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by jshier11 hours ago |
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upvoteby michaelt10 hours ago|
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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 jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.

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upvoteby torginus11 minutes ago|
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If I was a concerned boss, I would likely use GSM cell info to track my drivers. While not good enough to do turn-to-turn navigation it certainly is good enough to tell where people are.

Btw, don't smartphones have this built in? I remember some old and cheap Android phones without GPS that came with this.

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upvoteby matheusmoreira1 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby Gigachad2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby colechristensen36 minutes ago|
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They're easy to find, but not necessarily with stuff from off the shelf. Professionals with the right equipment though have no trouble locating them. The FCC is happy to hand out 5 and 6 digit fines for operating a GPS jammer and has fined retailers tens of millions for selling them.
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upvoteby dzhiurgis10 minutes ago|
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Russia has a satellite constellation for global jamming.
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upvoteby bb888 hours ago|
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GPS jamming was being investigated by the NTSB as a possible reason for this air crash that killed 4 people near White Sands Missile Range.

The plane reported GPS signal loss 5 minutes after the jamming started by WSMR. Three other planes in the area also reported GPS loss.

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-08-05/ntsb-medevac-...

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upvoteby sokoloff4 hours ago|
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I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming.

That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099

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upvoteby bb883 hours ago|
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I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming.

One is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be.

If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.

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upvoteby sokoloff3 hours ago|
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I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.
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upvoteby bb882 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby sokoloff2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby pigggg2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby azernik9 hours ago|
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Being much closer to the receiver and tied into terrestrial power grids, ground-based beacons can transmit at higher powers than GNSS signals and be received at much higher powers.

Received GNSS power is on the order of -130dBm (10e-16 W) - you can jam that with a 1W terrestrial source for hundreds of meters around. Way more if you're willing to scale the power from car USB power levels to bigger grid-connected supplies.

LORAN, from my quick googling, looks to be about 6-7 orders of magnitude higher received power.

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