Quantum navigation systems are being tested in Britain. Last month there was a successful test flight of an aviation system, and a system is being tested on test trains on the London Underground. (It’s not clear to me whether these systems are related, but the U.K. has apparently been making a big push into quantum tech lately.) Quantum navigation is essentially quantum mechanics applied to dead reckoning, using the properties of supercool atoms to measure change of position. The advantage of the system is that it’s self-contained: it doesn’t require a GPS signal or navigation beacon to triangulate from, which makes it resistant to jamming or spoofing—and considering how essential real-time location data has become, and how easy it is to disrupt location signals, the appeal of a self-contained solution is self-evident.
Category: GPS
CBC News on Russian GPS Jamming
CBC News reports on GPS jamming by Russia, which has closed the airport in Tartu, Estonia until authorities could install a backup ground-based beacon. Russia has been accused of messing with GPS signals for years, but the CBC report focuses on the idea that in this case the jamming is at least in part to deal with Ukrainian drone attacks—the implication being that insofar as Estonia is concerned, this is collateral damage (to which Russia is presumably indifferent at best).
See also the BBC News story from earlier this month (previously).
Solar Storms and Precision Agriculture Don’t Mix
We were warned that this weekend’s solar storm could have an impact on GPS and navigation systems. 404 Media reports that it’s causing outages in the GPS and real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning systems used in many farmers’ tractors, right in the middle of planting. This is a bigger problem than you might think: quite a lot of crops are grown using precision agriculture, “with farmers using increasingly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines with uniform spacing. […] If the planting or harvesting is even slightly off, the tractors or harvesters could damage crops or plant crooked or inconsistently, which can cause problems during the growing season and ultimately reduce yield.” To say nothing of the harvest. Precision agriculture achieves centimetre-level accuracy, but also relies on it, and losing it at one step of the process can’t be good. [Engadget, The Verge]
G5-Scale Geomagnetic Storm in Progress
The Earth is being hit by a solar storm at the moment; NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has observed severe (G5) geomagnetic storm conditions for the first time since 2003. Among other impacts, this may disrupt GPS and other navigation systems. On the other hand this also means aurorae where they’re rarely seen: see SWPC’s aurora dashboard for maps.
Previously: NOAA’s Aurora Forecasts.
Russia Accused of Jamming Civilian Flights’ GPS
BBC News: “Russia is causing disruption to satellite navigation systems affecting thousands of civilian flights, experts say. […] The persistent disruption led Finland’s flag carrier Finnair to suspend daily flights to Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to return to Helsinki due to GPS interference. ¶ Tartu Airport relies solely on GPS, unlike most larger airports which have alternative navigation systems that allow aircraft to land even if the signal is lost.”
Flightradar24’s Map of GPS Interference
Another map of GPS interference, also based on GPS accuracy information reported by aircraft, this one from Flightradar24. Data updates every six hours. And once again high levels of interference are being reported from conflict zones: Ukraine and other foci of Russian mischief like the Baltics, plus Israel/Palestine, though to be honest I didn’t expect Myanmar. Data is archived, so you can look up previous dates (7 days free, more than that needs a site subscription). [Maps Mania]
Previously: GPSJam Maps GPS Interference.
Guidestar and GM’s Early Attempts at In-Car Navigation
The 1995 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight was the first production car in North America to be offered with an on-board navigation system, Guidestar. Car enthusiast website The Truth About Cars recently ran a six-part series on the road to that release, exploring General Motors’ earlier, experimental attempts at in-car navigation. The series starts with the very experimental, 1960s-era DAIR, which would have relied on in-road magnets; parts two, three and four of the series look at TravTek, a system combining (still-scrambled-for-civilian-use) GPS with road sensors that was tested on Oldsmobile rental cars in the Orlando, Florida area in the early 1990s. The series ends with a look at the background and development of the Guidestar system itself.
GPSJam Maps GPS Interference
GPS Jam, created by John Wiseman, is an online map of GPS interference, updated daily, based on GPS accuracy information reported by aircraft. It’s not necessarily a map of where GPS is being deliberately jammed, but when you look and see that the hotspots are the eastern Mediterranean, western Russia and the Baltics, well. Active war zones (e.g. Ukraine) are blank: this map is based on civilian aircraft data and those are no-go areas.
SMBC on GPS
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a take on what GPS does to our ability to navigate.
SuperGPS Promises Ten-Centimetre Accuracy
It seems to be steam engine time for GPS alternatives. We’ve already seen two proposals that suggest using constellations of low-flying satellites to provide greater accuracy and more resilience against signal blocking than GPS and other orbital navigation systems can provide. Now a research team in the Netherlands is developing a project called SuperGPS, which promises decimetre-level (10 cm) accuracy through the use of terrestrial transmitters connected to a fibre-optic network. They’ve built a working prototype, and published the results in Nature. More at the TU Delft news release.
Previously: Starlink as GPS Alternative; ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System.
ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System
The idea of using low-earth-orbit satellites to provide greater GPS/GNSS accuracy isn’t limited to commandeering the Starlink constellation. The European Space Agency is exploring the idea of using low-flying satellites to increase Galileo’s accuracy and robustness: make it possible to use indoors, make it more resistant to jamming and interference, and enable positioning at the centimetre level. They’re planning an in-orbit demonstration of around six satellites to test the proposition. The satellites would supplement the existing Galileo constellation rather than replace it: for one thing, they would rely on the Galileo satellites’ atomic clocks, which would allow the low-flying satellites to be an order of magnitude smaller in size. [Universe Today]
Starlink as GPS Alternative
The point of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, consisting of some 3,000 low-orbiting satellites (so far), is to provide broadband internet access. But it could also be used as an alternative to GPS that might be less susceptible to jamming or spoofing. The U.S. Army and a team at the University of Texas at Austin were interested in the idea, but SpaceX told them to go pound sand in 2020. Now said UT team has gone and reverse-engineered the Starlink signal to pinpoint a location to within 30 metres. Not as good as GPS, obviously, but the researchers say that a software update—and SpaceX’s cooperation—could get that accuracy down to within a metre. Their (non-peer-reviewed) paper is here. Coverage: El Reg, TechCrunch.
New Apple Watch Features Include Dual-Frequency GPS, Virtual Breadcrumbs
Apple is touting the Apple Watch Ultra’s dual-frequency GPS support, viz., it uses the GPS L5 band in addition to L1 to improve accuracy. The new L5 signal is higher power and is supposed to provide more robust service, but with only 17 satellites broadcasting on it it’s not yet fully operational. Still, a Reddit user was able to document the improved accuracy by conducting an unexpected stress test: mowing the lawn. With the Ultra the mowing rows can be made out, whereas the tracks made with a series 4 watch were all over the place. [9to5Mac]
While the Ultra is the only Apple Watch that can use the L5 band, watchOS 9 adds a redesigned Compass app and a Backtrack feature that lets users retrace their steps using on-the-fly waypoints and GPS traces. MacRumors has a tutorial. This is something I’m looking forward to trying out: my series 8 watch arrived last week.
India Pushing Phone Makers to Adopt NavIC
Reuters reports that the Indian government is pushing mobile phone makers to include support for NavIC, the Indian-government owned satellite navigation system. (At the moment NavIC provides regional coverage from a seven-satellite constellation, but the plan is for 24-satellite global coverage.) Phone makers are resisting the request, citing the additional chips and cost required to support the system. And there’s the matter of redundancy: the current iPhone, for example, already supports BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS and QZSS in addition to GPS. [9to5Mac]
Ships Are Increasingly Spoofing Their Location
Ships spoofing their location is an increasing problem, Anatoly Kurmanaev reports for the New York Times. All large ships are required to carry an AIS transponder that transmits the ship’s ID and position, but some ships are starting to find a way around that.
[O]ver the past year, Windward, a large maritime data company that provides research to the United Nations, has uncovered more than 500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide their locations. The vessels carry out the deception by adopting a technology that until recently was confined to the world’s most advanced navies. The technology, in essence, replicates the effect of a VPN cellphone app, making a ship appear to be in one place, while physically being elsewhere.
Its use has included Chinese fishing fleets hiding operations in protected waters off South America, tankers concealing stops in Iranian oil ports, and container ships obfuscating journeys in the Middle East. A U.S. intelligence official, who discussed confidential government assessments on the condition of anonymity, said the deception tactic had already been used for weapons and drug smuggling.
We’ve seen examples of this before, but this is starting to look like an endemic problem.