Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
wsj.com
wsj.com
GPS is fantastic and as a primary source everyone loves the benefits it brings. However, in a century of aviation, everyone has kinda sorted out that you can't have too many backups to critical items... unless you let the accountants and bureaucrats run the show.
In the '90s I used to fly light aircraft back and forth between Seattle and Alaska. You were frequently out of range of any VOR transmitters, but that LORAN always worked. NDBs? That didn't work so great for Ron Brown.
However, in a modern commercial aircraft, all position sources including VOR-DMEs, GPS, and IRS are cross-compared by the flight management system and turned into a latitude, longitude, and circular error of probability. There is no TO/FROM flag to worry about in a 777, and no reverse sensing on the back side of a localizer approach.
Thankfully, they are not needed to pass a PPL check-ride.
Creating a track on a 1:500k map and fly it is incredibly complicated when you have to do a ton of other things inside the plane too.
I would say it is partially true. The reason I have trouble with VORs is that the equipment inside the plane is very awkward to use. The fact that the plane is in the center of the VOR display is super confusing as it shows everything in reverse: if the line is on the left it means the plane is on the right. And having to learn Morse Code to validate you tuned in the right frequency. And so on.
I get it that when they invented that we did not have technology, but now we do and nothing is stopping us from using a digital display that can translate VORs/DMEs/NDBs fixes into GPS like routes. And knowing where every VOR is can make the map accurate too. That would make it very easy for a lot of people to use and not have to learn the arcane ways of how people used to fly 50 years ago. I don't need to know that I'm flying TO or FROM the station.
It's really hard to jam oceanic areas though, you need a vessel capable of sustaining human life autonomously at least for days plus dealing with the high seas.
Buoys could theoretically be used for that purpose, yes, but good luck getting them stationary enough. Maybe some of the secret services could pull off such a trick but at least no ordinary civilian.
Not really. Drone ships are very much a thing these days.
But in theory you're not wrong.
Or one of the many methods described in TFA.
GPS signals are just incredibly weak so it takes next to nothing to drown them out, easier still if you are above the receiver.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49186101
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184484
GPSJam: Daily maps of possible GPS interference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868106 - October 2023 (89 comments)
GPSJam: Daily Maps of GPS Interference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346 - July 2022 (82 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-range_multilateration | https://www.arrl.org/direction-finding
GPS was jammed even as early as Iraq war.
"Coalition troops also got a glimpse of GPS’s greatest weakness during the Gulf War. Iraqi forces installed jammers, for example, on top of landmarks such as Saddam Hussein’s palaces to prevent them from being hit, Mastalir says. This helped the military realize early on that it would have to further develop its laser-guided munitions and other weapons that acquire targets when GPS is unavailable"
https://web.archive.org/web/20160208233555/http://www.scient...
What work is done to make GPS more jam resistant?
Single element antennas, adaptive antennas, beam steering antennas. Basically attempting to pull good RF while avoiding bad RF.
(this has been applied in the Russo-Ukrainian war in modified Starlink equipment)
GPS antenna mods make Starlink terminal immune to jammers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39616417 - March 2024 (72 comments)
https://olegkutkov.me/2023/11/07/connecting-external-gps-ant...
https://www.gpsworld.com/todd-humphreys-russian-satellites-a...
Ongoing Ukrainian strikes against Rassvet satellite production and launch sites contribute to further impairment of Russia's ability to get any new or replacement satellites to orbit.
https://ua.news/en/war-vs-rf/video-ukrayina-atakuvala-golovn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_2446
https://insidegnss.com/onenav-l5-direct-technology-enables-d...
For obvious reasons hard information about all this is tricky to come by, you can read what is available from non-classified sources though and you can glean quite a bit from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#L5
The third edition of 'Kaplan' is still excellent reading on the subject even though it is 10 years old now.
Impressive performance.
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.
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-...
That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099
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.
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.
Yes, obviously. Losing signal on your GPS unit, and having your GPS unit tell you that you are in a different position than you actually are, are two very different things.
Also, since other aircraft reported GPS issues, that is evidence that would speak to jamming or spoofing. All three other aircraft reported a loss of GPS, not inaccurate GPS. Coverups are real, government conspiracies are real. But the completely evidenceless “I’m just saying…” or “isn’t it weird…” or “I’m just asking questions” is tiresome.
The police could probably combine this data with license plate scanners and see the single truck that always exists in the jammed location.
Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/orders you can just look at the enforcement actions.
Yesterday's actions include 7 $25k fines apparently all for companies illegally importing banned drones (a procedural fine just for ignoring the investigation attempts). You can peruse that list and find plenty of things, lots of pirate radio recently. They absolutely do go after apparent small fry and your "mcdonalds manager" absolutely has assets that can be seized.
>Yeah the FCC could probably pull an ATF and shoot a bunch of people over fairly petty crimes but that costs political goodwill that I'm not sure the FCC has to burn.
The FCC doesn't have guns, they can't arrest you
The notices of liability the FCC posts to their website are not final orders. They're the federal equivalent of when your zoning sends a notice saying "your patio is 6in too close to the property line, according to the aerial photos it's been there since <years ago>, you owe use <insane number of dollars>". It's essentially civil enforcement speak for "hey asshole, lawyer up and take this seriously". So then like a naive idiot you reply back "this patio predates my ownership of the property" and the money grubbing commissioner fires back "don't care, pay up". This is what the forfeiture order the FCC post on their website are. That said, the FCC is less slimy and less interested in fine money than your local commissioner probably is and I personally hold them in high regard.
Most of these end in the subject of the enforcement simply changing their behavior and paying a trivial fine (the lawyers are the real winners).
To quote those numbers as if they're final is no less dishonest than to quote lawsuit claims as if they're final judgements.
>They absolutely do go after apparent small fry and your "McDonalds manager" absolutely has assets that can be seized
Once again, you can't get blood from a stone. You might get a little but it's not worth the squeeze It is not politically sustainable to make a habit of ruining small time businesses and individuals (we're not talking about the Sackler family here) over nonviolent violations in technical laws where there is no clear chain of causation from the violation to some sort of harm to life or limb. The Mcdonalds Manager will settle for $5k, throwing away his storage unit of Alibaba stuff and not doing that anymore.
The reason I brought up the ATF is because they have a track record of forcing compliance with arcane arbitrary laws and they do it through flamboyant violence. This comes at political cost.
>The FCC doesn't have guns, they can't arrest you
Right, they'd get the FBI be the muscle like all the other Feds that don't have entry teams do.
The feds effectively all have guns. It's just a question of how many desks the papers must cross before they turn into bullets.
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.
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.
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...
If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)
How is an insurance company provision an excuse? Do you propose self-insurance? If so, would that be advisable from a fiduciary responsibility standpoint for most small companies?
Who ultimately bears the increased insurance premiums and deleterious effects emerging from legislatively banning GPS on company assets and dashcams? (Hint: not the business)
Btw, don't smartphones have this built in? I remember some old and cheap Android phones without GPS that came with this.
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.
Brad Parkinson, the father of GPS and PNTAB, they've been trying to lobby the US government to remove ITAR from that technology so the civilian can benefit from anti jamming, and finally they managed to do it sometime last year. Now it falls under EAR
Not sure what makes an antenna/sensor ITAR restricted, I suspect if you try optimizing it to military use-cases, you'll get hit with ITAR, but I suspect Brad Parkinson is right - security through obscurity just doesn't cut it any more.
I remember in the 90s, computer security was either missing or an afterthought (you could bypass the Win98 password prompt by pressing escape in the release version). Thankfully the industry got together and figured it out.
Now everyone else needs to follow suit. We already have a bunch of examples of assuming security does not matter (hackable cars, meters that can be switched with a Flipper zero).
Intentionally-designed anti-jam features (active-nulling and electronically-steerable receivers made for this purpose) marketed towards GNSS applications are EAR items (and are incorporated into ITAR by reference.)
"These antennas" is doing an impossibly large amount of work. What you are describing here is a delay-calibrated coherent receiver, not an antenna, and it's absolutely not "inexpensive" to pull this off.
With passive antennas, most of the attenuation of adversarial signals is being done by the relatively-high-directionality of planar arrays: off-boresight signals have far greater attenuation with these (20dB? - tricky because you still do want good satellite data close to the horizon), and most garden variety jammers are terrestrial and off-axis.
Still, these signals are always below the noise floor and mostly unsigned, it's somewhat easy for an airborne (or spacefaring) jammer to fully drown out, replay/time-shift, or spoof the signal.
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.
As more and more are decommissioned, the percentage that support distance-measuring goes up, as the ones being decommissioned are more likely to be the less-useful ones, which are less likely to have supported DME in the first place. So most remaining ones support both, but it’s not assured without checking.
More common is to use Nav2 tuned to a VOR to find an intersection on the arrival and Nav 1 to fly the final (ILS/LOC/VOR).
So GPS-like systems need precise orbital data and coherent clock from each satellites, or otherwise the receiver cannot figure out those radii.
Presumably you can have each sats reflect a clock from the same master ground station but that's not how GPS is implemented currently.
And, there's a contextual difference here between civilian GPS and military GPS. Much of the precision in the existing GPS satellites is to support the military use of GPS, with intentionally error injected into the civilian side.
And, by the nature of the hostile environment the military operates, military craft don't have as strong of a reliance on something that's ephemeral, like a GPS signal on a battlefield.
https://www.ti.com/product-category/clocks-timing/clock-netw...
However, because of the way they communicate node to node, they do need to know where their nearest neighbour is to a very high degree. So relative position is probably easy to obtain.
But if you're gonna do that, you're better off with 4g/5g masts. there are loads of them and they don't generally change position that much. They are clow enough together to do odometry.
Unless youre over the sea.
With a quick calculation 50 ms time offset would mean about 20 meter difference. You can get that accuracy with NTP over residential internet and a better TCXO could hold that for a day. You could sync clocks and download the almanac at each airport. The almanac could be digitally signed and NTP has an option for authentication, too. That's about 10 USD of hardware (plus what you need for image capture and processing).
I'm pretty sure with dedicated hardware and better solutions you could get much better accuracy.
[0] https://www.righto.com/2026/04/B-52-star-tracker-angle-compu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_Airway_System
and have giant concrete QR codes
Although that approach depends on you being able to see the ground neither of which is guaranteed over a body of water or in poor visibility.
I have recently heard an episode of Amp Hour podcast¹ where they talked about using Bluetooth from satellites as a GPS replacement for asset tags. So maybe alternatives to GPS on different bands are on the verge.
Another interesting idea would be to have an antenna array on the plane that captures different radio sources and the angles from which they seem to come from and create a always updating radio activity map that maps a certain "radio landscape" to a position on the planet. AFAIK this is currently being worked on as well under the name "radio-SLAM" (with SLAM standing for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). This means, jammers could maybe even be used as potential beacons themselves.
¹: The episode in question: https://theamphour.com/728-space-age-bluetooth-with-alex-har...
Yes, we can stop that with modern tech, but the problem with loran-c is you had location ambiguities. Decca was worse, unless you had a good initial fix, you were all sorts of fucked. There are of course modern alternatives, but they are not block proof, or turned on.
There is a very good reason why GPS was opened up, because the alternatives were not anywhere near as good.
Now, what are the alternatives? well hyperbolic navigation is still a thing, and with modern electronics you can get a pretty good fix without any of the nasty ambiguaty that loran-c had. If you are flying over land, then visual odometry is now at a point where you can locate pretty accurately autonomously (assuming cloud cover is your firend)
Small low power ceasium clocks are $4k now, and only really need a few hundred millitwatts to run, which opens up a whole load of other ways to navigate.
then there are IMUs, they are dirt cheap and way more accurate than 20 years ago. A calibrated array should be able to sustain reasonable accuracy after 30 minutes now
Depending on their kind they might not return a specific position, but in combination with other sources they often do via triangulation.
PS: INS (Inertial Navigation) also still exits. It often works for quite a long time really precisely. Also precision can be calculated. So it can start as a dot on a map which becomes a bigger circle as the precision decreases. It could be automatically recalibrated whenever high confidence positioning is available.
Essentially a position is calculated from VOR/DME, GPS, and INS. When there is disagreement it is flagged and procedures are in place to fall back.
The issue is VOR/DME is slowly being decommissioned eliminating one of those sanity checks. It hasn't been degraded to the point of creating massive gaps in coverage over land but it will slowly happen if the rate of decommissioning continues.
Ultimately, INS is sufficient for enroute navigation but if you're degraded to just that state, the impacts to traffic separation, particularly in congested airspace, are significant. Required Navigation Performance (RNP) levels dictate all of this.
I'd imagine temporary (15 minutes?) disruption would be considered in the design of pacemakers or blood glucose monitors, but if you're using this in close proximity for a long period of time... then wouldn't there be problems?
yes, the new ones come with BT LE so you can monitor it via your smartphone (yeah really..) but I would not call that 'severely affected'
i tried that esp32 that uses nRF24 but it doesnt seem to jam all the time. i heard about hackrf one dont know if its can properly do that.
In theory, you could try to exploit the adaptive frequency hopping that bluetooth does, nudging it to switch to specific bands, which you will then jam; this could save on energy, but I don't know if anybody's done it.
https://github.com/cifertech/RF-Clown
You can use their files to make one via a pcb vendor like jlpcb or you can look for someone who has already done that:
https://www.tindie.com/products/ryanyu/rf-clown-v20-esp32-wi...
Though most GPS jamming is by countries at war. Russia has a large GPS jamming operation around Ukraine, and this often affects GPS in other parts of Europe as well. I have no information, but I would be surprised if Iran wasn't also jamming GPS (off and on depending on the current state of their war). You can safely assume every military in the world has some GPS jammers that they have plans to use if it makes sense to them.
FCC will hand out fines if they can find the owners. Reading through the comments here about the hardware size and capabilities nowadays for pretty much off-the-shelf solutions, it is not a far fetched thought that an adversary can plant thousands of jammers in dense urban environments and then turn them on whenever they want to. Imagine what a blanket jamming can do in NYC airspace.
2s on / 2s off would completely disable all of their functionality until the interference was gone. And possibly much longer - they are finicky.
Counting my lucky stars I don't need one, but if I did, I don't think I'd rely on it if it's that incapable of staying up.
I would absolutely support consequences to any device manufacturer if a death is caused by a jamming of unlicensed frequencies. (In my opinion, medical devices should be able to keep you alive in any jamming scenario if feasible. But using licensed bands is just bare minimum.)
Additional paperwork reduces the likelihood (in actual, observable practice) that unintentional interferers exist to impact your critical-to-life application.
Furthermore, by moving your critical-to-life application away from common frequencies of interest, you avoid being collateral damage to jammers targeting unrelated applications.
They can be optional. Just grant yourself a moment to let them go away.
Out of sight, out of mind.
I can't help but think it's intentionally deviant behavior, because any semi-ordinary person would at minimum reduce the volume to a reasonable level. But no, these folks have it dialed to the max, they want everyone within a 100 yard radius to know their shitty taste in music.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cel...
BLEeding is a tool that allows you to jam Bluetooth (BR/EDR) and BLE devices. It can be used to spam DeAuth requests or L2CAP ping requests. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows and Raspberry PI.
Edit: Moderated some of my language.
Except silence, which is so unnatural that it should be disrupted and criticism of its disruption should be silenced.
FWIW, both Spotify (Jam) and Apple Music (SharePlay) have a feature to sync audio playback and give both participants the ability to control the music from their phone. It was probably targeted at CarPlay/shared speaker situations, but it works great for this.
That aside, you don't need to give up on GPS just yet. As expensive as airplanes are, there is no reason not to have at least 8 element CRPA receivers in them. Mostly a military niche product in the past they are rapidly proliferating, and most fuselages make for a great ground plane.
They absolutely do threaten air and maritime navigation, because those trucks drive in and near ports and airports.
https://insidegnss.com/fcc-fines-operator-of-gps-jammer-that...
https://ilwulocal94.org/news/2024/CSA%2001-24%20GPS%20Jammin...
I hope some future Wifi standard makes it much easier to anonymize or obscure persistent access points.
It's actually the opposite, a hidden SSID will backfire and hurt your privacy when it comes to phones and laptops.
With a normal network, your phone can passively listen for when it approaches MyHomeNetwork and then connect. If you change that to a 802.11 hidden SSID, then whenever you aren't connected your phone will be constantly emitting a very distinctive mating-call: "Any hidden networks? Hello, if you're MyHomeNetwork, please then let me in." That makes it easy for someone to uniquely identify your phone as it moves around, and it also takes up more battery power with the often-fruitless transmissions.
Both issues could be reduced by restricting it to only auto-seek the SSID based on other clues, like GPS regions or neighbors' public SSIDs, but that usually isn't a feature.
> But unless you insert personally identifiable info in your wifi name there is not really any privacy risk for this data being mapped.
How often do you reset/rename it? Surely it's at least weird that some big companies, via sensors carried by your neighbors, know you moved your apartments from X to Y even when you don't use any of their products.
Some phone-apps will have access to the network name too, but that seems just marginally worse compared to other identifying info they could track and exfiltrate.
When combined it is very hard to break the position fix. I expect the issue with the system is it's a military tech. with all it's that'll associated legal problems. After all. it'd bypass most the protections built into GPS modules.
Good luck finding a pilot trained on doing this, or an aircraft with high enough window cutouts that allow for the use of a sextant. Old Boeings had them [1], but no modern aircraft does.
I think even among navies you'll be hard pressed to find a navigator who still can do astronavigation. IIRC even the US Navy discontinued astronavigation, but recently-ish reintroduced training for it again.
[1] https://virginflightdeck.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.htm...
Not necessary. ICBMs have been able to do this autonomously for a very long time [0]
Astro-inertial guidance is used for example in submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
"Astro-inertial guidance, or stellar-inertial guidance, is a sensor fusion-information fusion of inertial guidance and celestial navigation. It is usually employed on submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Unlike silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose launch point does not move and thus can serve as a reference, SLBMs are launched from moving submarines, which complicates the necessary navigational calculations and increases circular error probable. Stellar-inertial guidance is used to correct small position and velocity errors that result from launch condition uncertainties due to errors in the submarine navigation system and errors that may have accumulated in the guidance system during the flight due to imperfect instrument calibration."
Don't forget there is a lot more than aviation. Hikers will want jamming protection if it isn't too expensive (depending on what protection we are talking about it come be cheap or expensive)
This means that it's easy to receive via a ferrite bar antenna but hard to transmit. You need an antenna of at least around 40m size for that to be efficient.
Meanwhile, GPS can be jammed or spoofed with a briefcase-sized device for a couple of kilometers around you.
But if you are about jamming, well. Either discontinue AIS/ADS-B or directed VHF jammers are not that conspicious. Not even a PESA, 60s tech.
https://www.engadget.com/2013-01-21-uk-eloran-navigation-sys...
* https://insidegnss.com/uk-and-france-renew-ties-resilient-pn...
The Wikipedia page says that China has deployed an eLoran network but I can't tell if used for navigation or just high-precision timing.
INS systems are expensive accurate ones are export controlled (or were when I used them on subsea surveys!
Really, all modern conveniences like grocery stores and plumbing are "unnecessary" in the sense that we survived for 100k years without them.
It wouldn't take much smarts for it to consider the type of vessel it's in and the max and current speeds. If the calculated position of a 10 knot vessel suddenly jumps 100 km away in seconds, that sure seems like a spoof. And if you had 10 satellites locked and then you have none, that sure seems like jamming, or you're in a tunnel; INOP either way.
It's like the internet all over again, where adversarial players were just not considered.
Until a couple years ago this was a theoretical issue that few real world people ever dealt with. Military class GPS likely has some form of protection (but what is classified) since military use of jammers have been known for a few decades - but they were very limited use and so non-militaries just ignored them.
Today things are different. Russia's military is jamming GPS on a large scale and that is affecting areas outside the war zone. GPS jammers are also cheap enough that the FCC and similar organizations (most non-poor countries have one) are unable to keep up with all the illegal uses (most countries have laws predating GPS that make these jammers illegal)
This was an interesting article up to the point where the writer started taking SandboxAQ seriously.
For why you shouldn't take SandboxAQ seriously as a creator of actual technology or real products, start here: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/lavish-spending-weak...
gps is 31 total satellites 12,000 miles up
starlink is 10,000 satellites at ~ 300 miles. (and what orbit?)
EDIT: I found this:
-- starlink:
"In any given place there are 3-4 Starlink satellites visible at a time"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42445512 :)
in december 2024, there were 4,000 starlink satellites in orbit
so starlink is ~ 8 at all times?
-- GPS:
This 24-slot arrangement ensures users can view at least four satellites from virtually any point on the planet.
Our RTK base station (a Ublox ZED-F9P receiver, with a cheap patch antenna on the roof) can currently see 45 GNSS satellites.
It then also needs to be signed/secure so that its not spoofed.
Then your signal that your measuring time from needs to be transmitted often enough and robust enough. Plus your time source on the transmitter needs to be accurate enough.
It might be possible with starlink, but you'd also have to trust musk....
I was under the impression that Starlink needs GPS for initial acquisition.
Secondly, the number of satellites doesn’t really matter, the jamming happens at the end user level not at the satellite.
Finally, where are you getting that 20k number from? It’s not like there’s 20k starlink satellites in LOS to your station at all times. The earth will be obscuring many of those, they are below your feet on the other side of the planet.
Quantum Compass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass
Also see: https://www.sandboxaq.com/post/sandboxaq-and-acubed-achieve-...
And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too.
The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation.
Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.
My "no worries" comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Who knows how far the tech will go or how cheap it will get.
Virtually anything navigational that cannot be easily or reliably jammed falls into this category far before meeting any of the accuracy/drift requirements.