How can Russia jam the GPS signal in Ukraine and what to do about it
Ukraine continues to repel all new attacks by Russian troops. The war continues on various fronts, and Russia continues to search for new opportunities to attack, one of which is the suppression of GPS satellite signals.
On Monday, April 11, NBC Nightly News published an interview with a representative of the US space forces, who said that Russian forces are targeting satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) from ground stations. Satellites are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes. (There is currently no evidence that the satellites themselves are under attack.)
How blockages occur and whether they can be bypassed
In general, experts from the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) are not surprised by this possibility, as recently Russia has used its interference systems in other situations, which look like large trucks with large antennas. According to a recent CSIS threat assessment report, the trucks are so large that they can be easily seen in some satellite imagery.
The report also notes that such suppression occurred long before the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, as the Russian military “has often jammed GPS signals in Ukraine since 2014.” In the same year, the Russians invaded and annexed Crimea.
Russia is hunting only for ground station signals from one of them: the Navstar satellite system used by the United States and available to many countries around the world.
Navstar is talking about a typical set of radio frequencies that can be received by devices with GPS receivers, such as car navigation systems or cell phones. One way to circumvent jamming is to change or increase the transmission frequency to make it harder for interference systems to block the signal.
Russia tried to silence Starlink signals
According to Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, Russia has also tried to drown out broadband signals transmitted to Ukraine by SpaceX Starlink’s Internet satellites. In February, SpaceX sent thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine to provide an independent set of infrastructure.
Musk stressed that SpaceX is adapting to the situation and has prepared a firmware update that helps to successfully bypass the jamming.
