Blog Editor's Note: It's incredibly important to defend against cyber attacks, but no defense is perfect. Nations need to focus on resilience, according to an official at the UK's GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of America's National Security Agency (NSA).     "Absolute...

Blog Editor's Note: There's lots of information "out there" to help the bad guys figure out how to mess with GPS. So occasionally we point out some of it because most of our readers are the good guys and need to be reminded, or need help reminding others, just how bad...

Blog Editor's Note: This incident from last year is an example of how GPS and PNT are taken for granted by many users. During the SVN-23 glitch in January of 2016 most all the first responder  systems in North America seem to have had fault reports, if not more...

Join us on the 15th of May for the RNT Foundation Annual Meeting and Reception aboard the USS Constellation  in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.  - All are welcome! The evening includes: Guided tours of the USS Constellation Reception with heavy hors d'oeuvres, wine, and...

Blog Editor's Note: Attacking satellites directly is difficult and dangerous. Attacking and disabling the GPS constellation would be especially difficult as it would require damaging at least 7 or 8 different satellites. Such attacks would also be dangerous as it...

The most recent Unsafe Airspace Summary from the Flight Services Bureau cautions pilots about chronic GPS disruptions in Egypt, Turkey, North and South Korea, and the Philippines. A subsequent update identified problems in Cypress as well. The US Maritime...

Blog Editor's Note: China has been jamming US drones and patrols in the area for a while. Installing jamming equipment on the Spratly Islands extends the reach of their ability to disrupt systems while reinforcing their sovereignty claims. (Interesting how on the...

Blog Editor's Note: Russian military doctrine is that all signals from space will be denied in any hot conflict, so their forces are fully prepared to operate without them. US military operations are highly dependent upon signals from space, such as GPS, and the...

Blog Editor's Note: We have reported several times on GPS disruptions in the Philippines. See for example Unsafe Airspace  and Aviation Disruptions.  Kudo's to RNTF member Guy Buesnel of Spirent for finding this ICAO report and the outstanding Linkedin post below. Guy...

Blog Editor's Note: The best way to prepare for something bad that might happen is to make sure when it does, it causes the least damage possible. We have the technology today to ensure that, with a minimal investment, when GPS goes away the nation can keep on going...

Blog Editor's Note: In 2014 portions of a mid-Atlantic container port were idled for seven hours by an apparent GPS jamming incident.  Since then the use of jammers has continued to increase, especially by drivers of commercial vehicles that are part of fleet tracking...

From C4IRSNET 5 April 2018: The cost of new GPS programs jumped $930 million last year   By: Mark Pomerleau The cost of two Air Force GPS programs increased a total of $930 million in the last year, according to a new report released by the Pentagon April 3. The...

Blog Editor's Note:  Today Google celebrated the 325th birthday of John Harrison, inventor of the first practical chronometer with a doodle. Harrison's was the first of many continuing steps to provide trusted time in support of navigation and thousands of...

Blog Editor's Note:  Kudo's to MARAD for posting this. Getting info out about GPS problems is not their job. We have had a hard time getting this kind of info to be made public.  The statement they were allowed to publish, in typical governmentese, says "possible...

Blog Editor's Note: The last two administrations (G.W. Bush and Obama) promised Congress they would build eLoran systems to serve as a complement and backup for GPS.   Bush Administration Announcement    Obama Administration Announcement  Despite these promises being...

Blog Editor's Note: The nation relies heavily on vulnerable space assets, including GPS. The Department of Homeland Security has called GPS "a single point of failure for critical infrastructure." We hope our leaders begin to consider that the best way to protect the...

Blog Editor's Note: Space launches are on the upswing with over 12,000 new satellites scheduled to go into orbit in the next several years. Most launches will put multiple satellites in space, but that still leaves lots of rockets making holes in the ionosphere. We...

The US Coast Guard has announced termination of the nation's remaining Differential GPS (DGPS) transmissions beginning in September of this year. The first phase of DGPS decommissioning was announced in 2016. In response, a group of congressmen wrote to the Deputy...

Blog Editor's Note: We understand from developers that autonomous cars will be able to use wheel counters, hyper-fine maps, Lidar, cameras, and other sensors to find there way when GPS/GNSS is not available. Space disruptions are still likely to impact them, though,...

Blog Editor's Note: On Friday, the US Government posted a report entitled "Assessment to Identify Gaps in Testing of Adjacent Band Interference to the Global Positioning System (GPS) L1 Frequency Band." The report examined five different sets of tests that have been...

The European Commission published the European Radio Navigation plan (ERNP) last week. Among other things, the plan calls for non-space backup systems - something we heartily endorse. From the plan's conclusion: "There are, however, some challenges that will need to...

"In the few weeks since the review of satellite determined position and time was released, the government has and continues to act. Some would say unusually fast, but this shows how important this issue and the challenges it raises, are being taken." Andy Proctor,...

Blog Editor's Note: A good overview article, especially about what is happening in Britain. GPS: Why our reliance on the Cold War satellite technology is an accident waiting to happen The Telegraph  James Titcomb  11 MARCH 2018 • 7:04 PM Last June, more than 20 ships...

Nation-states attacking financial institutions and power grids, and organized criminals stealing high value assets were deemed among the most likely spoofing scenarios in a recent presentation by Fugro. Discussing "the world of spoofing," as part of a presentation to...

In a recent presentation, Septentrio provided an excellent overview of GNSS jamming and spoofing issues. Of particular interest to us was their discussion of "budget spoofing." It was a clear explanation of how spoofing GNSS has dropped in price and complexity to...

Blog Editor's Note: There are really two areas of concern with Ligado's proposal pending before the FCC. The first is the technical analysis. Ligado claims that their proposal will not significantly impact GPS services. Others say it will - a lot.  We expect to see...

Blog Editor's Note: We have seen an increasing number of reports of drivers for taxi and ride-sharing services spoofing GPS/GNSS in order to increase the amount of work they get.  See this item about Grab drivers, for example. There have even been reports from Russia...

Novatel provided an excellent presentation that highlighted the attributes of its Interference Tool Kit (ITK) at the Dutch Institute for Navigation workshop on the 31st of January. One of their observations was that "interference will always be a problem for GNSS...

Blog Editor's Note: An interesting overview article by Wired. It briefly discusses Satelles, which could be a good complement for GPS (though perhaps not a backup) and DARPA's STOIC efforts. We have always had mixed feelings about STOIC and other "signals of...

The Dutch Aerospace Center (NLR) office in Amsterdam detects numerous GNSS jammers passing by every day. On the 31st of January the Dutch Institute for Navigation hosted a workshop on GNSS interference. NLR provided an excellent overview presentation describing the...

Blog Editor's Note: The three authors of this opinion piece are among the most qualified in the world to opine on this issue. Similar recommendations to these were made by the President's National PNT Advisory Board in 2017. FCC must act to avoid a grave threat to GPS...

  Vice President Pence chaired the second meeting of the National Space Council last week at the Kennedy Space Center. During the meeting the Hon. Kirstjen Nielson, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, asked a panel what could be done to incentivize...

Blog Editor's Note: This is the most recent of several requests for information (RFIs) that the federal government has issued on this topic in the last few years. While the title says "Alternative Technologies" the text states the goal as "complementary and backup...

Blog Editor's Note: We don't normally give space here to Russian propaganda, but this piece, re-posted by GPS Daily from Sputnik News, is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the Russians have spent a good part of the last 12 months demonstrating how they can defeat...

Blog Editor's Note: Since we first reported on this, we have come to learn that the GPS backup issue in the UK is being lead by the Cabinet Office - the UK's equivalent of the White House. The GPS backup effort in the US is at the agency level. Recommendations need to...

Blog Editor's Note: A good overview article by Sean McCrystal at Orolia about the need for resilient PNT. Orolia has been positioning itself as a resilient PNT provider for several years. We understand that some of it's Spectracom brand products have the ability to...

Blog Editor's Note: - "Focus on what is most important" is the theme of an excellent commentary by Lt Gen Shea, USMC (ret) in this month's "Signals" magazine.  The United States has identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors. An attack on any could inflict a lot of...

Blog Editor's Note: Another outstanding article by Mike Jones. Several points he makes are worth restating: One disadvantage of SOOP is that it can require complex hardware to do it well. You cannot afford to rely on signals that you don’t control. SOOP is also highly...

The European Union's STRIKE3 project found over 160,000 GNSS interference events during the most recent 18 month period for which a report is available. These events were detected by sampling done in 14 different countries. Early in the project when just sampling in...

Blog Editor's Note: Not all problems with space services are best solved in space. Yet it seems that the way our budgets and policy making are stove-piped, that is the only way we are addressing problems. See yesterday's post regarding the Secretary of the Air Force;s...

Last month Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told the Washington Examiner “We built a glass house before the invention of stones” by way of explaining the vulnerability of space systems and the services they provide. Of all our space-based services, GPS signals are...

Blog Editor's Note: We just discovered this recent paper available for free through the Royal Institute of Navigation's "The Journal of Navigation." It makes a number of good points about policy, as well as being a good technical review. From the paper's conclusion: ...

Blog Editor's Note: A recent UK government report sounds the alarm for every nation about dependence on GNSS. As an example of one of dozens of vulnerabilities, the report describes how jammers are used along with a suite of other wireless tools to easily steal...

At the Munich Satellite Summit last year a rep from the European Union announced that they had detected more than 150,000 unique electronic signatures of GNSS jamming devices on the continent. Unlike the United States and other areas of the world which undoubtedly...

Blog Editor's Note: This article speaks to general principles as well as the specifics of Ligado's proposal to broadcast adjacent to GPS frequencies.  We also provide a link to the larger paper upon which the article is based at the end of the post. Aerospace Corp....

Yesterday we posted about a newly released report from the UK government on critical infrastructure and its dependence on satellite navigation systems. Today an official UK policy letter was made public that says; "The UK Government is therefore supportive of any...

Blog Editor's Note: The below Reuters article highlights an interesting confluence of events. Just last week the UK Minister for Defence expressed concern about Russia attacking the British infrastructure and economy. This week the UK government issued a report on...

Blog Editor's Note: Military exercises are a necessity, including those that jam GPS. This year's Red Flag exercise starts today and ends on February 16th. GPS jamming will be part of the exercise, but will undoubtedly not occur the entire period. That said, any...

Blog Editor's Note: Robert Poole is director of transportation policy and Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow at Reason Foundation. Poole, an MIT-trained engineer, has advised the Ronald Reagan, the George H.W. Bush, the Clinton, and the George W. Bush...

The RNT Foundation and ATIS are co-sponsoring a workshop to identify what users need and want when it comes to resilient GPS/GNSS timing receivers in the telecommunications, electrical distribution, and financial services industry. According to the event's organizer...