Advisory: GPS jamming - Eastern Mediterranean and Red Seas

[Cpt Pat]

Our clever friends to the East have stepped up their interference activities. I'm not sure if GLONASS (Russian GPS) is affected. There's more to this story...

https://www.marad.dot.gov/msci/advisory/2018/30688/

Since this interference is so easily accomplished, I predict that - with rising tensions - we will see more instances of GPS interference and denial of service attacks in the future. People considering buying self-driving cars might want to consider this issue. AIS and chart plotters will go belly-up entirely without sat navigation.

I personally use both GPS and GLONASS. If only one is affected, it's easy to detect by a large delta (difference) between position or timing solutions. My Class A AIS, which continually monitors positional differences between GPS and GLONASS, has an alarm and logging function when large disagreements occur. Maybe someone will come up with a cheaper detection and alarming solution (or an inexpensive NMEA-compatible inertial guidance system).

Still waiting for the European Galileo constellation and useable receivers to come on line....

And we really, really need e-Loran deployed. But we have a leadership in Washington who flunked primary school science class, so I don't hold out much hope for that.


Our strategic missiles don't use GPS. They use a combination of inertial and celestial navigation (they have cameras that take star sights in flight). So, if The Big Snit happens, they'll still find their targets. You might want to dust off your sextant so you'll still find your harbor.

[chuckr]

We were sailing from Mersin Turkey south and lost GPS a couple of times on the south central side of Cyprus. It did not last long - 10 mins or so but was a bit disconcerting when it was dark and we were trying to anchor. When we went into Larnaca we asked a pro capt of a big yacht about it and he laughed and said about 10 mins - we get use to it -

[teppokurki]

If you have GPS and GLONASS receivers you can get the data to Signal K format with for example OpenPlotter. Then you can define the notification rules you want with either Node-RED or write your own sat jamming detection plugin.

Add WilhelmSK to get notification on your iDevice and Apple Watch.