Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
flightradar24.com
flightradar24.com
Relevant previous posts on HN:
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346
2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106
(From my comment on that 2023 post: "Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this?")
"A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence."
There are heuristics you can use that allow you to make a pretty good guess about whether jamming is happening based on signals from just one or two aircraft, and have worked well on GPSJAM for the past couple years.
With regard to localization of GPS jammers, yes you can do direction finding of the emitted signal directly, but that's easy mode. For a fun challenge, do it based just on observations of the ADS-B data from affected (and unaffected aircraft). Here's one approach from researchers at the GPS laboratory at Stanford, "GNSS Interference Source Localization Using ADS-B data": https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...
I have some other ideas about how to do that localization.
https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1764054377982308484
"Do aircraft systems really only use GPS and not the full constellation of navigational satellite systems?"
ADS-B doesn't tell you what navigation system is, but my understanding is that most aircraft are still using GPS. Maybe someone who works on aircraft avionics will chime in. A few years ago I did see data that distinguished between different GNSS, and GPS was experiencing more jamming than the others. I assume as multi-network systems become more and more common jammers will just target all of them, if they're not already.
"There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there."
That's right, no (or few) flights over Ukraine with ADS-B transponders means no data. I actually first started mapping GPS jamming on Feb. 14, 2022 (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=45.00000&lon=35.00000&z=3.0&date=202...), because I thought it might give me an early warning of the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine. It didn't work out that way--there was no indication of interference right up until Feb 24., and then all civil aviation stopped and there was no more data for that region (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.18928&lon=33.51687&z=3.9&date=202...).
As some of you have noticed, GPS jamming is highly correlated with conflict zones. Some conflicts are higher intensity than others--for example, I think the airspace around Cyprus has been jammed for years (since 2018 maybe?), and I get the feeling it's more harrassment than anything else (maybe someone more geopolitically savvy than me knows more).
"I see 2 red cells on the US/Mexico border right about Texas/Coahuila region". Someone always says it's cartels, and the evidence is that it's much more likely to be U.S. military testing and training. First, the interference is always in the Laughlin and Randolph military operating areas (MOAs) (https://imgur.com/vieGhgN). Second, the interference usually runs during the week and takes weekends off--which I doubt cartels do, but that's the typical pattern seen for military exercises.
"am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?"
From 2/24/2022 until 3/19/2024, gpsjam.org was the only site with regularly updated GPS jamming maps. On Twitter, @auonsson (https://twitter.com/auonsson) and @rundradion (https://twitter.com/rundradion) have been posting geospatial and other analysis of similar data for the past several months at least, and @x00live (https://twitter.com/x00live) has looked at ADS-B and GPS interference for a while too. (I'm not even going to try to catalog academic or government efforts, though I will mention HawkEye 360's satellite based GPS interference mapping: https://spacenews.com/hawkeye-360-gps-ukr/)
"If line of sight to the jamming antenna is required to be jammed, why do aircraft not have a downwards shield so that they only receive GPS signal from the sky (satellites) and not from jammers (coming from the bottom hemisphere)? Or is the jamming signal so many orders of magnitudes stronger than the satellites that there's always going to be some gain no matter how good the shield is?"
Yes, GPS signals are so weak (below the noise floor!) that it's just super easy to overpower them with terrestrial (or airborne) jammers. But there are special antennas and other techniques for building jam-resistant systems, e.g. "controlled reception pattern antennas" (CRPA): https://www.gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-th... But I think the main reason most civilian aircraft systems aren't jam resistant is because they didn't need to be--For the past several decades GPS jamming has been a much smaller issue than it is now, and I don't think there was sufficient reason to spend time and money on what would have been an over-engineered, mostly unnecessary system. But the situation is changing, and I expect anti-jamming to become a more significant concern by equipment manufacturers and aviation authorities.
[Edited to add:]
"I'm in the middle of one of the red blobs on the map and just used my phone with google maps to drive around. It worked fine."
From the GPSJAM FAQ: ""I live in one of the red zones and my GPS was fine?"" (https://gpsjam.org/faq/#i-live-in-one-of-the-red-zones). Yeah, the answer is, as you mentioned, aircraft fly at higher altitudes, so they get much longer line of sight to the jammer.
On the general idea of using ADS-B to map GPS interference, when I thought of this idea I was pretty excited. I realized that if you had access to worldwide ADS-B data, which ADS-B Exchange graciously gave me as part of my Advisory Circular project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661), you could also make a worldwide map of GPS jamming, and I hadn't seen anyone do that before (later I found some researchers who realized you could get GPS jamming information from ADS-B, but they only looked at a couple aircraft).
I just think it's pretty neat that even though there were multiple companies devoted to processing, analyzing, and selling ADS-B data, and ADS-B data is not all that complicated, none of those companies had realized this new way of using it. Sometimes there's gold left even in data that you think must have been completely mined out.
Even specifically looking at ADS-B data as it relates to GPS interference, there's still lots to be done! FR24 is mapping jamming, but I don't think anyone else has made worldwide maps of spoofing (yet!): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1770515361739493488
[Edited to add more:]
With respect to safety issues, yes, aircraft have redundant navigation systems. But GPS is one of the important layers that add safety to aviation, and it is not at all normal for entire countries or even larger regions to lsoe GPS while still maintaining passenger flights. This Eurocontrol presentation, "GNSS Interference and Civil Aviation", has lots of details: https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...
From the presentation:
Aviation Safety is built on two main principles:
• Trust your instruments
• Follow standard operating procedure
GNSS RFI causes pilots to have to question both principles!
Why the reluctance? I do not think there is much love lost in regards to Russia.
Appeasement of someone like Putin is always a mistake.
So far every time the West calls his bluff he cowardly pretends nothing happened, be it HIMARS, Storm Shadow and HARM missile shipments, tank shipments, AWACS support, you name it.
He only attacked Ukraine because he hoped to win in a week, and this wouldn't have happened if the West armed Ukraine earlier. The desire not to escalate with Putin cost Europe a war.
However, this is all playing chicken. Whenever they were facing actual opposition, they backed down.
Also, are you aware of this?: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-09/news/us-completes-in...
As for INF, US withdrawal was a response to Russia testing infringing missiles first.
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691521600/russia-pulls-out-of...
Sensational out of context drive by sound bytes from the likes of Guardian, Fox News, Twitter and video gammer subreddits are not sources - they’re click bait.
Months and months of this nonsense now.
Do you really think Solovyov and Simonyan are broadcasting it without official approval?
Show me any actual authoritative source not from social or drive-by media pointing out where the official Russian position is some kind of first strike.
NATO in a certain way is based on that as well. If it fails a single test regarding article 5 after someone challenges it, it becomes instantly worthless.
The danger as I see it currently is that the West is tired of war and it’s an opportunity for Putin to challenge NATO. Attack a small village in a Baltic state. Are Americans and Germans and the British going to risk their lives for a small village in a Baltic country? I hope they would, but I realistically don’t see it. And that one non-response would make NATO worth less than the paper the agreement was printed on.
But somehow much of the world pretends not to notice and only does whatever is convenient at the moment (buy Russian oil/gas, do business in Russia, stay "neutral", etc). I find it incredibly depressing, I thought that surely in the 2020s our civilization would have progressed further.
Russia will play the slowly boiled frog game to their advantage — GPS jamming is just the beginning. We will likely soon see further small incursions, each one ever so slightly larger than the previous one. And we'll hear Mr Scholz say something about doing something, but we won't see him actually do anything. Mr Macron will use grand words and do nothing as well. Austria will "declare neutrality" (easy to do when you have other countries as buffers from the aggressor).
As someone currently living in the EU close to Ukraine, I find all this very sad.
The US has made more than its fair share of policy missteps. But to try and argue that the actions of the US somehow “forced” Russia to invade its neighbor and former satellite state to rid it of “nazis” (Putin’s quote not mine) is absurd.
Hmm. I think there is not much point in discussing
That doesn't mean people don't care about the people though. Human suffering is always bad.
Hawkeye + SAR data would be pretty interesting for ship tracking. I think I've seen some papers here before, but nothing interactive like your site. I think open SAR data is not quite realtime yet, but hope soon is.
GNSS, GPS plus other constellations depends on the receiver. Even drones or consumer ones support that these days, some bigger drones even support L5 bands.
So your 100 dollar drone very likely has a receiver with more features than a 100 million dollar airliner. And that drone is probably made recently, but airliners fly for 30 years.
I know older long-range planes from the 70s and 80s had excellent inertial navigation systems.
Not quite as good as GPS, but good enough to know the location of the plane within a few nautical miles. The main problem is that inertial navigation systems drifted over time and required constant recalibration from the crew whenever they had a fix from real navigation beacons and errors could be catastrophic (especially when skirting the edge of Soviet airspace).
I've always wondered if modern avionics suites kept the older style inertial navigation systems as a backup to GPS, or if the systems were deleted when everyone switched to GPS.
I think it would be smart for larger planes to have a modern inertial navigation system that constantly recalibrated off GPS, ready to take over in the case of GPS jamming or spoofing.
https://ops.group/blog/gps-spoof-attacks-irs/
https://aerospace.honeywell.com/us/en/about-us/blogs/spoofin...
I understand that current civilian aircraft wasn't designed with that in mind though.
Practically that was what happened all the time before GPS. You would fly for a few hours over the ocean with no ground based reference, having a reasonable but not perfect INS location. Then get close to the coast where a DME/DME fix was done which updated the INS position as a big jump of up to a few miles.
Filtering GPS updates that are too far "off" the INS state would be an almost opposite design to the original assumptions that DME and GNSS are highly accurate.
Modern aircraft will also set the known position based on the runway you're taking off from. And when airborne they'll pick up a DME/DME fix and update the location. So while it's procedure to set the known starting location at the gate, there are also other sources.
It might be sampling bias. More military aviation with erratic movement and also planes turning off and on their transmitters.
To measure GPS jamming, you should measure from a fixed object. Trying to do that with planes is unnecessary hard.
If you look at that for a few seconds, you'll see that it's almost entirely civilian passenger aircraft that are not making erratic movements, and that are near conflict zones.
Detecting GPS jamming with planes actually works a lot better than from a fixed terrestrial object, because 1. They have greater sensor range, 2. There are lots of them, 3. They move and cover lots of area, 4. they cover e.g. parts of the Black Sea where it would be more difficult to put a ground-based sensor.
I was curious how powerful should a jammer be to completely actively substitute GPS coordinates in a city so large.
> As part of the ADS-B messages we receive from each aircraft, the Navigation integrity category (NIC) encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft. The NIC value informs how certain the aircraft is of its position by providing a radius of uncertainty.
> Poor NIC values alone might indicate a problem with an aircraft’s equipment or unfavorable positioning. However, when observed in multiple aircraft in close proximity during the same time frame, it suggests the presence of a radio signal interfering with normal GNSS operation.
A single observer can't really say for certain that jamming is happening; you need a distributed sample from multiple different sensors over a period of time to have reasonably high confidence.
Could you use RTLSDR triangulation to hone in on granular lat long of jamming sources?
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/detecting-gps-jammers-in-augmented-r...
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/kiwisdr-tdoa-direction-finding-now-f...
But to get fine granular data, you need a timestamping SDR. (each parcel of signal data for a quantum of data needs an exact time down to 6-8 significant figures, basically GPS timebase).
Most your cheaper SDRs cant do that.
Stuff like the BladeRF and higher do provide timestamped data.
Can other GNSSes (Galileo/BeiDou/GLONASS/etc) give usable timestamps? Seems like it'd be tricky for a jammer to target all of them simultaneously. (Of course, since they'd be on a different band, unless your SDR is wideband enough you'd need two RX heads which gives you potential issues with phase drift between the tuning VCOs even if your sampling is coherent).
Perhaps a sufficiently directional antenna/phased array (for getting an actual satellite signal) as well as an omnidirectional one (for picking up the jamming signal) could get you somewhere...
Or perhaps one could look at computing AoA at each receiver site (using MIMO-y techniques, e.g. Kraken/KerberosSDR) and triangulating based on angles instead, which wouldn't require synchronizing physically-distant sites at all...
The problem definitely seems soluble, though I don't have the technical background to know how realistic that is.
Actually the opposite; GNSS systems are all purposely designed to operate at virtually the same frequency (check out this figure [1]) while cleverly not interfering with each other. There are sub-bands within each constellation too (L1,L2,L5 etc) but it's very easy to pump out wideband noise across all the GNSS bands.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-spectrum-of-current-...
The little five antenna array can even attach on the roof of a car for a handy ground plane. Prob not a good idea to drive with it out there tho.
Besides GPS, the GNSS currently includes other satellite navigation systems, such as the Russian GLONASS, and may soon include others such as the European Union’s Galileo and China’s Beidou.
"The map uses are color coded overlay to indicate low (green) to high (red) levels of interference with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Often just referred to as GPS, there are actually multiple systems beside the US GPS constellation, such as Russia’s GLONASS, Europe’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and others."
But aviation is much more conservative due to its safety-critical nature. Galileo was only just recently (2023) certified for use in aircraft systems by ICAO:
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Navigation/Galileo/Galileo_...
The redundancy of multiple independent GNSS systems is a fine thing for dealing with unintentional failures, of course.
Just for the record, this must have been written ages ago. Today you would rather look up to NavIC joining them as a global system and QZSS operating independently from GPS soon.
Pretty neat! I starting sending data from my ASD-B feeder as well. https://airplanes.live/get-started/
This is really cool since ASDBExchange was bought out by a private equity firm and has since stopped giving out data to cool projects. I see they are being sued for IP theft and a couple other items. Link to Lawsuit in CA is below because I was reading it tonight.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm...
https://www.lacourt.org/casesummary/ui/index.aspx?casetype=c... 23CHCV02662
There looks like a big hole of no data over Ukraine, where I'd most expect GPS jamming, but I suppose there are no civilian flights either. Maybe they could setup an GPS observation station on the ground at a surveyed point to get data there.
There's a big red blob over Turkey, is that maybe the southern edge of the reach of Russian jammers in the Black sea?
There's also a big red blob over the eastern Mediterranean. Is that Israel? I'm not so sure though, because it's not centered on Israel and parts of Israel proper are green on the map. I also assume they're heavy users of GPS, so wouldn't want to jam it.
There's a red blob in Southeast Asia, and that looks like Myanmar, where there's a civil war right now.
There's a little red blob over what looks like Kashmir.
[1]https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/over-100...
They might if they are from countries neutral to that conflict, like NATO flights over the Black Sea.
About three or four civilian aircrafts were able to leave Ukraine during the war and every departure was a major military operation to undertake.
Actually, it's more about airspace:
https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/aircraft-and-ownership/ads-b/whe...
"The FAA requires ADS-B Out capability in the continental United States, in the ADS-B rule airspace designated by FAR 91.225:
Class A, B, and C airspace;
Class E airspace at or above 10,000 feet msl, excluding airspace at and below 2,500 feet agl;
Within 30 nautical miles of a Class B primary airport (the Mode C veil);
Above the ceiling and within the lateral boundaries of Class B or Class C airspace up to 10,000 feet;
Class E airspace over the Gulf of Mexico, at and above 3,000 feet msl, within 12 nm of the U.S. coast."
Another notable spot is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave. It looks relatively normal on some days, like today, but on others like yesterday it's covered by solid red stretching far into Poland, Sweden and even Germany.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot that was a thing, and that explains that spur of red in the Baltic. I'd (probably incorrectly) assumed it was some kind of spillover from jamming in Ukraine.
I didn't realize you could look at it over multiple days. One interesting thing about that blob is the outline of red seems to always be there, in the same shape, but the middle is often green. Maybe that's some artifact of their agreement algorithm? More overflights around the edges than through?
It also looks like there's some jamming in Estonia? Or maybe that's just the edge of jamming around St Petersburg?
They are at war with west (more Europe than US though) for solid 2 decades straight, just that they started to use military only in last decade, but were subverting public opinions in usual command & conquer strategy for much longer (riling western and former soviet populations against EU and Nato, supporting ultra-right groups, spreading false rumors ie on covid in us vs them psi-ops).
Whatever politicians on their side say is meaningless or diversion and definitely just wasted time, just look at actions alone.
Probably temporarily. They violate the Estonian airspace on a regular basis with military planes, with their responders turned off. The NATO planes stationed in Estonia then take off and go see them off.
Phones don’t use GPS these days if they can help it - WiFi triangulation is significantly faster and uses much less battery - so GPS jamming wouldn’t have anything to do with Tinder matches.
https://www.gpsworld.com/one-gps-mystery-solved-another-rema...
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.3385589,-100.8055747,12.72z?...
What's unfathomable to me is how Israel (or Netanyahu?) keeps treating them as a frenemy.
See this report by C4ADS from 2019, about Russian jamming: https://c4ads.org/reports/above-us-only-stars/
Map of Israeli GPS spoofing (which is distinct from jamming, and we haven't talked much about in this discussion): https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1717987479255720076
https://dfworks.xyz/blog/hnwi-osint-private-jet/
Slightly tangential so feel free to remove if irrelevant
The Bombardier Global Express 6000 GLT6 result is interesting, as it's a plane with a known large number of military conversions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Global_Express#Mili...
Known Conversions: GlobalEye, Project Dolphin, Raytheon Sentinel, Saab Swordfish, PAL Aerospace P-6, E-11A, HALOE, PEGASUS, Hava SOJ, CAEW, HADES.
Actually has a tie-in with the article, since the Hava SOJ is an air stand-off jammer configuration for the Turkish region.
Otherwise, if I still worked for the government contracting, I'd probably offer you a job, although you're apparently British, so there might have been citizenship issues.
Most of us know about "site:" since it's extremely handy, but there are a lot more. For some reason I had it in my head that many of the documented operators didn't work properly -- or at least I couldn't get them to work properly the last time I tried to experiment. I'll have to try again.
The date operators from: to: I think have been unsupported for a while and replaced with a dropdown in the UI
filetype: is a fave and has been working for as long as I can remember
AROUND(number) is pretty useful too although I find that might be a bit buggy sometimes
There is a good list here https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database showing how dorks can be used for pentesting and/or generally finding insecure stuff
At least in the last year, looks like "inurl", "intitle", and "intext" have all been getting a lot of use.
Also, a lot of "index of". "db.py", "store", "secret", "ec2 -aws", "mysql inurl:./db/", ect... in combination. Must be a lot of low hanging fruit in the orchard.
(Your comment downplaying someone else's work, while simultaneously showing your lack of historical knowledge on the topic about which you're commenting, based on my specific googling to find the date of coinage, might make you eligible to be "a foolish or inept person as revealed by Google".)
Crowdsourced data isn't subject to LADD, so adsbexchange and other such sites can and do display such aircraft.
For flights within the US, there's also a private address program that allows an ADS-B equipped plane to broadcast an alternate address.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Also: https://gpsjam.org/ | https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gpsjam
(am I missing any other GPS jamming mapping or data collection projects?)
https://sapt.faa.gov/outages.php?outageType=129001450&outage...
Does anyone know if a similar service covers things like GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou?
EDIT: nevermind, these services can't distinguish. From the FAQ:
> The ADS-B data used by this map includes information on the accuracy of the navigation system used by each aircraft, but doesn't specify the type of navigation system. It could be GPS, another global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like GLONASS, or it could be an inertial navigation system (INS). My understanding is that most aircraft are using GPS, so that's probably mostly what the map shows.
I'm not sure if that means FR24 has a better dataset, or they're processing it differently or if they're just extrapolating from few data points when they maybe shouldn't be.
Ok it exists, but shielding is (only) about 20dB looking downwards, which may not be enough: https://safran-navigation-timing.com/product/8230aj-gps-gnss...
- GPS positioning is more accurate if the satellites it sees come from a variety of angles (GDOP), so the satellites near the horizon are valuable.
- Aircraft pitch and roll, so a fixed antenna like this would lose precision as it turns to make an approach - just about the worst possible time.
It's difficult to make an antenna with a sharp cutoff to limit the ground vs. above-ground. So, most anti-jammers will use beamforming to cancel out interference in one or more specific directions. So, the null in the antenna moves to follow the interference.
GDOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigat...
* A large part of Eastern Europe around Ukraine is missing data, and there are many jammed/interfered areas around it, including the southern coast of the Black Sea and parts of Poland and the Baltic. Part of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Kaliningrad are also jammed/interfered.
* Part of Germany near Berlin, possibly part of the Ukraine-related jamming/interference?
* A large part of the eastern Mediterranean and some of the Middle East around Gaza.
* A small area on the India-Pakistan border near Punjab and Lahore.
* Two medium-sized areas in western Myanmar.
* Two small areas in New Guinea with a gap in the data between them, spanning the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border.
* Two small areas in western Australia.
* A small area on the US-Mexico border.
* A dot in southern China with some gaps in the data around it near the border with Vietnam.
Ukraine, Gaza, and Myanmar all have major conflicts going on. Other comments have suggested that the US-Mexico interference might be related to drug cartels. The India-Pakistan border is a longstanding point of tension. Not sure what (if anything) is going on in New Guinea and Australia.
The jamming/interference in India-Pakistan, US-Mexico, and China all went away in the last 6 hours -- they're only visible in the 24-hour data.
No. It is not.
The data is ADS-B data which is broadcast by aircraft.
FR24 (and other similar services) obtain the data via a community[1], you can take part too[2].
For certain parts of the world, they may have the option to augment the data via commercial services, but that is highly unlikely to be on a global basis.
Conclusion: Missing coverage means no community coverage in that area and no commercial augmentation.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/how-we-track-flights-with... [2] https://www.flightradar24.com/apply-for-receiver/
FR24 is a bit of farce as their blocking and removal of 1000's of aircraft makes the data picture incomplete. Plus it's kinda of a money hungry commercial enterprise. Same reason that Raytheon bought FlightAware and Silversmith Capital Partners via JETNET bought ADSBexchange -DATA = CASH - the later buyout is going to court because they apparently stole IP from the company that built the infrastructure. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm... - wild stuff in there!
Of the four tiles in that area (for March 19th at least), one is entirely in Poland, one is covering the Polish-German border, one is a bit of the German coast around Rügen but mostly the Baltic Sea, and the other is Bornholm (island in the Baltic Sea) and a bit of the Swedish coast.
My guess is, this is part of a larger system to limit Russian military use of the Baltic, and possibly also a single layer of defence against Russian aircraft and missiles targeting Berlin and Copenhagen. Likewise, I would guess that the strip of interference from St Petersburg in the direction of Moscow is a similar single-layer of defence by Russia.
At this resolution, it also looks like the west is interfering with access to St Petersburg and someone (could reasonably be either side) is worried about Kaliningrad, but that image is also also making me think "WTF?" about the Gulf of Riga.
The single tile near Kandalaksha (Russia) suggests something interesting is going on there, but I have no idea what that might be, and there's a non-zero possibility that it's a deliberate red-herring to make western analysts waste time — as an analogy, imagine a troll releasing three greased pigs with the numbers "1", "2", and "4" painted on the side.
But what's going on in Western Australia? And South-west Texas?
I guess south-west Texas is most likely also military. E.g. the Naval Air Station Kingsville is not far away.
My guess is that the spots in Western Australia are the same thing, given the nearby RAAF training bases.
Then again, I'm not very GIS/geodesy minded, so maybe hexagons are the best shape that'll tessellate over a sphere easily.
Was this work in any meaningful way inspired by GPSjam? If yes, it'd be nice to have an acknowledgement in there.
I've seen hexagons used for maps and boardgames for years.
This is Uber H3 for spacial indexing: https://h3geo.org/
This was a good read:
https://klioba.com/how-to-use-postgresql-for-military-geoana...
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662246
The jamming is done to make crossing the border without going through the checkpoint more difficult
TL;DR: It's weak signal, not jamming. The weak signal reports come from military training aircraft carrying out maneuvers that cause temporary signal loss.
Maybe with the data we can figure out what portion of military flights are included?
For the helicopter training flights that I notice most often, it's still rare to see one that broadcasts ADSB, probably <10%. C-130s usually don't either here but it's more often, maybe more like 25%. Perhaps for other categories of aircraft they've installed more transponders. But in the city where I live, even passive mode-C MLAT is probably around 50% success on tracking military flights for ADSB Exchange. FlightAware might have better coverage for mode-C. mode-C can't contribute to this GPS reliability data anyway but it illustrates that even C-130 pattern practice is sometimes "stealth" from a radio perspective due to the low installation rates for ADSB and difficulty of good mode-C coverage.
The paper linked elsewhere (https://web.stanford.edu/group/scpnt/gpslab/pubs/papers/Liu_...) mentioned issues with military training flights resulting in spurious low-NIC cases but unfortunately doesn't quantify it. With the way the AF rollout has gone it probably depends on the specific installation, command, and aircraft type.
In the border region specifically we would tend to expect the majority of non-military flights to be civilian CBP aircraft that aren't performing unusual maneuvers. CBP has a somewhat complicated and limited authority to disable ADS-B that I don't know the contours of, I'm not sure how often they do so on their larger (non-sUAS) aircraft. Involvement of the Air National Guard in the Texas area might complicate the analysis though.
Military aircraft on military maneuvers don't deal with FAA ATC, the military has its own controllers. It's mostly an issue when they're operating near civilian airports (or the many, many military facilities that share an airfield with an airport). There are still adverse safety impacts to the lack of ADSB on many military aircraft, in that it defeats things like TCAS.
Actually this topic is slightly complex and I think a lot of people have misconceptions, so let's lay it out. These rules have gotten stricter and stricter in recent years.
1. ADSB is not required. Meaning, there is no universal requirement that aircraft be equipped with ADSB, and plenty of aircraft still legally operate without.
2. ADSB is required in class A, B, C, in many cases in class E, and within the "Mode-C veil" surrounding major airports.
3. ADSB is required in any case where a transponder is required, for those edge cases that are not included in the above.
4. The result is that the areas in which you can legally operate without ADS-B are mostly limited to low altitudes in rural areas. Of course, this encompasses a large portion of hobby aviation especially, but not very much commercial flight.
I can actually receive high flighting planes over Del Rio so it would be interesting to see if they are reporting bad NIC values.
e; oh wait you said passive MLAT off Mode C, that makes more sense then
It should be pretty simple for Flightradar24 to exclude non-commercial aircraft from the data through, which would solve that problem.
There's also tons of data available in the ADS-B signal that should help distinguish between aircraft-motion-induced outages and actual jamming: https://mode-s.org/decode/content/ads-b/7-uncertainty.html
> The GPS interference data is derived from NIC (navigation integrity category) values that we receive as part of the ADS-B protocol. We mark regions as affected if a significant number of flights in that area report lowered NIC values.
For people doubting that aircraft maneuvering can affect navigation accuracy as reported by ADS-B, I found a fun example. Around 1300 UTC today (0800 Texas time), 4 T-38s took off from Laughlin AFB for what looks like training, with lots of maneuvering. This link shows what it looks like when mapped in 2D: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adffc3,adfff9,adffd2,ae...
Here's a 60 second segment of the track of one of those jets, STEER21, that captures a steep turn and dive: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfff9&lat=30.067&lon=-...
If you click on the track, you can inspect the ADS-B data at that point in time in the sidebar on the left. If you scroll to the bottom of that sidebar, there's an "ACCURACY" section, that shows the Estimated Position Uncertainty (EPU). You can see it change from better than < 30 meter uncertainty to > 18.5 km(!) uncertainty as it performs the maneuver.
I made a video that shows how to see those values, and also shows the maneuver in a 3D viewer so you can see how steep the dive is (it's steep!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfHlpnEdHxw
(The viewer uses a generic aircraft model, FYI, don't be distracted by that.)
I wonder how the jamming works - is it just for higher altitudes or maybe it only affects GPS and my phone also uses GLONASS or something?
For one, accelerometer-based location has become pretty good. You can usually get by for a few kilometers on the average road.
For two, Google maps is aware that you are driving, and this it sticks to roads, especially ones that are on your itinerary, because of your GPS registers as the middle of a field, it's more likely that you're experiencing GPS issues rather than you driving at 130km/h in a potato field.
Finally, location services are amplified by nearby wifi signals, mapped by google with street view. Your phone can say "here is the Mac address of every wifi network I can see and a rough estimate of my position" and Google's services can very accurately triangulate where you are.
the accel-based positioning I'm pretty sure is implemented app-side, not os-side, but I could be mistaken.
On the ground, the radio horizon is about 20-40 miles. In the air, the radio horizon is about 200-400 miles.
Just a guess/speculation as I’m familiar with aaronia’s products and services (indirectly)
I am absolutely no expert in this but I can imagine that even natural occurrences can interfere with the GPS.
[1] https://sapt.faa.gov/outages.php?outageType=129001450&outage...
It's hard to know intentionality without also knowing where there is expected+natural interference. Of course, when a region is surrounded by persistent GNSS issues and is a known war-zone with large actors, intentionality is fairly reasonably assumed.
- ADS-B messages include position information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, etc.
- It is not possible to directly measure GNSS interference, but we do calculate the NIC (Navigation integrity category) for ADS-B messages.
- The NIC value encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft.
- Poor NIC values alone might indicate a problem with an aircraft’s equipment or unfavorable positioning. However, when observed in multiple aircraft in close proximity during the same time frame, it suggests the presence of a radio signal interfering with normal GNSS operation.
Currently I am working for a new wireless PHY technique that is more secure and robust against jamming, and also the first that able to propagate with limited non line of sight (NLoS). Hopefully soon we can overcome this anti human GPS/GNSS jamming shenanigans.
For an excellent example for anti jamming secure wireless network for GPS (not my work) please check this thesis by Cara Yang Kataria [1]. She is currently working at the infamous MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
[1] Antenna-driven methods for increased wireless network security:
Also that whole region is just patchy with flight data - it makes it difficult to really see the true shape of jamming.
PKK the terrorist organization, yes. Kurds the ethnic group, no.
> PKK the terrorist organization, yes. Kurds the ethnic group, no.
The Turkish government has a decades long history of discrimination against Kurds, including banning their language, even denying their existence as a people. If Turkey had treated Kurds better, PKK may well have never existed, and almost certainly would not have had as many Kurds supporting it even if it still had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_Kurds_by_Turkey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_and_discrimination_...
There have been more Kurds served in the Turkish Army than all the other armed organizations combined.
Majority of Kurds in Turkey openly support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
Several Kurdish organizations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
PKK kills Kurds. PKK kills Turks. PKK will happily kill you if doing so benefits the crime and propaganda business they have been profiting for decades.
Let's not parrot some politically charged material as facts without having any actual understanding about such sensitive matter.
> The Kurdish language was banned in a large portion of Kurdistan for some time. After the 1980 Turkish coup d'état until 1991 the use of the Kurdish language was illegal in Turkey.[52]
> Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media.[55][56] In March 2006, Turkey allowed private television channels to begin airing programming in Kurdish. However, the Turkish government said that they must avoid showing children's cartoons, or educational programs that teach Kurdish, and could broadcast only for 45 minutes a day or four hours a week
It is true that over the last 20 years or so, the Turkish government has relaxed many (but not all) of its anti-Kurdish laws and policies. But that doesn't erase the reality of the decades of oppression which proceeded it.
There were no "anti-Kurdish" laws and policies. The pro-American coup d'état in 1980 came with a law to control non-Turkish publications, but it was never put into action.
Here's a 1999 Human Rights Watch report – "RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF THE KURDISH LANGUAGE" – https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/turkey/turkey993-08.htm
You must have a knowledge about the history and currency of the topic to hold such strong opinions. You should also use your own words to articulate your arguments, so I can keep myself engaged in this conversation.
Nevertheless, I've read the report. It misinterprets the government's certain actions to protect the public against several jihadist, separatist, and other destructive movements, which are not exclusive to a specific ethnic group.
It also fails to recognize the newly founded republic's goal to build an inclusive Turkish citizenship identity, and to provide a progressive and secular education program to everyone regardless of their race, religion, and gender while preserving the cultural value of each.
"Kurdish" isn't a single language anyway. There is a reason Kurds use French in France, English in USA/UK/Canada, and Turkish in every part of Turkey to communicate with each other, unless they're from the same tribe. It's not realistically possible to institute a system to provide public service to every individual without establishing a common ground.
I'm citing reputable sources, your reply is just your own say-so.
If you don't like Human Rights Watch, how about the European Commission?
https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/pro...
> and expect them to support your original premise that the PKK terrorism is justified.
I'm not defending attacks on innocent civilians. Consider Northern Ireland: the IRA's attacks on civilians were shameful and wrong. But, if it were not for the oppression of Catholics by the Stormont government, and the failure of the UK government to stop it, those attacks may well have never started.
You'd think that your left-wing instincts will guide you through this, but you will accidentally end up taking ugly sides in proxy wars in this part of the world.
PKK started out according to CIA's Operation Gladio to justify the 1980 coup, and continued operating in line with the Carter Doctrine. Its first actions were assassinating Kurdish and Turkish left-wing leaders (Zeki Ön, Mehmet Ongan, Adil Turan, Hasan Erkılıç to name a few).
Today, PKK follows the radical Islamist narratives (Şeyh Said, Seyit Rıza, etc. are often celebrated by them). PKK is in agreement with an Islamist terrorist organization (FETÖ) behind the 2016 coup attempt, whose leader (Fethullah Gülen) resides in the US. PKK conducts international drug trafficking at "cartel" scale (between Asia and Europe; ask your neighborhood drug dealer about it). PKK is backed by several crime syndicates and tribes who are responsible for countless human rights violations from systematic child/woman abuse to forced labour and human trafficking. PKK is currently taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Arabic, Turkish, Assyrian population in Syria and Iraq to make a space for an American-backed puppet state under "YPG" alias.
How is your IRA-PKK correlation shaping up now?
Your "reputable sources" are compilations of quotes by "usual suspects" anyway. Western organizations are not known for being the gold standard of social justice advocacy here, as they have a history of endorsing any "project" that fits their financial and political agenda; from cyanide process in gold mining, to civil warfare for carving up sovereign states.
What is the max range I wonder? Probably same as radar? How much power does it take?
Edit: Looks like they might source their data from commercial ADSB providers. Bummer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_civil_war_(2021%E2%80%...
You answered your own question. Put 2+2 together.
Exactly.
You don't live there.
Not many people live in the Australian desert.
Conclusion: No data or very limited data
Erm mate, have you tried looking at different days ? Those cells you find so suspicious in Australia are not there on other days !
Seriously, given the largely community-based nature of FR24 data I would not expect too much in term of accuracy.
That kind of disproves the "no data" hypothesis though, no?
One explanation could be they have a simplistic algorithm like "if uncertainty > (something indicating more than 5 minutes of GNSS-to-INS fallback) on more than 50% of all flights of a day", and there's only one flight per day in that region.
> Seriously, given the largely community-based nature of FR24 data I would not expect too much in term of accuracy.
Flightradar24 data is accurate enough for some commercial entities to rely on it. Also, in case of a lack of ADS-B receiver data we'd also expect a grey square, not a red one, right?
I don't really see any other evidence that low data areas can turn into red areas when there's no actual interference.
Red areas: Military experiments and exercises, probably. https://gpsjam.org/faq/#what-can-cause-aircraft-to-report-lo...
Though if that were the case, I'd probably guess there should be more areas at the other site locations around northern Australia - so that might invalidate my guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Net...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'02.6%22S+122%C2...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'36.3%22S+122%C2...
I don’t think I am misreading the map - what on earth is that? Are the sheep rebelling and have some decent anti-aircraft tech?
Might be use of WebGL which Mac-Safari doesn't support.
- There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Starr!
I wonder, how does it influence navigation in mobiles/cars?
And there have been several close calls already, with passenger jets: https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-thre...
Planes don't need radar, transponders, or even radio to fly, but they're all very important for safety.
Here in Europe VORs are also very rare now. Makes sense because they're hugely expensive to operate and when used only for backup it's not a very good investment.