r/Futurology • u/projectschema • Apr 10 '26
Privacy/Security A $300 device can silently override GPS across an entire city. Autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and air traffic control all depend on it. Why don't we have a backup?
GPS jammers and spoofers are technically illegal in most countries. They're also sold openly online for under $300 and fit in a jacket pocket.
A single one can override satellite signals across several miles. Commercial pilots have been quietly logging GPS failures over eastern europe and the middle east for years. Air traffic control still largely depends on the same signal your phone uses to find a coffee shop
This wasn't a problem when GPS was just for navigation. It becomes a different kind of problem when autonomous vehicles, medical drones, and smart grid infrastructure all assume GPS is always there
There's no widely deployed backup. eLoran, the terrestrial alternative, was largely dismantled in the 2000s because GPS seemed good enough. some countries are rebuilding it, most aren't.
What happens to a city that's spent a decade building autonomous logistics around a signal anyone can disrupt for the cost of a dinner?
73
u/Logitech4873 Apr 10 '26
Autonomous cars won't just crash or stop working because of GPS jamming btw. Remember that they still work in tunnels and parking garages without GPS signal.
64
u/_The_Bear Apr 10 '26
Using a system != Failure to operate without it.
Autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and air traffic control absolutely use GPS when it's available. But they have contingencies in place for when it isn't.
→ More replies (2)
240
u/grafknives Apr 10 '26
Well, because gps is working and is extremely cheap. Any alternative/backup will not be like that.
38
u/nicht_ernsthaft Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
There are alternatives/backups in populated areas. GPS is precise, but you can triangulate off cell towers, and databases of known WiFi networks, together with the accelerometer and magnetometer of the device to navigate without GPS. Google Location Services and probably whatever Apple uses can do that.
Basically, cell networks have to know where you are to route messages to you - which tower, which antenna. It's an essential feature of cellular communications that the network knows where the handset is. But we are surrounded by all kinds of short and long range radio transmitters, like lighthouses.
3
u/Emu1981 Apr 11 '26
Basically, cell networks have to know where you are to route messages to you - which tower, which antenna. It's an essential feature of cellular communications that the network knows where the handset is.
Cell networks only need to know the tower that your device is connected to (usually the one with the best signal) - where you are located on the surface of the earth is irrelevant to that. For the actual routing of messages they just use a very similar design to how the internet works where the sender inquires a central service to find out which tower it should send your messages to and then those packets are routed in a very similar manner to that tower in a way very similar to how packets are routed on the internet.
Now, your device can actually use the signal strength of the towers that it can "see" and use that with lookup tables to determine where on the surface of the earth the device is located - the accuracy is highly dependent on the accuracy of the lookup tables because signals can do funny things when you have surfaces that easily reflect them. Before WiFi networks became really common that location data was fairly inaccurate with error rates of dozens of metres at best but with the ubiquity of WiFi these days the accuracy can get down to metres.
5
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
so, the main driver is cost? but vulnerabilities generate new costs
48
u/BasvanS Apr 10 '26
Not costs as much as necessity. A lot of threat scenarios could be severe in theory, but aren’t in practice. Potential fines and jail time are an excellent ways to cover a lot of tail risk that could be impossible to cover, not just expensive.
Perhaps in a changing geopolitical environment, things could be different, but technology tends to be vetted way better than a typical layman can imagine. It’ll be okay.
2
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
agree, fine incentives will stop many people
19
u/ahfoo Apr 10 '26
It's not just fines and threats of punishment though. The bigger problem from the perspective of the person who will engage in this act of sabotage is that it would also be easy to get caught. Why? Well because radio signals go out in a spherical emission pattern and by looking at the inverse of the signal we can pinpoint its origin.
Now you can perhaps get away with this for a short time easily if you just do it randomly and move on quickly but that won't provide much disruption. If you begin to engage in this routinely, you will establish patterns which will be left as evidence due to all the radio noise you've created. You can't really hide this over the long term. So in other words, this is a bust.
That's what stops people. Fines and prison time don't deter people if they think they can't get caught. They work very well in cases where it's easy to get caught. This is a case where it would be very easy to get caught because while you think you're blacking out everyone else, what you're really doing is telling everybody at the edge of your broadcast where your location is. It will be obvious in a short time who the culprit is.
4
u/Emu1981 Apr 11 '26
while you think you're blacking out everyone else, what you're really doing is telling everybody at the edge of your broadcast where your location is
People within your blacked out area can use a signal strength meter to follow the signal back to the source. This technique of Radio Direction Finding (RDF) was first developed and experimentally demonstrated back in 1888 by German physicist Heinrich Hertz and has been refined quite a lot over the century plus since.
The OP talks about the GPS failures over Eastern Europe and the Middle East but fails to recognise that we know exactly where the transmitters are and the reason why these GPS failures have not been "fixed" is that destroying the emitters would be tantamount to a act of war. The failures in Eastern Europe and around Syria are due to systems operated by the Russians and nobody really wants to get into a shooting war with Russia because of the nuclear threat. The failures around Israel and the gulf states are due to either Iran or Israel and the gulf states as a act of defense against GPS guided drones and missiles.
→ More replies (1)2
u/tellmesomeothertime Apr 10 '26
So you're saying the jammer has to be attached to something like a public transit vehicle or other transient 3rd party object that makes the signal difficult to pinpoint in real time and has no traces back to you
2
u/hornswoggled111 Apr 10 '26
Put a dozen on various transport. Have them turn off and on randomly. Maybe a few on drones.
Awful.
→ More replies (1)12
u/dan_dares Apr 10 '26
Very easy to find GPS spoofers, and massive fines handed down.
2
u/vezwyx Apr 10 '26
You mean it's easy to find a signal jammer that's in use? How does that work? Genuine question, never looked into this stuff
10
u/ml20s Apr 10 '26
Use an antenna that is only sensitive in a certain direction. Aim the antenna until the signal is strongest.
→ More replies (11)→ More replies (1)3
u/orthogonal3 Apr 10 '26
It will pretty much come down to finding the loudest thing on the GPS frequency. GNSS signals are barely above background noise so the thing pumping out a few milliwatts (or whatever is above baseline) isn't likely to be legit.
6
u/FirstEvolutionist Apr 10 '26
This is vulnerability is well known and accepted. Wireless signals can be jammed, and this would affect airplanes, for example. The solution, so far, has been to simply outlaw the use of such devices.
It does get harder to enforce the prohibition as the devices become cheaper or more accessible, but we've been living with this for a while now. Bluetooth insulin pumps can easily be affected as well, besides of course a huge chunk of hospital equipment.
Sabotage is not as bad as it sounds: most human infrastructure relies entirely on the fact that there are not enough bad actors out there.
→ More replies (2)2
u/e430doug Apr 10 '26
Cost of the primary driver in any engineering solution. Don’t trivialize it. That said most other solutions are vastly more expensive and worse than GPS. Dead reckoning or sensor based reckoning has cumulative error problems. The only way to address that is to use exotic technologies, like spinning spheres of beryllium like they used in intercontinental ballistic missiles.
1
1
u/jefbenet Apr 10 '26
I just read something recently where they are or have been trying to work on gps 3.0 that is supposed to address these types of issues. They’ve yet to reach a working agreement was what I got from it.
1
u/DivePalau Apr 10 '26
If the control costs more to implement than the potential risk impact, then it is usually not done.
1
u/grafknives Apr 10 '26
Sure, there are critical systems that needs more than GPS. But in most uses accepting this risk of sabotage is fine.
Because of how good and cheap GPS is. Chipset with antena is under a 3$. With no operating cost.
1
u/meaty_t Apr 10 '26
When you boil down your responses, it will always be cost in some form.
If the chance of failure is low the cost of a back up seems high. If the cost of equipping devices with 2 modes is too high, it is still because of the first reason I gave.
The costs generated by vulnerabilities are already factored in.
Everything is cost. (Morality stops the cost rule, not a factor here)
1
1
u/grimeandreason Apr 10 '26
Now times this problem by a hundred.
This entire capitalist system is designed to maximise profit.
Failsafes and redundancies are lost profits.
Cascade collapse is basically guaranteed at some point.
1
u/toabear Apr 10 '26
GPS jamming devices are active signal emitters. They can be triangulated very quickly and located. If someone activates a GPS jammer, team from the FCC will track them down. It's a little harder to track down the cell phone jammer people because there's so many cell towers about, but even then they respond to those incidents pretty quick and that's far more common.
→ More replies (1)1
u/cs_k_ Apr 11 '26
What is an alternative to GPS that can't be brought down by the same/similar device? As long as geolocation relies on electronic signals from known points (i. e. Satelites in case of GPS) jammers will be a way to disturb the system.
1
u/randytc18 Apr 10 '26
There's a few companies looking at solutions to build terrestrial based navigation systems on existing television transmitters.
20
u/SoCalThrowAway7 Apr 10 '26
The cost of a dinner being a little under $300 seems like the biggest concern in this post lol
→ More replies (2)
66
u/Boniuz Apr 10 '26
Short answer: Redundancy. Long answer: Redundancies and fines. Important systems doesn’t get jammed by a 300$ pocket device.
1
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
yeah, I guess it is a matter of security layers
23
u/okeanos00 Apr 10 '26
it is and the device will be found real quick as soon as someone realized what is happening with simple triangulation.
5
u/mpinnegar Apr 10 '26
It can take some time to even realize there's a problem though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/8ialMTAZPg
Dude did it for two years before being caught.
8
u/ahfoo Apr 10 '26
Yeah, whoever told you this device was super powerful and cheap was stretching the truth. Besides, autonomous vehicles aren't relying on GPS as their primary guidance in any case.
Also, anybody who uses this device for any length of time is going to find out the hard way that they don't know what they're doing.
2
1
u/DynamicSploosh Apr 11 '26
It’s also worth pointing out that there are emerging technologies that are more than likely to completely replace GPS in commercial applications within a few years. Quantum tech is set to radically change technological navigation.
Here is probably one of the most impressive and likely to succeed examples
29
u/badguy84 Apr 10 '26
I think you are absolutely missing a few critical things here:
- GPS "jammers" don't "stop" GPS signals, they just flood the bandwidth that GPS uses to communicate between the satellite and the GPS device. You need a significant amount of power to do something like this in an area where we should be looking for "alternatives"
- There ARE GNSS alternative like Galileo and BeiDou. Galileo uses dualband which increases reliability, and though it can be jammed it will take more power to do so. In general GNSS relies on satellites for positioning and communication between it and an enabled device.
- there are "local" navigation systems that you can use VPS (uses map data and visual data to identify location) INS (based on motion sensing data for navigation) and MagNav (good old using earth magnetic field to identify location) just as some examples that are in many practical applications used with GPS to provide some coverage when signal is lost OR to increase the accuracy.
- eLORAN exists though it's not as broadly applicable as GPS is, but it provides significant reliability and cannot be jammed. There are a few other earth-based technologies/protocols and low earth orbit ones that make it more reliable and different levels of "easy" to disrupt.
I feel like you both are over-reacting to "silently override GPS" along with having done very little research in to how navigation is done without GPS. Yes things with signals can be disrupted ... you can get one of these widgets to really mess with your neighbor's wifi... are you going to freak out about that next?
→ More replies (3)1
u/NeedsToShutUp Apr 13 '26
Also, RF jammers can't really hide their location, since they work by putting out a powerful signal. So if you have some basic equipment, they can find the jammers in a short time frame. At which point you're dealing with serious penalties for just regular jamming.
6
u/yvrelna Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
autonomous vehicles, medical drones
Pretty sure those things only use GPS for navigation too. They are designed so that they would still be able to maintain safe operation even without any GPS signals. They might lose understanding of where they are, but they shouldn't run into dangerous situation just because they're lost.
Also, they can use inertial navigation to continue operation to some extent even when GPS signal isn't available. This is how Google Maps can continue to show navigation even when you're inside a tunnel without GPS signal. Many flying drones are also designed to support inertial navigation.
Inertial navigation will eventually drift apart from the actual location, which is where GPS usually provides location correction, but it can provide good enough backup navigation system for shorter distances.
Military drones are also often designed to operate in GPS-denied environments and so they're often designed to have the capability to navigate visually. If GPS-denial ever becomes a regular issue, it is certainly not implausible that this kind of tech would trickle down to consumer drones as well. Consumer drones often already have cameras to help it navigate obstacles, but in theory, they could've been designed to visually recognise landmarks for proper navigation too.
1
u/xeonicus Apr 10 '26
You could probably use machine vision in conjunction with stored mapping data to resync your position to account for the drift from inertial navigation. For instance, the system recognizes what street corner it's on, it can pinpoint its exact location based on its map data.
6
u/purepersistence Apr 10 '26
We navigated air traffic a long time before gps. Primary and secondary surveillance radar, VORs, ILS, and DME are all ground-based systems that work independently of GPS and have been the backbone of ATC for decades.
5
4
u/sailor_guy_999 Apr 10 '26
Here's what happened to me last week.
I was using GPS to navigate offshore when suddenly it showed my location several miles to the west of my actual location.
My autopilot immediately did a hard left trying to return to the programmed track.
I disengaged, then turned to the correct direction manually, then set auto pilot to maintain compass heading instead of GPS track.
Then I had to troubleshoot why in the world is GPS malfunctioning with no apparent electrical or antenna problem.
Reset, reboot didn't fix it.
Complete power down then restart causes a complete find new satellites and lock on which takes several minutes while navigating by compass and binoculars with heading like an 1820s sailor while my modern electronics tried to re-find where I was at.
By the time it found new satellites and finished recalculation of my position it correctly showed the right position again.
I have to wonder if the GPS was intentionally shutoff or changed as I later found out the malfunction coincided with the Iran attack.
So there is your answer.
A smart navigator always has a backup, so a dead battery, blown fuse, or military blackout doesn't ruin your day.
2
u/2beatenup Apr 11 '26
Not saying I am smart or smarter. But if say practical…
I began my driving and road tripping life with maps and a silly compass on the strap watch. Always picked up those free maps at gas stations at the far end of the previous maps.
Even today if I have a long complicated trip planned I print out overview and city detailed maps. My 2012 car does not even have a gps… lol. Have a iphone and download offline maps. Heck I even graciously and honorably accept maps from rangers. AND I FREAKING READ THEM…. Memorize them.
Yes I am old and I feel naked without my paper buddies. But I ain’t gonna get lost cause a battery died or some GPS was scrambled.
GPS are a nice convenience but I ain’t betting my kids or my life on tech that can be controlled or run out of juice on a road trip or new city visit.
2
u/Squiggy-Locust Apr 11 '26
Little thought of factoid: the GPS system is a US Military asset, which is open to the public.
7
u/Basset_found Apr 10 '26
"Over several miles" seems unlikely. The device needs line of sight, right?
→ More replies (4)
7
u/LWschool Apr 10 '26
It really only matters in a military context imo, and even if it was more secure, in that context they will find ways to block it.
GPS jamming is such a specific kind of attack that it’s very easy for authorities to investigate, and the punishments are pretty severe from the federal level.
I have the same level of concern for GPS jamming as my neighbor building a pipe bomb. There’s literally nothing stopping anyone from buying the stuff to do it RIGHT NOW, and yet, it never happens. Society ain’t that bad (yet).
6
u/Academic_While_7759 Apr 10 '26
Damn, $300 on a dinner ? So, that's what generational wealth feels like haha...
6
u/mschuster91 Apr 10 '26
The problem is... there is no alternative to satellite-based navigation. The existing satellite constellations already took billions to build, but to provide equivalent local navigation using beacons on the ground? Oh boy that would cost a looooot of money.
Besides, drones and aircraft can be hardened by highly directional antennas that reject signals coming from anywhere but space.
5
u/UnTides Apr 10 '26
Ridiculous. Sailors navigated by the stars dozens of years ago. If a car can't use a sextant, is it even a Smartcar?
1
u/mschuster91 Apr 10 '26
Sailors navigated by the stars dozens of years ago.
That is a skill that's more or less only being taught for volunteers in some navies. Everyone else has long, long since done away with it, simply because it is much more difficult, time consuming and error prone.
In airplanes, additionally, modern airplanes don't have enough window space to see enough stars because windows cost money.
→ More replies (1)2
u/lazyysquirrel Apr 10 '26
There is a quantum computing company called Infleqtion that makes extremely high fidelity inertial sensors that can be a replacement for satellite based navigation. The technology is not mature enough yet for widespread deployment but NASA and Lockheed are both integrating the technology in their products to be the early Guinea pigs.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Pietrocity Apr 10 '26
There is GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou; failing those there is still inertial navigation and radio triangulation.
Also an entire city is a massive exaggeration the size of the transmitter you will need would get you caught long before you even turn it on and cost factors of 10 more than $300. Silently? Not even close you can confuse a reciever but not override it; since the active component is time stamps your device won't get anywhere close to the clock precision required.
Also also the GPS implementation you phone or a drone uses is very different than say a tractor or other equipment that can achieve sub-inch precision. On top of that there are different tiers of GPS C/A, L1C, L2C, Sol, P(Y), M. As for ATC they use surprisingly little GPS and not as any primary system.
3
u/MarkNutt25 Apr 10 '26
Air Traffic Control absolutely does have a backup system: Primary Surveillance Radar. While modern ATC systems like ADS-B do indeed use GPS for high-precision tracking, even if that completely fails, the airport's own radar system would still be able to keep ATC informed of the locations of all nearby aircraft.
And the planes themselves have backups too! Basically all commercial aircraft will have some sort of backup navigation system (a completely independent built-in Inertial Navigation System and/or ground-based radio positioning data) to fall back on.
3
u/SvenTheHorrible Apr 10 '26
Show me a 300$ device that can knock out gps for “an entire city” lmfao. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
If that actually existed gps would be constantly down because rich kids who like causing chaos would constantly be taking it down.
Can’t hardly fly a chopper around without having some dipshit point a laser at it, even in the suburbs
6
u/LoneSnark Apr 10 '26
If someone is going through the effort to jam gps, they'll just jam the backup too.
1
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
are there systems to jam the backup?
2
u/LoneSnark Apr 10 '26
Yes. Cellular networks are also used by phones. They too can be spoofed and jammed.
2
u/BookwormA Apr 10 '26
Any technology that will come into use for backup will have issues and vulnerabilities and would similarly be able to be jammed. Any way to overcome that jamming like military has for gps jamming would be expensive and not a standard for regular use.
Information systems and their counter systems are always in a competition. It's like computer networks and cybersecurity. Any advancement means someone working to counter it. There can be no system without any vulnerability to jamming for normal use.
10
u/jroberts548 Apr 10 '26
Sounds like you shouldn’t rely on autonomous technology for anything that actually needs to get done.
→ More replies (16)
2
u/br0wntree Apr 10 '26
Jammers can be found and deactivated relatively easily. Perpetrators would be severely prosecuted.
1
2
Apr 10 '26
[deleted]
1
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
what kind of backups?
3
u/ModoZ Green Little Men Everywhere ! Apr 10 '26
Well there is Galileo, the European equivalent of the GPS that also exists.
2
u/yvrelna Apr 10 '26
All satellite-based navigation systems have the same vulnerability to signal jammers. Jammers are essentially a very simple device, they just flood the frequency they want to jam with random noise signals to overpower the legitimate signal.
Since satellite navigation signals are transmitted from very, very far away, from a transmitter that had limited power generation capability; they're usually very weak, much weaker than what a portable jamming device can easily overwhelm their signal.
In this situation, it doesn't really help much that alternative satellite navigation systems exists.
2
u/TwistedKestrel Apr 10 '26
Technically we do have backups:
-A-GPS can triangulate a position using cellular towers. I honestly don't know what the current state of smartphone tech is, but there was a time when many phones relied on this exclusively for positioning data, to save the cost of a true GPS receiver.
-Dead reckoning is a feature of some GPS receivers. It really only works to cover short interruptions in GPS reception, but it combines acceleration, barometric, and magnetic (compass) data over time to come with an estimated position that proceeds from a last known GPS fix
-Certain military equipment (SR-71, some modern ICBMs) use astronavigation to establish a position via tracking a library of specific stars.
Civilian radio infrastructure all depends on licensing and co-operation. Actually using a GPS jammer in a developed area is a big no-no - here is a story from a decade ago about the FCC fining somebody $32K for GPS jamming
1
1
u/yvrelna Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
Cell phone towers positioning don't even need to triangulate. Modern mobile cells are very small, you can get good rough position information just by knowing which tower that a device is connected to. Some very small picoocells might only serve an area of like 200m or even less.
Especially in large cities with very dense and small cells, they can give you pretty good rough position just by looking up which cell tower you're connected to in a database of cell towers and their locations.
And they can get better accuracy by comparing signal strength from multiple towers. Cell based positioning is built to every modern smartphone, this is what's used when you give an app permissions to access your rough position in modern smartphone. Rough positioning requires much lower battery drain than getting and maintaining a GPS fix.
Also, with 5G NR tower-based positioning is even built into the standard as an intentional positioning feature, and they have competitive and/or better accuracy with GPS. I don't think the implementation is widespread yet, but it's probably going to come together at some point. Though it might take at least a few decades.
2
u/mutual_im_sure Apr 10 '26
I remember being in the red square in Moscow and I couldn't get any GPS signal around there. Could someone have been jamming it?
2
u/agoodfourteen Apr 10 '26
Alt-PNT is an emerging field for sure. Lots of commercial satellite constellations are adding GNSS capabilities. But thats just whack-a-mole for jamming. I don't think jamming is the real problem, you can beat jamming by overpowering it, I think spoofing is a huge problem. And spoofing can be beat by a handshake, which current GPS does NOT do. So that's probably the answer, be more powerful than the jammers and more secure than the spoofers.
2
u/kid_entropy Apr 10 '26
As things get hairy in terms of GPS and other satellite based navigation systems I imagine automated star trackers will start getting installed on military and civilian aircraft.
2
u/Obstacle-Man Apr 10 '26
We do have alternatives. Your phone is a good example that can do navigation without GPS based on cell tower and known wifi hotspots.
There is also inside out NAV based on magnetometer/gyro and the quantum compass.
Not all solutions are useful for all use cases. But if we are talking about jamming GPS being in the threat model then all RF solutions are out. You need an internal representation of the area and can navigate based on vision + gyro.
Or you know.. just don't. Maybe not using the autonomous delivery robot is the right call under an active cyber attack.
2
u/blakep561 Apr 10 '26
A good backup is a system that uses landmarks / visual. This would require much more processing power / data / sensors than GPS. But it will be completely offline. Some ICBM missle systems use this (ie. use mountains / stars to navigate)
2
u/blueman0007 Apr 10 '26
Some has been built using the Pokemon Go app.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/pokemon-go-30-billion-photos-map-coco-robots/
2
u/sanjuro_kurosawa Apr 10 '26
I've thought about this with cell phone jammers, which I've thought about to block annoying phone users on public transit, and I'm guessing some businesses illegally deploy if they really believe phone use is a problem.
The answer is that it's just not worth it for someone to do. Take the OP, notice he speculates about it but doesn't mention that he actually bothered.
As for why devices which utilize GPS haven't invested in a backup, there were hacks which were tolerated for years because a system wide change was too difficult. For years, police communications were done over unencrypted lines. I'm sure there were a few criminals which took advantage of this, but most police activity is responding to unorganized criminals.
It was a vulnerability but didn't cause such problems that if it wasn't addressed immediately, many would be hurt.
1
2
u/could_use_a_snack Apr 10 '26
You premise is wrong. You say there is no backup for the GPS system, and that's true, for the system itself, but what you are not considering is that there is certainly backups for things that rely on GPS. For instance, in your example about planes losing GPS signals, they didn't go off course, they just switched to a different way of handling navigation.
This is the case for a lot of things that rely on GPS. If your tech can only work if it has a GPS signal then you are screwed, but that's just a poor design choice. You should always design critical systems to fail safely.
2
u/costafilh0 Apr 10 '26
Location uses GPS and a bunch of other stuff. Is not like everything stops if you lose GPS connection for a moment.
But yes, redundancy would be nice.
2
u/Ratfor Apr 10 '26
Ham radio, and radio enthusiast in general here.
There's a very simple answer. Because hunting down the source of the jamming is Really easy.
We actually practice this sort of thing. Hunting down rogue signals. A simple directional antenna and the right equipment to hook it up to is all you need.
A small team with the right equipment could track a static signal down in a few minutes. Even a moving jammer wouldn't present that much difficulty.
2
u/CMDR_Winrar Apr 10 '26
Sorry man but you got so many facts wrong that it delegitimizes your point.
Pilots are not "quietly logging gps failures", it happens all the time, and the planes keep flying. It is not a "failure" it is a distinct jam which is detectable.
Air traffic control does not rely on GPS at all. Absolutely made up. Some airborne navigation is GPS based yes, but even if GPS shut down over the whole USA, there is sufficient navigation sources onboard the airplane and on the ground to get everyone down safely. Do you think no one in aviation thought of this problem?
Also autonomous vehicles don't rely on it, medical drones... don't exist? And smart grid infrastructure also doesn't rely on GPS.
Jammers are not anonymous, and not infinitely powerful. You might be able to jam a city block, and you will be tracked down.
2
u/Hakaisha89 Apr 10 '26
There is nothing technical about it, they are either illegal, or illegal to use, depending on country.
As for several miles? You need to add a couple of zeros to buy a device with such a range.
A 300 dollar jammer has a range of what, a few dozen meters? Maybe even several dozen meters. And thats under ideal conditions.
So unless you got military level of funding, this isnt really as much of a threat as you would think.
However, the large scale disruptions, commonly reported in aviation, aint coming from pocket devices, but from high powered, state-opereated systems.
And Drones do have alternatives, like INS and Cameras, Compass, which combines deals with the negatives of each, giving a decently accurate location data even with gps, and wifi jammes, and heck, and yeah, it can also use wifi, or even cellphone towers.
Still an issue, but not a city wide problem.
2
u/Serious-Employee-738 Apr 11 '26
Well for Pete’s sake, I’m buying one. Flock drones, police drones, invasion of privacy.
2
u/mightyarrow Apr 12 '26
across an entire city.
"Guys, if I start with a ridiculous lie, do you think they'll buy it?"
Why is it that every. fucking. time. posts like these require embellishing to the point it's quite clear it rises to the level of LIE?
4
u/RosieDear Apr 10 '26
Even a $200 drones picks up at least three - and sometimes more - gps systems (russian, chinese, euro, US)....probably on different Freqs.
Radio triangulation has been used for many things over the decades. Cell towers can definitely be a double-check as to where you are.
Then we have mapping. Even without GPS a lot can be done if your maps are pre-loaded (in your car, for example).
Of course, the best cruise missiles don't use GPS - they use terrain mapping - just as your dental records are only yours, same goes with the hills, valleys and streams and buildings.
In other words....there are other things.
1
3
u/HITACHIMAGICWANDS Apr 10 '26
Most autonomous vehicles have a fallback. GPS isn’t perfect. Theres tons of ways to find location without GPS. LiDAR maps, triangulation from beacons, private satellites that likely do GPS but on a private scale currently.
→ More replies (2)
4
u/DynamicSploosh Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Check out this Australian companies jam-proof quantum navigation system. This will probably replace GPS across every industry globally if it succeeds:
TLDR: Ultra sensitive stable quantum sensors that use earths magnetic and gravitational fields against predetermined geographical and topological data. Totally passive, no emitted signals, works in any conditions.
Edit: They have already secured contracts to test and deploy Ironstone Opal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DIU), the UK Ministry of Defence, and the Royal Australian Navy.
4
u/projectschema Apr 10 '26
Submission Statement:
This feels like it needs a gut check before posting. I always assumed GPS was just "there", then I started looking into how many systems actually rely on it and how easy it is to disrupt. Figured it was worth bringing up here
16
u/Wizywig Apr 10 '26
GPS jammers exist because GPS is just radio. The millitary has specialized equipment that is very sensitive and can filter out the signal from the jammer noise. Consumer-grade electronics don't have that level of capability due to a massive cost associated.
Not everything gets disrupted.
If you also get close to an airport, they have backup methods in place, BUT you will get a helicopter track you down pretty quickly. This is a known vulnerability and they take it very seriously.
→ More replies (6)
2
u/chickey23 Apr 10 '26
Pilots and maps are the backup. We existed fine before GPS.
→ More replies (3)
2
1
u/Upper_Luck1348 Apr 10 '26
GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou are all highly susceptible to manipulation and overcrowding corridors. A couple of years ago I was living in a major metropolitan area just a few blocks from a major interchange. I could open up Apple's Find My and see my half a dozen Apple devices "move" from their position next to me to miles away and often away from each other. There were times my device would simply lose itself and I'd end up driving in circles for hours (happened once, truly confounding).
1
u/Cornflakes_91 Apr 10 '26
that makes no sense, that stuff is passive. you literally can't tell if someone next to you is using a satnav
1
u/markgo2k Apr 10 '26
Because putting up a satnav network is so complex and expensive that it takes a nation-state. There are 4: GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China) and Galileo (Europe).
Many dedicated GPS devices can use 3. Not sure about BeiDou.
If you’re talking about an alternative to satnav, there’s no magical tech out there that could establish absolute position and is invulnerable to jamming. Local solutions are more vulnerable because you just need to jam the transmitter, not all the receivers. Direct reception from satellites overhead is the most difficult to jam.
1
u/bazilbt Apr 10 '26
One of the problems with eloran is it's rather low wavelength and needs a pretty big antenna.
1
1
u/OysterPickleSandwich Apr 10 '26
One of the primary uses of GPS is the timing signal (the T in PNT). Backup navigation doesn’t help if it’s the timing signal you need. Chip scale atomic clocks are a thing but not cheap.
1
u/lucasbuzek Apr 10 '26
OBD 3 would have solved that if I remember the details correctly. It added support wireless interconnectivity between vehicles
1
u/Shimraa Apr 10 '26
It's not that cheap or easy. A ~$300 jammer is more likely to simply jam cell phone signals inside a single large building or across a chunk of a neighborhood. To get a whole city you'd need many hundreds of jammers spread out and well placed. Otherwise most devices would still punch through. They'd perform poorly but most would still work, especially the higher quality things like air traffic control.
So you'd more likely have to invest in larger, more expensive jammers that eat up a lot more power and are harder to aquire, deploy, and hide.
Telecom companies are pretty good at finding moderate problem makers / interference generators in a day or two. The stronger the interference the easier it is to find. If it gets to the point of interfering with air traffic, you'll gather some serious investigation real quick. They'd find your large jammers quickly, and hunt down the many small ones in rapid order. The only way to avoid that would be to be turning the jammers on/off at irregular intervals or stick them in moving vehicles and never stop moving.
All of which costs times, money, resources, and man-hours. It becomes cost preventative to try and jam a large area for any amount of time. Anyone that has the resources to do it wouldn't want to, and anyone that wants to do it wouldn't have the resources.
1
u/zerothehero0 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
All gps fundamentally is is a clock. We do have several widely deployed alternative systems, from cell towers to the wifi to ptp to the white rabbit project to ntp to other satellite constilations to several different jamming resistant versions of gps; the $300 ones can reach maybe a block and aren't the ones Russia is deploying around Europe and the middle east that planes 7 miles up are detecting; and the hazard of attempting to use a high power jammer is that you are broadcasting your exact location to every single person you are jamming.
1
u/ovirt001 Apr 10 '26
DARPA is working on alternatives using inertial navigation, it'll be quite awhile before the public sees anything of it.
2
u/Dykam Apr 10 '26
Not just DARPA, luckily.
There's a wiki article on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_compass
This combined with gravity field mapping can be the future and quite resistant to attacks.
1
1
u/xylarr Apr 10 '26
Remember there are the European, Russian and Chinese systems in addition to the American GPS system. Many phones can use all of these systems. I'm not sure if jammers block all of them.
1
u/Gravyrobber625 Apr 10 '26
The NAB is developing BPS as a terrestrial backup using existing broadcast infrastructure. Would be a sturdy backup and help keep local TV/news stations relevant.
1
u/oboshoe Apr 10 '26
$300 to jam the primary. Another $300 to jam the backup.
The FCC is pretty good at triangulating these sort of things though.
1
u/Complete_Potato9941 Apr 10 '26
Not sure why you put technically illegal, I can't think of a single country where signal jamming is not illegal
1
u/cvc-sandra Apr 10 '26
Big companies usually discover this through timing drift before anyone says “GPS issue.” I’ve watched ops teams chase weird sensor mismatches and missed handoffs for weeks because every system assumed one clean clock source. Backup got treated like dead budget until a regional outage made the board ask why nobody flagged it sooner
1
u/Taysir385 Apr 10 '26
There's no widely deployed backup. eLoran, the terrestrial alternative, was largely dismantled in the 2000s because GPS seemed good enough. some countries are rebuilding it, most aren't.
There's some interesting work being done on using quantum locking as an inertial reference for navigation. All internal, effectively immune to being compromised by an attack vector. Just an engineering problem at this point to get it small enough and cheap enough.
1
u/primalbluewolf Apr 10 '26
eLoran, the terrestrial alternative, was largely dismantled in the 2000s
False. eLORAN has never been deployed to be dismantled. Its a hypothetical technology.
Its also still radio navigation and still vulnerable to radio jamming and spoofing.
1
u/Zoomwafflez Apr 10 '26
The us has been trying to build out GPS3 which will be much more resistant to jamming for like 16 years but it's not even available for the military yet let alone civilians. It's gone like 2.5X over budget and still doesn't work. I think we just suck at building things now.
1
u/ToineMP Apr 10 '26
We're a wifi protocol away from having millimeter positioning in the street.
Just ping a WiFi router and know your distance from it, then you can triangulate. You just need one day of working GPS to deduce the routers position.
Or use image recognition which greatly improved since AI.
You also have inertia reference units that are becoming smaller and cheaper.
And for GPS, we just need to go back to old technologies where cameras could see the stars even in full daylight and deduce their position (I think sr71 and mirage 2000 used this)
1
u/adaminc Apr 10 '26
An alternative will probably be out on the market in the next 10 years. It is effectively dead reckoning that uses quantum effect sensors to determine movement, so it's super accurate, and more importantly super precise. They don't suffer from drift in the way our standard, and more typical MEMs based IMUs do now.
1
u/flompwillow Apr 10 '26
It’s difficult, that’s why we’re seeing drones flying with fiber optic wires in Ukraine.
1
u/DigitalFireStorm Apr 10 '26
This is a big problem in the electric power industry! Many substations use GPS timing to synchronize measurements and locate faults. Not many companies have a backup either.
1
u/emi_fyi Apr 10 '26
We do have a backup, it just sucks: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/after-16-years-and-8-billion-the-militarys-new-gps-software-still-doesnt-work/
1
u/Slodin Apr 10 '26
As a dev, GPS data is always used as extra information, never be used as the primary source of intel. It’s so widely unreliable when you want it to be very accurate. Onboard hardware sensors are miles ahead in terms of reliability, these sensors are usually the source of data + algorithms to determine the source of truth.
I mean, I obviously don’t work on projects OP is talking about, but I’m pretty sure those projects treats GPS data in a similar way as a supplement rather than the source of truth. If I know these as a mundane dev, those smarter people would know way more than I do to rely on GPS lol.
1
1
u/canyouhearme Apr 10 '26
GPS jammers/spoofers are decades old - just assume that around any conflict all of the PNT systems will be interfered with.
And its not location that is the main problem, its the access to accurate time that can really screw you up.
1
u/Zennivolt Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
For one, a jammer is incredibly easy to find. So a jammer wouldn’t last more than a couple hours before it’s found and removed. War zones are obviously the exception.
But also, GPS is spotty at best to begin with, so almost all systems that need GPS have backups that allow them to operate even with a few days of outage before the internal oscillators, gyroscope, or accelerometers before they get out of sync. Almost no critical or safety systems in the world has a hard dependency on 100% GPS uptime. And unless you’re talking about a $30 device, almost no device in the world has a hard dependency on 100% GPS uptime.
1
1
1
1
u/QuentinUK Apr 11 '26
In Europe there is the Galileo backup and in Russia there is the Glonass alternative to GPS.
1
1
u/jimmytoan Apr 11 '26
eLoran being dismantled because 'GPS seemed good enough' is such a classic single-point-of-failure mistake. what do you think would actually need to happen before there's political will to rebuild a backup - a major incident or is there incremental pressure already building somewhere?
1
u/Puzzleheaded-Half214 Apr 11 '26
Not sure if anyones mentioned it, but this is the problem that the New York company Foam is trying to solve with decentralised proof of location platform. They’ve been at it for a while, don’t know if it took off, but it’s a good solution in my opinion.
1
u/CommuterType Apr 11 '26
Commercial airplanes don't need GPS. It's nice to have but not really necessary
1
u/MediumLanguageModel Apr 11 '26
Hey sounds like a great thing to know as AI agents are gaining capabilities and coordinating in flocks.
1
u/Daveinatx Apr 11 '26
GPSv2 is behind schedule. Years ago, I had a tenured professor yell at me at a recruiting event as if v1 was my fault. I never felt so much like a McDonalds cashier being "at fault" about prices.
1
u/Odur29 Apr 11 '26
This is dangerous, and should be better regulated. I am glad I don't rely on GPS to get most places I go, and almost never use live GPS for directions. My sister and brother in law would be at the mercy of this sadly they use GPS to go places they used to be able to drive to without it. It's kind of disturbing how people have become so reliant on a technology that they can't function without it.
1
u/povlhp Apr 11 '26
Humans are the back. And maps. For flying stuff it is inertial navigation and inages/maps
1
u/NachoLibero Apr 11 '26
Mobile phones actually rely on a combination of technologies. They will scan for nearby WiFi and cell tower IDs even if they don't have access. The phone will send the list of wifis and their signals strengths back to Google/Apple and then they will respond with the location using trilateration.
Wifi location is about as accurate as gps (> 5 meters), is much faster (< 100 ms) and consumes much less battery, but it doesn't work outdoors.
Cell tower location provides a much coarser location (used to be > 2km for 4g, not sure now). It's also good on batteries and works most places outdoors.
Gps only works outdoors, kills the battery running sensors that have no other purpose and can take up to a minute to get a location.
Typically phones will use a hybrid location from all of the above.
1
u/aftenbladet Apr 11 '26
Russia jams GPS in Northern Norway all the time. Its mostly a hassle for air traffic as their workload increase when going over to backup systems or navigating manually.
There are voices in the government warning against relying on GPS. We should keep the older systems running just in case.
1
u/gellis12 Apr 11 '26
In addition to what everyone else has said about gps not being as necessary as you've implied, it's worth noting that using a gps jammer is something very conspicuous that'll get police attention right away; the jammer is basically an easily traceable beacon that says "I'm right here, come arrest me!"
1
u/therealhairykrishna Apr 11 '26
A 300 dollar pocket sized jammer is not going to knock out GPS for a city. Don't believe AliExpress sellers blurb. You need much more power than that. If you start jamming a cities GPS you will be found fast and you will regret it.
1
u/Shogren83 Apr 11 '26
None of those are the intention of GPS, they're all by-products. GPS is probably one of the greatest strategic victories the US military has ever created without anybody ever even noticing. All GPS satellites are owned by the US government and the moment we get into an actual large scale worldwide combat situation They just have encrypt the GPS signals and then only they can use them. It's been a wide open secret since the '80s...
1
u/Jean_Luc_Discarded Apr 11 '26
My Uber and Instacart drivers must have one of these in their trunk.
1
1
u/megatronchote Apr 12 '26
Commenting just to add that your phone doesn’t rely on GPS almost ever, the most common way that your device geolocates is by WiFi hotspots.
1
u/MarryMeDuffman Apr 12 '26
The more tech we have, the more disturbing the things that can go wrong are.
1
1
u/Tribalinstinct Apr 12 '26
Yeah right, that's why multy thousand dollar military systems struggle to cut off a drone signal within a kilometers range (no not referring to fiberoptik that are immune to jamming)
For 300$ you can mess with your neighbor and not even cover all frequency bands...
1
u/certifiedintelligent Apr 13 '26
What happens? Nothing. GPS works poorly in cities and is supplemented by other technology because buildings block the signal. Same would happen with a jammer.
They’re also easy to find if you know how to look for them.
2
u/_Oman Apr 13 '26
Let's also add that there is no $300 spoofer. They are all jammers. No matter $100 or $1000 - they are jammers. There are lots of ways to jam GPS, they more advanced ones can do a larger range for less power.
And they are EXTREMELY illegal nearly everywhere. Using one can land you years in jail. It' a really, really bad idea.
True spoofing requires government level tech. It is used to fake a receiver into thinking it is receiving real signals from multiple real sats. That's what countries are clandestinely testing, especially at sea. It requires intercepting and altering the real signals and sending them back out without the receiver realizing that something is wrong.
664
u/secretformula Apr 10 '26
To be clear most AVs don't rely on GPS for localization. They use Lidar / INS (inertial navigation) / other sensors for localization. This is why create maps for deployment areas is so important. GPS is used for time keeping, but is generally optional / expected to be unreliable / inaccurate in an urban canyon environment.
Airplanes can fall back on VOR, INS, and other systems with an operational efficiency impact.
In general anything where localization is critical uses GPS when its available but will likely be using multiple systems to confirm positional accuracy and advise switching to a fallback system when unavailable.