jjwiseman

I liked this overview map they posted a few days ago: https://x.com/HamWa07/status/1919763145536463222

giammaiot2 on twitter has a long history of trying to use science sensors to detect intentional RF interference, e.g. this post with a map from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) looking at 7 GHz: https://x.com/giammaiot2/status/1919493425100988490

Or this thread from 2023 looking at SMAP: https://x.com/giammaiot2/status/1770815247772729539

I use Caprover to run about 26 services for personal projects on a Hetzner box. I like its simplicity. Worth it just for the one-click https cert management.

"LLM built into YouTube…" The what now? This is the first I've heard of this.

Just to be specific, PAT25 seems to have been using Mode C for an earlier portion of its flight and Mode S for the later portion.

It wasn't coming back from Langley. That's misinformation from people who don't know the subtleties of what's displayed by flight tracking sites. For more info see https://x.com/aeroscouting/status/1884983390392488306

Ken Layne's Desert Oracle radio show is one of my favorite podcasts. It covers desert life, the outdoors, UFOs, weird creatures, true crime, and other things. In some ways I think of it as a spiritual successor to Art Bell. There's also a Desert Oracle print magazine.

More info in this article: https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a42052683/an-ode-to-de...

I was thinking of airborne electromagnetic (AEM) surveys (e.g., https://www.ramboll.com/projects/water/aem-mapping-californi...) when I wrote that, but after checking my notes, I found that I had misremembered: I actually hadn't been able to find any ADS-B tracks that were clearly survey flights!

It's not true that commercial services filter out military aircraft with ADS-B. In fact, FlightRadar24 even lets you filter to only show military aircraft. I see over a dozen flying near San Diego right now.

I feel like I've seen lots of geophysical survey aircraft using ADS-B for their entire flights. Do you have a reference?

I have an AI-powered NOTAM mapper at https://notam-mapper.obliscence.com. It's just intended for fun, but you can try pasting arbitrary NOTAMs into it and check the results.

I was mostly addressing the idea expressed in other places in this thread that aviation without GPS is fine, not your specific point. To address your question, the commercial aviation world is still in the process of figuring out how to deal with the new, current reality of GPS jamming and spoofing. They're developing new procedures, designing new equipment, and changing priorities and plans. While this happens they're downplaying the risks in press releases and statements to avoid spooking the public.

"If this is a regular thing, shouldn't we have ways of using the airport without hoping that the jamming is having an off day?" Yes. But it takes time and money. This level of GPS interference is relatively new, and for about the past 30 years you could basically assume GPS would be available.

Go to https://globe.adsbexchange.com and once it loads, press "u" to show only military aircraft. You'll see bunches of helicopters, transports and tankers, trainers like T-6 Texans and T-38 Talons, and once in a while an actual fighter or ground attack aircraft.

That aviation without GPS isn’t as safe as aviation with it.

Thank you! I haven't updated that page in a long time, and there are a few things I should add. Some possibilities:

* Does this map show spoofing? No.

* How come sometimes I see aircraft flying over Ukraine? That's GPS spoofing.

* [Add Myanmar & Kashmir to the list of conflict zones.]

There usually are other systems (e.g. ILS), but not always.

This post has several comments along the lines of "We used to fly without GPS and it was fine!" The fact is that aviation is so much safer than it used to be, and GPS is part of that. GPS helps aircraft navigate accurately even when they're not near an airport. It helps give situational awareness and avoid mid-air collisions (almost every aircraft these days has a traffic display that shows ADS-B positions of other nearby aircraft, and those positions come from accurate GPS).

Loss or spoofing of GPS isn't usually a critical safety issue on an aircraft, but it definitely removes layers of safety and adds additional risk. Pilots can lose that situational awareness of nearby traffic. They may have increased workload and distraction due to having to use a less familiar & less accurate means of navigation, trying to figure out why their systems aren't working correctly, and even getting bogus ground proximity warning system alerts. ATC may now have increased workload and distraction because some approaches or even runways are no longer usable.

We drove cars for a long time without seat belts and air bags, too.

For one thing, the scale of Russia's interference is probably close to 100x as many aircraft being affected. Maybe 1000x or more if you consider the total number of aircraft affected over the past 3 years.

GPSJAM had a non-free map for years that didn't have this issue, but as the site got more traffic I could no longer afford to pay for it.

Russia has been jamming GPS over Finland, Estonia, and Poland on and off for a couple years, and it's been at its peak now for several months. Sometimes flights have to be canceled. Tartu airport in Estonia was closed for a while[1] because the only instrument approaches it has were GPS-based.

Even worse than jamming is spoofing, which Russia also does. With jamming, you and the aircraft's systems both know what's happening. Spoofing isn't as easy to detect, as the GPS system can report the wrong location but think it's highly accurate. Spoofing (and to some extent jamming) can have a persistent effect on aircraft systems even after they move out of range of the jammer/spoofer, which can lead to degraded navigation accuracy for the rest of the flight.

It's a whole deal. Russia is messing with strategically important systems of many European countries, and decreasing civilian aviation safety, and they rarely get called on it. For a long time there was reluctance to even name Russia as the culprit.

1. https://www.heise.de/en/news/GPS-jamming-no-more-flights-to-...

The apparent interference in Texas is almost always fighter pilots doing training. During aggressive maneuvering the aircraft fuselage can mask the GPS antenna, causing the aircraft to lose GPS accuracy.

I'm thinking about adding that. (Donations help, see the About page.)

"it can't be hysteria, look at these extreme ways people are reacting!"

Physical evidence or GTFO (the video with the NJ police is physical evidence that they have a drone with thermal imagery and of nothing else).

Here's a gift link to yesterday's New York Times story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/video/new-jersey-drones-p...

  The vast majority of the videos appeared to show planes or helicopters,
  moving across a part of the state that brims with airports. None of the
  videos analyzed by The Times conclusively showed drones, though in some
  cases that remains a plausible explanation.

None.

Here's a video by Mick West, who's an expert in analyzing things people see in the sky, that does a great job of explaining what's happening and making it seem obvious in retrospect. It's short (< 4 minutes) and if we could figure out a way to make it required viewing for media that would help a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4HFxzsjgo

tldr: People aren't seeing drones. It's collective delusion.

You should show the time zone, or convert to UTC. Chart sightings over time. Show user names. Use an LLM to parse narratives into structured information.

This data is about 10 GB, available on S3, and is really easy to query from duckdb. If you have fast internet you can even do a trial query without downloading anything:

  SELECT
      COUNT(*)
  FROM
      's3://fsq-os-places-us-east-1/release/dt=2024-11-19/places/parquet/places-*.snappy.parquet'
  WHERE
      name = 'Wendy''s';

This takes less than a minute with fast home internet.

Curious what parts of the planet have the highest density of fast food restaurants? Download the files so you have local copies, then make sure you have the H3 extension installed:

  INSTALL h3 FROM community; LOAD h3;

Now:

  SELECT
      printf('%x', cell) as h3,
      COUNT(*) AS count
  FROM (
      SELECT
          name,
          H3_LATLNG_TO_CELL(latitude, longitude, 4) AS cell
      FROM 'places-*.snappy.parquet'
      WHERE array_contains(fsq_category_labels, 'Dining and Drinking > Restaurant > Fast Food Restaurant')
  )
  GROUP BY
      cell
  ORDER BY
      count DESC;

The top H3 cell will have ID 841ec91ffffffff; Go to https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-index-inspector and paste it in and you'll see that it's… Istanbul! Write another query to find out what the most common fast food places are in Istanbul… (Burger King and McDonald's, and it's not even close).

Install the spatial extension and you can find all venues within 100 meters of you. Find all the Taco Bell/Pizza Hut combos. Go crazy.

[Also see https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source...]

The whisper command at https://github.com/openai/whisper can generate .srt and .vtt subtitle files using --output_format.

One reason I put charts for both absolute numbers of flights and percentage change is to help understand the larger context. Those relative upticks happened just before CrowdStrike hit, so around midnight Eastern time, when traffic was already very low. So a 25% increase might be 12 extra flights taking off in the U.S. in an hour. There's plenty of noise, for sure, and looking at absolute numbers and percent change together can help give you a sense of what was going on. Looking at two days worth of data is probably enough to give you the main themes of the CrowdStrike impact, but not enough to explain every variation.

Maybe I'll do a Part 2: The World.

Thanks, I updated the post.

Using OpenStreetMap data to map stuff the balloon flew near: https://youtu.be/sQ_sEWodIrc?si=LUfvRR4kvlqQyrZ1&t=16

It's like writing webgl shaders for ADS-B. In SQL.

Incredible work, and I hope this kicks off a lot of innovation in the world of aircraft traffic analysis & visualization, which I think has been kind of stuck in a rut for a while.