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What’s New: Certainly not aircraft in the Baltic being jammed. That has been happening periodically since December. 63 hours does seem to be a record for a period of continuous disruption.
Why It’s Important:
- Disrupting GPS signals degrades the efficiency and safety of the entire air traffic system. Eventually, someone is going to get hurt.
- Electronic warfare (as we have said before) is… warfare! NATO and its members are allowing Russia to attack their aircraft, ships, territories, and citizens with impunity.
What Else to Know:
- There was also a prolonged jamming event in the Baltic on Christmas that lasted two days. Of course, that was on Western Christmas, not Russian Orthodox Christmas.
- We had a question come up the other day to the effect of why all this jamming seemingly isn’t also impacting infrastructure that relies on GPS timing. At least there hasn’t been much reported in the press other than some IT network problems in Poland early on. Possible reasons:
- The jamming and spoofing are likely targeting aviation, so not aimed low enough to get a lot of terrestrial users
- Aviation ADS-B uses just GPS as an input, Other receivers often use multiple GNSS. If the jamming is only targeting GPS (which we have not seen any reliable reporting on) then multi-GNSS receivers might not be impacted. – Note we understand that it is more difficult to target just one GNSS and leave the others unaffected, but we have seen the Russians to just that in Norway.
- Telecom providers are beginning to backup their timing with fiber. We saw a report from Sweden on this just the other day.
