Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

by mimorigasaka • 2 months ago

440 217 2 months ago

NKosmatos• 2 months ago

TLDR (conclusion from the paper): "By a combination of these techniques the satellite Cosmos 2546 (NORAD ID 45608) was identified with high confidence as one source of the interference. Further analysis pointed to the Russian Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema, an early warning constellation to which Cosmos 2546 belongs, as collectively responsible for the wide-area transient interference causing GNSS degradation across Europe since 2019."

jeroenhd• 2 months ago

Additionally:

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.

yladiz• 2 months ago

Related Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA

sippeangelo• 2 months ago

The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely. Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already. Therefore, the disruptions must either be regular tests of the capability, or just actual communication. Right?

wcarss2• 2 months ago

Or actual jamming mistargeted for some reason, or used because it was deemed necessary.

throw0101a2• 2 months ago

Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already.

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:

* https://rntfnd.org

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...

Havoc2• 2 months ago

Unless the actor happens to be a state that puts a great deal of emphasis on flexing & appearances regardless of how pointless it is

rcxdude4• 2 months ago

There is definitely value in having a demonstrated as opposed a simply supposed capability, though. And actions that are 'almost-certainly-but-not-completely-provably-us' is very much something Russia likes to do.

(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)

ordu• 2 months ago

The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely.

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.

Scroll_Swe4• 2 months ago

Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless

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...

codedokode5• 2 months ago

Why these capabilities, if they exist, were not used to send Iranian drones to a wrong target? Maybe because they do not exist. Israel definitely would be happy if thousands of drones were rerouted to a neighbour country or into the sea.

scotty793• 2 months ago

Even if that's for communication, repurposing it for mass jamming shouldn't be that hard. It already has this effect. Unless it's low power satellites that wouldn't be able to sustain radio signal in anything longer than short bursts.

atleta• 2 months ago

The flexing seems stupid, but also if it's a communication channel, they have given themselves away (just as if they were flexing with the jamming).

sam_lowry_4• 2 months ago

The video did not settle on the jamming of von der Leyen plane on approach to Plovdiv, but AFAIR it was a (likely unintentional) lie.

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.

sam_lowry_4• 2 months ago

Why downvotes?

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.

throwaway20374• 1 month ago

Even if you think the information density of YouTube videos is too low (many do on HN), I can confidently say that the visuals are outstanding for (a) how GNSS/GPS works and (b) how they pinpoint'ed the satellite.

uijl• 2 months ago

Interesting to see that they are able to identify the specific satellite. I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.

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.

colechristensen4• 2 months ago

I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.

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.

whizzter• 2 months ago

If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).

nutjob2• 2 months ago

You can shoot it down with a missile.

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.

JoachimS• 2 months ago

So Russia may be in violation of a treaty, treaties. I'm shocked.

pelorat• 2 months ago

Like the USA, I don't think Russia codifies treaties into law. Like in the USA, treaties for Russia are mere suggestions used as a geopolitical tool until inconvenient.

Schlagbohrer3• 2 months ago

That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right? Unless it is very carefully aimed which seems unlikely since it is also trying to cover a very large volume.

q3k• 2 months ago

Kaliningrad is one big military base.

lazide4• 2 months ago

1) with the exception of probably a few pensioners (who also depend on gov’t funding), everyone in the area is dependent on the military. It’s a giant military base in the middle of nowhere.

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.

rcxdude4• 2 months ago

Jamming in general will affect everything using those frequencies (and potentially more besides) in a given area, so if you're using it you're weighing up the effects it'll have on your stuff as well. (early in the current Ukrainian invasion, reportedly Russian electronic warfare units were screwing up their own side more than the Ukrainians)

Havoc2• 2 months ago

must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?

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

sorenjan6• 2 months ago

Yes, it's very wide spread and not carefully aimed at all. It's also not done by satellite but a ground based station.

https://gpsjam.org/

Scroll_Swe4• 2 months ago

That jamming near Kaliningrad must surely be impacting the Russian residents as well, right?

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.

ponector• 2 months ago

No one gives a fuck what russian residents are thinking about it. And if they start to talk about issues - police will quickly force everyone to shut up.

NoSalt• 2 months ago

Do you believe Putin cares who he inconveniences?

codedokode5• 2 months ago

Russians got used that GPS in Moscow and St. Petersburg often shows wrong position (I did not observe it because I never enable GPS though). We also have mobile Internet shoutdowns which are more annoying than GPS spoofing.

ifwinterco2• 2 months ago

I’ve briefly been somewhere for a few days with significant GPS interference, and yes, basically phone navigation doesn’t work reliably.

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

hughmungus67• 2 months ago

"what is GLONASS" - you

neonstatic• 2 months ago

Yes, it does, and they don't care, bc russian "culture" has no regard for life or people in general. Everyone and everything is expendable.

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

One of Russia’s superpowers is that they don’t give a damn about collateral damage on their own people. This isn’t just a throwaway comment I’m making this actually bears out over several decades.

Scroll_Swe4• 2 months ago

Russia is constantly GPS jamming EU.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx3ly54veo

So funny seeing non-EU people and/or people friendly to Russia comment (not you)

Carry on!

embedding-shape4• 2 months ago

Yeah, same with traveling by boat in the Baltic Sea, been continuously GPS-jammed since 2022 or something annoying like that, basically the entire South East-coast of Sweden been unnavigatable with GPS since then.

burne_• 1 month ago

Are you aware of https://gpsjam.org ?

That site has limitations. It uses the GNSS quality send by ADS-B beacons. So, you will only see reliable data if there are sufficient aircraft in that region. But, it is a useful site.

mattlondon• 2 months ago

tl;dr - it was Russian satellites

imp0cat• 2 months ago

How unsuprising.

Cthulhu_2• 2 months ago

This tl;dr is actually in the tl;dr on the linked page. We're doing tl;drs for tl;drs now?

Schlagbohrer3• 2 months ago

In the future abstracts will be called Tilldars and no one will remember it came originally from trying to pronounce "tldr"

muyuu• 2 months ago

it should be right in the title tbh, not after some 150 words of prose

red_admiral• 2 months ago

Not a new concept. From Matt Might https://matt.might.net/articles/peer-fortress/

"The scout delivers a flawless summary of your abstract."

dwa35923• 2 months ago

Hmm - the timing is uncanny that only 2 days ago I started building a dead reckoning system.

Joel_Mckay• 2 months ago

Your local cellphone towers already provide a more accurate position beacon signal for GPS modules in most parts of the world. Additional RF beam-forming in G5+ systems also make it impractical for lamers to jam long-distances due to limited coherent signal propagation.

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

dwa35923• 2 months ago

Agreed about cellphone towers providing accurate position, but not with enough precision and highly dependent on the number of towers in the vicinity.

What i started building is for a highly unlikely scenario which is ; no internet + no GPS + no cell tower.

platybubsy• 2 months ago

GPS jamming has been happening for years and it's not like dead reckoning is an insane new concept

dwa35923• 2 months ago

what are you saying? nothing of what you said is new or unknown.

DivingForGold• 2 months ago

You can likely bet that Space X with their thousands of sats deployed in space already has among them a few hundred stealth US military sats strategically placed and ready for the command to deal with the few Russky sats causing these problems ... think our Space Force.

general14652• 2 months ago

Completely different orbits to make this possible

Coala152• 2 months ago

Being engaged to warfare with Russia and being jammed in response. So weird.

preisschild3• 2 months ago

Russia attacked Europe, this is just another reminder that they are our enemies and we should be sabotaging their systems in turn.

Coala152• 2 months ago

Relax, Russia didn't attacked Europe yet (if you mean EU).

awestroke2• 2 months ago

Russia is the aggressor. What do you propose?

Npovview• 2 months ago

Playing Devil's advocate, given how much firepower Russia has, why is it so soft on Ukraine. I mean what is the endgoal for Russia here? Tire out the US/NATO Empire just as US did to Soviets in Afghanistan. I sometimes feel like all these events are orchestrated as Simon Dixon talks about them in his videos.

https://www.youtube.com/@SimonDixon21/videos

general14652• 2 months ago

The GPS jamming has been measured since 2019.

moffkalast• 2 months ago

There's a live map too: https://gpsjam.org

masklinn2• 2 months ago

That has nothing to do with the article, which is about satellite based interferences.

f137• 2 months ago

I do not see any discussion of the power required for such wide-area jamming. Even as the useful GPS signal is quite weak at the ground level, this satellite would require power in kW range, right?

awestroke2• 2 months ago

Satellites have multi kW solar panels

masklinn2• 2 months ago

Being on a Molniya orbit probably also helps: the apogee is at nearly 40000km, but the perigee is on the order of 1600 (according to the EKS wiki page), so outside of their primary observation points of their orbit they are quite close to the earth and thus have a ton of blasting ability for satellites with geostationary comms capabilities.

avazhi2• 2 months ago

It's been known that Russia does GPS interference near their Western border and the Baltic down to Ukraine for several years now. It's something airline pilots prepare for now, and expect.

Not sure why this is being couched as novel or surprising.

dingaling• 2 months ago

The novel aspect is that it is being conducted by a satellite, rather than a ground station. Which is an escalation in sophistication which makes counter-jamming much more difficult and also gives global reach to the jammer.

numlock86• 2 months ago

You could actually try reading the paper first before posting comments like this.

avazhi2• 2 months ago

Was responding to many of these comments, which read as if the commenters haven’t heard of this before.

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.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 months ago

Saved you a click:

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.

DumpoLumbo2• 2 months ago

I wonder why they call this specific discovery “jamming”. What they found is a relatively rare burst transmissions over roughly 5MHz of spectrum of something looking like a 12ms cyclic prefix with spacing related to 150 seconds multiplies. I would suspect it is some sort of sync or data close to L1 GPS frequencies, that as a side effect causing lower CNR for the GPS receivers. Btw it is only 10dB, which also I can’t really call “jamming”.

Overall it seems to be an overfitting the observation to the wider intent of a malicious actor.

scotty793• 2 months ago

I wonder why they call this specific discovery “jamming”.

Because it jamms.

DumpoLumbo2• 2 months ago

Well 10dB lower CNR for couple seconds doesn't pass my definition of jamm, but rather is a minor co-channel interference.

spwa4• 2 months ago

TLDR: Russia is jamming GPS and GNSS over Europe, purposefully, using a constellation of military satellites, part of the Russian nuclear program.

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.

yehat6• 2 months ago

Who's theory is that? Is it proven by independent research?

yehat6• 2 months ago

Well I like how "the community" downvotes a reasonable question. À la guerre comme à la guerre.

ck2• 2 months ago

glad it's getting more coverage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48246794

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309667

RealityVoid• 2 months ago

Mildly interesting, and highly likely related. A cluster of 5(?) Ukrainian marine drones wound up today outside and around of Constanta off the coast of Romania with one detonating in the port and the rest detonating... somewhere around. Que here noisy exposion in port:

https://youtu.be/Y8kdneBU_3Q?si=cr07TeMnxJTG-3TM&t=17

No significant damage.

The Ukrainans apparently lost control of the drones and they wound up there. My pet theory is that Russian EW jammed the control signals and guided the GPS jamming walking them to Constanta. I'll admit, if it was intentional (it seems so) it's pretty damn' impressive work from Russian EW.

atomicbeanie• 2 months ago

Comm signal in band with GPS? Control for a GPS software supply chain attack?

VerifiedReports• 2 months ago

The disturbing thing is that anyone was surprised by this. GPS is very fragile.

This made news in the U.S. a few years ago because Ajit Pai had the brilliant idea to allow so-called "5G" telecom service on frequencies too close to those of GPS. I don't think this case is resolved yet: https://physicstoday.aip.org/news/new-5g-exemption-may-jam-g...

d0mine• 2 months ago

U.S. Military Turned GPS into a Global "Numbers Station" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414479

Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

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