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Antenna tech has moved way beyond what was possible in the days GPS was invented. Planar arrays and MIMO are ubiquitous and cheap.

These antennas have a very good idea of where the signal is coming from, due to delay measurements and can detect and filter ambient noise. They are super hard to jam. The reason why drones have become such a PITA is that these inexpensive antennas are very hard to defeat even with military jammers.

If this becomes a geniune need in the civilian sector, then I'm sure the tech is up to the challenge.

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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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> 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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IMO tracking is just way too useful. You know when things are about to arrive (so you dont miss a parcel because you went to the toilet or you can even intercept your driver once he's in the area, removing most of the last-mile problem), routes can be changed on the fly (e.g. for on-demand public transport pickup, trunking or delay mitigation) or, well, you can track your vehicles, allowing you to find them quickly in case of theft, optimize routes or have decent evidence in case of disputes.

The real problem is not really drivers being tracked, but how the tracking data is or might be used. Timestamped delivery notifications might be just as bad in this regard.

As often, the solution is probably more about accessible and pro-human law. No idea how that should work, maybe certain sensitive data services having to be provided by a third party or even the government itself? There are probably much smarter ideas or variations of this...

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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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> if a bunch of people installed fixed GPS sensors at home

Similar things already exist - although it's used for increasing GPS precision and detecting faulty satellites, moreso than detecting jamming, so the networks might not be dense enough to detect small areas of jamming.

For one state's example, see [1] - choose 'RINEX archives' if you want historical readings.

[1] http://www.wsrn.org/Map/SensorMap.aspx

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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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If you wanted to exactly pinpoint it with a single device sure, but I'm thinking of a map where nodes just report that they are experiencing jamming, and then with the whole network you can see a radius of the jam, see it moving around, and assume it's somewhere in the center. All with cheap off the shelf hardware.

The police could probably combine this data with license plate scanners and see the single truck that always exists in the jammed location.

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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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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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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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I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.
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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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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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Russia has a satellite constellation for global jamming.
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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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