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Comment by jjwiseman | Hacker News Reader

(Of course if you were spoofing ADS-B RF signals you wouldn't necessarily need to be anywhere near the spoofed locations. Just like with GPS spoofing.)

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Surely the receiver would run plausibility checks on the received messages and reject spoofed locations that are physically impossible to receive by said receiver?

> spoofed locations that are physically impossible to receive by said receiver?

Wait until you hear about Sporadic-E or Aurora. RF is a weird place full of natural phenomena making the impossible very possible.

But even if that was the case, is there any value for a receiver to be receiving those? Surely those messages would be picked up by a receiver closer to the transmitter anyway. I think the value in spoofing rejection is greater than the probability of a transmission reflecting from beyond the horizon and not being already being picked up by a local receiver.

> But even if that was the case, is there any value for a receiver to be receiving those?

Yes, radio propagation is an entire academic field to be studied :)

In addition, if you have enough receivers you can use that to run something called MLAT [1] to also pick up GA aircraft that just have a transponder but no GPS. The more the merrier.

[1] https://adsbx.discourse.group/t/multilateration-mlat-how-it-...

These receivers mostly don’t have gps and it’s very common for people to put in the wrong coordinates.

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