from the US than dealing with the power that has killed hundreds of thousands on their own continent.
The current US president has threatened to invade European territory, is attempting to impose Russia's preferred "peace" plan on Ukraine, and has recently relaxed sanctions on Russia. He also consistently denigrates the military support Europe's given to the US in the recent past. The US has basically cut aid to Ukraine to zero, while Europe continues to supply them, which is currently the best way of dealing with Russia, sucking their military power into a war their not going to win.
When the Russians invaded Georgia in 2008, Europeans inked a deal for a second gas pipeline with them, Nordstream 2. When they annexed Crimea in 2014, Europeans went to the Sochi Olympics (which happened that same year) and went to the World Cup in 2018. And this is before you take into account the dozens of smaller incidents.
Those aren't "threats to invade European territory", not even ones that were ignored by the military. Those were shooting wars that got people killed and redrew the map in Eurasia. Europeans continued to do business with Russia more-or-less unimpeded until 2022. Many Russians still live, work, and do business in the Schengen area.
The US Congress passed a bill to fund Ukraine this week. [0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-ukraine...
Except that's not true at all, is it? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
> According to data cited in Wednesday's letter, which was seen by Reuters, 477,878 Schengen visas were issued to Russian citizens for tourism in 2025, up from 440,558 in 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/world/sweden-urges-eu-tighten-rules-...
Funny how Ukraine situation started improving once they have severly limited sharing information with the US.
Just as Iran jams GNSS, and Venezuela jammed GNSS ahead of the attack. Didn't really help though.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/nasa-satellites-can-...
Russian technology is very dependent on both western and Chinese tech, yet they couldn't even defend their own oil refineries in St Petersburg or make any relevant progress along the front in years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...
Russia does not care, nor does it care about its population.
Where are you from?
I ask because you have western privilege, like me, and assume our governments care about its people. Why I lucked out being born in Sweden, the more I learn about the world, the more I am convinced I lucked out ahahaha.
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.
(I, of course, do not agree with the decision to demolish the remaining ruins in 1968; it could have been handled better.)
Most places in Russia are hunting and fishing locations too, hah.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx3ly54veo
So funny seeing non-EU people and/or people friendly to Russia comment (not you)
Carry on!
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 now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.
I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.
I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.
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.
Realistically, how many people could do this ?
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.
Forget "state actors", truck drivers have taken out entire airports with GPS jammers:
* https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...
People like the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation have been trying for years to get some kind of GNSS backup accepted:
China has certainly put their money into resiliency (both navigation and timing):
* https://www.gpsworld.com/china-completes-national-eloran-net...
* https://rntfnd.org//2026/03/19/china-has-built-a-triad-of-sa...
* https://rntfnd.org/2023/11/28/china-eloran-used-for-critical...
Some folks are certainly cluing in: South Korea has (e)Loran and the UK and France are joining up with them:
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/04/30/the-uks-system-of-systems-appr...
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/11/12/s-korea-leads-meeting-with-u-k...
Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation as its line-of-sight only. But if the sun threw a Carrington event (or worse) at us, I think a lot of western aviation could carry on.
I'm aware of the FAA's MON, Minimum Operating Network.
Exactly: that doesn't help boats. Or people in cars. Or farmers:
* https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
It doesn't help those that use GNSS for precise timing (TCXOes can only 'free run' for a finite amount of time before drift compounds 'too much').
(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.
No, conventional radio broadcasts can be received with a low noise amplifier and a tuned filter.
The received GPS signal, at ground level, is lower than the thermal noise floor. And the 1.023MHz code is modulated on the RF carrier anyway.
So correlating it with a sine wavelet?
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...
Also the user posting this article on HN was only created 5 hours ago.
Is the US planning for war with Russia and are manufacturing consent again?
But in the case where the story is interesting to a larger audience, having a push behind a story across non-academic media is not unheard of. If you can get some media coverage of an academic topic, it can be very beneficial to the researchers’ careers. One goal for a researcher is to bring notoriety to their research, to their institution, and to the field in general. This is the main motivation I see.
The authors may have pushed the arxiv paper out earlier due to the timing of the release of the video.
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.
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.
Probably because some missing mention of some specific thing you care deeply about doesn't imply "lack of basic world knowledge" for an entire political office, really strange thing to say and most likely why people are downvoting. It's neither kind, curious and definitively a snark/swipe that doesn't really add anything to the point you were trying to make.
If you listen to the press conference, Podesta (the press secretary) spoke about the plane circling and not being able to land. When preparing the press conference, she should have checked if this obvious lie can be obviously disproved, but she did not. This probably means that she did not know this was a lie, but then someone who ordered this to be announced knew.
My bet is that von der Leyen or her close aide told Podesta to announce the lie in these terms, and the thing that worries me as a European is that there was none to warn these war-mongering ladies that they are making a mistake. This whole situation screams for an intern that sets up the mics and has a callsign and who can stop Podesta as she walks to the pied de stal of shame and explain that the position of planes is monitored all the time and is public information.
But I bet that all their interns are servile 3rd generation eurocrats.
P.S. The whole press conference (and many others) are fascinating to listen to. The language these people use is softened by the media. What do you think von der Leyen was doing on that plane? She was going "along the frontline" to inspect our preparedness for war where "the frontline" is the Eastern EU border.
P.P.S The story made rounds in EU circles, and there was a parliamentary question offering a chance to apologize, but von der Leyen chose to ignore it.
I don't care about Ursula von der Leyen nor her plane, merely explaining that if you try to extrapolate that a group of people don't have "basic world knowledge" based on not knowing a specific technology nor how/why it's used, the community is actually doing the rest of us a favor by downvoting it.
Want to discuss her office's use of a plane and how it's related to inspecting ammunition factories or whatever tirade you're going on about? Do create a new submission where that can be discussed, hardly related to the interesting story and methods of trying to track down GNSS interference.
I raised it because it was mentioned in the Veritassium video, but they stopped short of calling it a lie. They wanted to stay on topic, but the beauty of HN is that we can wander slightly off-topic and discover curious facts without being punished.
Overall it seems to be an overfitting the observation to the wider intent of a malicious actor.
> Note that Cosmos 2546 was launched in May 2020 and so cannot be responsible for the interference events that occurred in 2019. Moreover, Cosmos 2546 was not over Europe during some interference events after May 2020. But during all events on the 75 days shown in Table 1 there was at least one EKS satellite above a 35∘ elevation angle with respect to every reference station that observed the interference. Thus, it is highly probable that the EKS constellation is collectively responsible for the wide-area transient GNSS interference events noted since 2019.
Indeed, amateur Hams have caught Russian ships jamming/spoofing local port traffic several years before the various official overseas conflicts started. Not sure if it is government sponsored, or just various smuggling schemes like some ships spamming China harbors. =3
What i started building is for a highly unlikely scenario which is ; no internet + no GPS + no cell tower.
I didn't come up with this for dead reckoning, it's more for, um, autonomous cars to be able to avoid potholes and stuff.
from a cold-war diplomat interview "What I experienced in the decades of my service was that each side constantly assumed the worst of the other. In each situation, if anyone had doubts they would make stories about the intentions of the other. .. If somehow people could stop doing this, much suffering could be reduced".. something like that, IIR
Not sure why this is being couched as novel or surprising.
The top comment in this thread is some dude asking if we can ‘do something now that we know the source’ lol.
We’ve known the source for 5 years. The fact this particular jamming originates from a Russian satellite and not Russian terrestrial-based equipment doesn’t change much. And while it’s unconvenient for planes and affects separation minima, planes have inertial systems and pilots deal with this easily. It happens in many places around the world, actually, although the Russians are definitely the worst offenders.
Theory is that Russia has been constantly practicing to totally disrupt GPS and GNSS (and the Chinese system) across all of Europe since 2014. Practicing to deploy electronic warfare not across a warzone or even a country but an entire continent.
>This paper analyzes and identifies a space-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference source that has caused scores of powerful transient wide-area interference events over continental Europe, Greenland, and Canada since 2019. While terrestrial or near-terrestrial sources are primarily responsible for the recent uptick in GNSS interference worldwide, space-based interferers are of special concern given their potential for vast geographic reach and their portent of a qualitative escalation in GNSS interference. Based on data collected between 2019 and 2026 from a network of terrestrial GNSS reference stations, this paper (1) develops a received-power-based detection framework; (2) details the spatial, temporal, and spectral patterns of wide-area interference events caused by the source; (3) presents and analyzes identification techniques that blend received-power and time-difference-of-arrival measurements; and (4) applies these techniques to confidently identify the GNSS interference source as a constellation of Russian early warning satellites in Molniya ("lightning") orbits.
"The scout delivers a flawless summary of your abstract."
In the past there have been other incidents with Russian weapons reaching the neighboring countries from the EU, like Poland and Romania, but this was the first time when they hit a populated area, causing human injuries.
> The country's defence ministry said the drone had self-detonated near an oil terminal without causing any casualties, although authorities have said it caused considerable damage to a ship and warehouses.
> Ukraine later confirmed one of its naval drones had been involved, saying it had been knocked off course by Russian electronic interference. Moscow has yet to comment.
> It also comes a week after two people were injured when a drone hit a Romanian apartment block in the eastern city of Galati - close to the border with Ukraine.
> Romanian officials said they had confirmed it was a Russian drone but Moscow said "accusations" of its involvement were "unsubstantiated".
Who needs it? Russia? I guess Russia does not need war but it started it anyway.