Russia’s jamming of GPS signals marks a shift in its non-conventional attacks against the Baltic states, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Friday.
“They [Russia] are moving from the cyber domain, disinformation domain, towards a more physical one which affects airplanes, daily lives of people in our region,” he said in a joint news conference with his new Latvian counterpart Baiba Braže in Vilnius.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania warned last month that Russia’s jamming of GPS signal was increasing the threat of aviation incidents.
Estonia on Wednesday summoned Russia’s chargé d’affaires to protest the jamming of GPS signals which led to disruptions in Tartu Airport.
The Estonian Foreign Ministry said in a press release that it “has caused serious damage to air traffic in our region, the clearest example of which is the suspension of flights between Helsinki and Tartu”.
Braže told the news conference in Vilnius that “it’s not a new phenomenon but it leaves a certain sort of consequence that is worrying”.
Landsbergis called for sanctions on those responsible for these actions, adding that “it is also very important to send a message to Moscow that they are not operating in a grey zone”.
“If they expect us to be silent, if they expect us to be quiet about the things that are happening, they are definitely not going to get that. We see, we know, and we act against it,” Lithuania’s foreign minister said.
This week, several European countries summoned Russia’s diplomats over hybrid and cyber-attacks orchestrated by Moscow or groups linked to it.
More to the point, if Russia is going to keep doing this, then I think that we’re going to need some more jam resistance. Absent outright destroying the transmitters or trying to apply pressure to Russia to stop it themselves, we can’t really stop the jamming as things stand.
The US military has some additional jam resistance that they can use with GPS – I believe, from past reading, that part of it involves having directional broadcasts, which I assume means that there are a limited number of areas that can benefit from it, and I think that it requires military, M-code-capable receivers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Military_(M-code)
I don’t know if it might be possible to provide at least limited access to this without compromising US military security.
It might also be possible to reactivate the old Loran-C stations. It sounds like Europe closed theirs down about eight years ago; I don’t know if the physical hardware is still present in the area. I don’t think that those provide enough accuracy for missile targeting, so Russia may not jam those.
EDIT: Sounds like people are already talking about it.
https://www.eetimes.eu/are-we-over-dependent-on-gnss/
EDIT2: While I’d guess that Lithuania and similar are mostly-concerned about maintaining safe navigation, I’d imagine that GPS jamming sucks from a smartphone standpoint too. Google and Apple both run location services; as long as they know the location of WiFi or Bluetooth stations in the area, and a smartphone can receive their broadcasts, they should be able to get a fix. One possibility might be the government rolling out WiFi stations – could even provide municipal WiFi if they want from it, but that’s not necessary – in urban areas where jamming is really bad and then just telling Apple and Google the precise location of the transmitters and their IDs (since I don’t know if the “auto-learning” of a position can work without a GPS signal). Then if you’re Lithuanian or whatever, the phone can get a position fix off the government WiFi points.
USA’s current idea solution to no GPS is NITRO, https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2023-05/callahan.pdf
That’s interesting, but from reading it, I think that they’re trying to solve a different problem. The issue that the Baltics and Finland are hitting is GPS jamming creating problems with positional data, which is used for navigation.
But it sounds like these guys are looking at trying to solve the problem of providing synchronized clocks countrywide (which is related in that having synchronized clocks is required for some positioning systems, but not quite the same thing; you can have synchronized clocks without knowing your position). They’re just using GPS as a time source.
Interestingly, they also mention possibly using this “new Loran” thing too (though to solve their time problem, not to determine location).
EDIT: For their timekeeping problem, I’m also kind of surprised that there’s no reference to the atomic clock radio transmissions that we run for the contiguous US. But maybe that’s vulnerable to spoofing or something.
googles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB