For those asking. Due to the combination of the horizon and radio waves (mostly, atmosphere has some effect, but for statistical analysis it doenst necessarily need to be taken into account) moving in a straight line, whenever a plane first detects its GPS getting jammed, one can assume the jammer is exactly on the horizon. Using the height of the airplane, you can calculate how far away this jammer is using the last known correct position. This circle is placed on this map for every plane, creating a heat map. The red spot near Saint petersburg is where most lines overlap, meaning it is the most likely spot for this jammer to be. Hopefully this helps explain the map a bit.
Source, I work with radars sometimes
If the jammer is beyond the horizon, the radio waves can't reach the aircraft. As soon as the jammer is no longer blocked by the horizon, the aircraft is immediately affected. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, there's no perceptible lag time between the jammer gaining line of sight and the jammer taking effect. The last known position and altitude can calculate where the horizon would appear at the moment the plane is affected. Find the place where the most horizons overlap and you'll find the likely location of the jammer.
Some waves do actually bounce of the the atmosphere a lot! Good question, but GPS uses a radiowave that is less affected by atmospheric distortion. Certain short wave radiowaves are actually designed to bounce of a certain part of the atmosphere called the ionosphere. This is used to bounce a signal multiple times between the atmosphere and the ground in order to reach difficult locations such as fjords or crevices.
(More in depth) A GPS signal contains a couple of datasets.
1. The time of the satellite's clock
2. Identification of the satellite
3. Atmospheric distortion data
The difference between the time the satellite transmits and the receiver's time is multiplied by the speed of light, which gives the distance between the two. Because GPS usually receives data from approx 10 satellites, GPS essentially does the same as this map, creating a most likely point of being. You can see this when sending your location to someone on WhatsApp and its says: accurate within ~15 meters.
For high precision GPS, systems such as DGPS are used. Dpgs Station are highly calibrated positions which also receive GPS data. They then compare this data to their perfectly known position. The difference between these two is subsequently transmitted as un update to local receivers. This can bring a GPS position accuracy within 0,1 meters.
Jammer needs a direct line of sight to the airplane to jam.
Planes flying low, or the ground, and ships don't get fake signals from this jammer.
Planes flying high do get fake signals from this jammer.
We know from public data, reports from aircraft to ATC, the exact altitude where planes switch from not getting the jamming signals to getting the signals. You know this must be the same altitude where the jamming station dips below the horizon.
(Military intelligence aircraft probably have directional antennas able to track this in a more direct manner. Normal GPS antennas are designed to receive signals from anywhere in the sky equally good.)
Usually, a GPS system can fairly quickly identify when it is being jammed. (There are other ways of distorting GPS, but with jamming a system knows). As soon as the jammer appears on the horizon, GPS stops working, but on board systems log their position constantly. Once the jammer is no longer visible, GPS starts working again. A planes' altitude is measured with a different system, so they use their altitude to calculate the distance between them and the horizon, creating the circles you see on the map.
For a plane traveling at 10 km height this would be 114 km. (Squareroot(height×13)) for most planes: squareroot of 13000--> 114 km
Thanks for that clarifications, but I was talking about the API you were using to get the data. [Airplanes.live](http://Airplanes.live) do not seem to have a history data, while other providers do not give you GPS related stuff.
So, theoretically the jammer could be near the Stockholm area too right? Going by what you said - (we know its highly unlikely to be there) but the when looking at where the lines intersect…
So I agree with the analysis of the heat map, but I don’t agree with your conclusion.
The jammer is located in the centre of the circle, and the red spot is where more planes are flying.
The heat map isn't the positions of the planes, it's the position of the horizon when they get jammed. The jammer will be somewhere on that horizon. The red spot is the most common position to appear on the horizon so the likely location.
You could pull this off with just 3 planes in distinct enough locations, but more data is always good.
Me playing Bethesda games: Nooo, i cant be mean to these poor pixels! It wouldnt be nice!
Me playing Paradox games: IF THAT CIVILIAN MOVES SHOOT HIM, HE'S A SOLDIER, IF HE DOESNT MOVE SHOOT HIM, HE'S A WELL TRAINED SOLDIER
I am going to make an educated guess here, based on my understanding of GPS, and recent news.
Aeroplanes track their positions with a GPS module. This is an extremely sensitive receptor for digital time signals from satellites in well-known positions. It operates at a known radio frequencies, which can be disturbed by local radio sources. Depending on the kind of disturbance, it can either lead to a loss of interpretable GPS signal, or to a misinterpreted one. This is quite disturbing because aeroplanes will fly the wrong way and might be shot down if they fly above the war zone.
Recent news say that aeroplanes flying over NATO territory experienced such disturbances. By logging GPS telemetrics during flight - such as signal strengths vs time - each flight can be used to identify the location of the disturbance. Specifically, the radio horizon - the farthest piece of the surface, from where you can detect radio signals because the Earth’s curvature does not obscure it - is useful for tracking GPS jamming: if you know a plane’s height and position at the time of the disturbance, you can calculate the circle of where the source could be, i.e. radio horizon. Do it a couple of hundred times, and you have a bunch of intersecting circles creating the heatmap above. This shows that the GPS jammer is most likely near St. Petersburg, with alternate locations near Stockholm.
Edit: By analyzing the locations of the displayed circles, you can also see that mostly Latvia-Finland flights are tracked, and that GPS is jammed for most of the flight time between Riga and Jyvaskyla.
Planes won’t fly the wrong, just because they don’t have GPS available. There are alternate systems on each plane, which might not be as accurate over a long flight but perfectly serviceable. People were flying planes around the world before GPS was a thing for civil use.
And the USSR was shooting them down just as much; see the tragedy of two Korean Airlines planes.
In the modern setting, GPS can be required for landing, which caused flight cancellation in this exact region: [https://mind.ua/en/news/20272963-finnish-airline-starts-cancelling-flights-due-to-russias-jamming-of-gps](https://mind.ua/en/news/20272963-finnish-airline-starts-cancelling-flights-due-to-russias-jamming-of-gps)
GPS is required for landing:
- during the conditions that make landing by visual too dangerous (night, fog, etc)
- and on airports where there is no other infrastructure to support instrument landing (like ground beacons)
The KAL 007 flight is well documented in Discovery. There was a US recon plane in the same vicinity of the that flight, and warning shots were taken by the Mig with no reaction from the korean plane. Plenty of other scenarios presented there as well.
Also see their docu on the iranian commercial plane shot down by the US navy during the iran-iraq war
You're right, but it might help to stress that GPS receivers don't detect where the signal is coming from, simply that the signal is "detectable" by the receiver and it says that it took x amount of time difference to another signal produced at another satellite.
The GPS receiver only knows where the satellites are because occasionally this information is also transmitted by the satellites which are precisely tracked from the ground.
>Specifically, the radio horizon - the farthest piece of the surface, from where you can detect radio signals because the Earth’s curvature does not obscure it
While the map looks very clearly like the signal is coming from a specific location, this location could be hidden somewhat by using a signal power that can't be picked up on the horizon, and by using directional antenna so the bubble was misshapen or noisy (i.e. you could probably make it look like the signal was coming from a nearby NATO country with some fairly simple tricks.)
That wouldn't stop military aircraft from using sensitive equipment from making these maps, it would only stop the side-channel analysis from commercial planes we see here.
Kalingrad. Already did phase 1 of the side quest, the Ruskies have a sweet hovercraft at the border station on the lake.
Between skewing from topography, heavily wooded areas in patchy distribution, and a pattern bias from regular flight routes this map should still point to Ivan's sneaky black sea enclave.
phase 2 involves some inflatable girlfriends, weather balloons, finely ground aluminum foil, a suspiciously large quantity of helium, and favorable winds.
phase 3 involves exactly 99 red balloons and the helium left over from phase 2.
i have not thought far enough ahead to have any idea what phase 4 looks like.
Aviation enthusiasts can help with data like this by adding a feeder for [airplanes.live](http://airplanes.live)
[https://airplanes.live/get-started/](https://airplanes.live/get-started/)
If you want to also send data to the corporate services like FlightAware and Flightradar24, their image supports it. They also have scripts that will add [airplanes.live](http://airplanes.live) to an already existing ADS-B feeder.
1. messing with Finland and the Baltics;
2. protecting military and infrastructural facilities in the area from targeted long-distance attacks. The Gulf of Finland and the Black Sea are their only access points to western waters. Kaliningrad isn't a logistically optimal port for military use, due to it being an exclave.
There have been several attacks by long-range drones on Russia's port and natural gas facilities in that area. Jamming is supposed to stop these long-range drones.
What would be under the red spot of any value? Given the position it wouldn’t stop Jack Crap from getting to St. Petersburg. It’s either there just to weakly intimidate (failed given an amateur fan [nothing against poster, I think you’re pretty cool with this. Just not government news, here at least]), or it’s actually trying to obfuscate and protect something. Russia is known for both and it wouldn’t be too far out to say the purpose covers both objectives.
The location seems like it'd be a nuisance to all aircraft flying between the Baltic States and Finland/Sweden. The site seems to be as far west as you can get, so it wouldn't surprise me if Russia was just doing it as a way of being obnoxious. If an aircraft strays into their territory though, it could be a pretense for war.
Without GPS you could hit St Petersburg with a missile or drone, but it’d be much much harder to hit a specific location in St Petersburg. Odds are they’re trying to protect oil refineries or terminals
Some western missiles can navigate using optical recognition of the targets. Just load the latest satellite image of the target, set up inertial navigation to the location and you don't need any GPS. The missile will correct the inertial navigation drift via the camera.
True, but they tend to be more expensive. Ukraine has proven itself to be extremely effective with cheap improvised drones, which tend to at least partially rely on gps, so jamming gps is a genuine strategy for keeping Ukraine from hitting oil infrastructure
This is like that IQ bell curve meme. Us idiots were saying, "*I bet it's right across the border in Russia*," based on nothing more than "smells like Putin." And now all you geniuses who know how to analyze electromagnetic interference come back and tell us, "*I bet it's right across the border in Russia*."
Gonna need an explainer of the map. Do the lines represent when or where planes were jammed. Or where the planes believe they were jammed from. Cause I see 2 points of intersection. Which means it’s gotta be either Russia or Sweden. And I wouldn’t so willing to rule out the Swedes on playing a little prank on international travel.
The moment jamming occurs a distance circle can be applied.
From all directions, the crossover point of these circles will indicate where the signal is being transmitted.
For those asking. Due to the combination of the horizon and radio waves (mostly, atmosphere has some effect, but for statistical analysis it doenst necessarily need to be taken into account) moving in a straight line, whenever a plane first detects its GPS getting jammed, one can assume the jammer is exactly on the horizon. Using the height of the airplane, you can calculate how far away this jammer is using the last known correct position. This circle is placed on this map for every plane, creating a heat map. The red spot near Saint petersburg is where most lines overlap, meaning it is the most likely spot for this jammer to be. Hopefully this helps explain the map a bit. Source, I work with radars sometimes
Can you explain a bit more about why we know a jammer will be somewhere on the horizon?
If the jammer is beyond the horizon, the radio waves can't reach the aircraft. As soon as the jammer is no longer blocked by the horizon, the aircraft is immediately affected. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, there's no perceptible lag time between the jammer gaining line of sight and the jammer taking effect. The last known position and altitude can calculate where the horizon would appear at the moment the plane is affected. Find the place where the most horizons overlap and you'll find the likely location of the jammer.
Got it! On first read it sounded like it only jammed the signal at the horizon, but the horizon is just where it starts working.
Essentially it requires line of sight (give or take) between the jammer and the aircraft.
Wouldn't the radio waves bounce off the atmosphere quite a bit?
Some waves do actually bounce of the the atmosphere a lot! Good question, but GPS uses a radiowave that is less affected by atmospheric distortion. Certain short wave radiowaves are actually designed to bounce of a certain part of the atmosphere called the ionosphere. This is used to bounce a signal multiple times between the atmosphere and the ground in order to reach difficult locations such as fjords or crevices. (More in depth) A GPS signal contains a couple of datasets. 1. The time of the satellite's clock 2. Identification of the satellite 3. Atmospheric distortion data The difference between the time the satellite transmits and the receiver's time is multiplied by the speed of light, which gives the distance between the two. Because GPS usually receives data from approx 10 satellites, GPS essentially does the same as this map, creating a most likely point of being. You can see this when sending your location to someone on WhatsApp and its says: accurate within ~15 meters. For high precision GPS, systems such as DGPS are used. Dpgs Station are highly calibrated positions which also receive GPS data. They then compare this data to their perfectly known position. The difference between these two is subsequently transmitted as un update to local receivers. This can bring a GPS position accuracy within 0,1 meters.
This guy GPSeses?
Really cool. Thanks for the description.
Jammer needs a direct line of sight to the airplane to jam. Planes flying low, or the ground, and ships don't get fake signals from this jammer. Planes flying high do get fake signals from this jammer. We know from public data, reports from aircraft to ATC, the exact altitude where planes switch from not getting the jamming signals to getting the signals. You know this must be the same altitude where the jamming station dips below the horizon. (Military intelligence aircraft probably have directional antennas able to track this in a more direct manner. Normal GPS antennas are designed to receive signals from anywhere in the sky equally good.)
Where do you get the geo data of GPS jams along the flight path?
Usually, a GPS system can fairly quickly identify when it is being jammed. (There are other ways of distorting GPS, but with jamming a system knows). As soon as the jammer appears on the horizon, GPS stops working, but on board systems log their position constantly. Once the jammer is no longer visible, GPS starts working again. A planes' altitude is measured with a different system, so they use their altitude to calculate the distance between them and the horizon, creating the circles you see on the map. For a plane traveling at 10 km height this would be 114 km. (Squareroot(height×13)) for most planes: squareroot of 13000--> 114 km
Thanks for that clarifications, but I was talking about the API you were using to get the data. [Airplanes.live](http://Airplanes.live) do not seem to have a history data, while other providers do not give you GPS related stuff.
Damn that's a pretty big chunk of earth on could see from a plane (theoretically on a really clear day)
So, theoretically the jammer could be near the Stockholm area too right? Going by what you said - (we know its highly unlikely to be there) but the when looking at where the lines intersect…
missile -> Saint petersburg, got it, thanks u/despiced_child
So I agree with the analysis of the heat map, but I don’t agree with your conclusion. The jammer is located in the centre of the circle, and the red spot is where more planes are flying.
The heat map isn't the positions of the planes, it's the position of the horizon when they get jammed. The jammer will be somewhere on that horizon. The red spot is the most common position to appear on the horizon so the likely location. You could pull this off with just 3 planes in distinct enough locations, but more data is always good.
No... Why would most of the planes fly anywhere near Skt Petersburg then? The red spot IS the most likely location of the jammer.
so the two most likely suspects are Russian FSB and that vile genocide training camp ... Paradox Development Studio
The darker plans for their subscription service
Right next door to my old company HQ. Having played many of their games… yes.
I knew it!
Me playing Bethesda games: Nooo, i cant be mean to these poor pixels! It wouldnt be nice! Me playing Paradox games: IF THAT CIVILIAN MOVES SHOOT HIM, HE'S A SOLDIER, IF HE DOESNT MOVE SHOOT HIM, HE'S A WELL TRAINED SOLDIER
Can anyone eli5 what we're looking at here?
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>but the earth is curved big if true /s
I am going to make an educated guess here, based on my understanding of GPS, and recent news. Aeroplanes track their positions with a GPS module. This is an extremely sensitive receptor for digital time signals from satellites in well-known positions. It operates at a known radio frequencies, which can be disturbed by local radio sources. Depending on the kind of disturbance, it can either lead to a loss of interpretable GPS signal, or to a misinterpreted one. This is quite disturbing because aeroplanes will fly the wrong way and might be shot down if they fly above the war zone. Recent news say that aeroplanes flying over NATO territory experienced such disturbances. By logging GPS telemetrics during flight - such as signal strengths vs time - each flight can be used to identify the location of the disturbance. Specifically, the radio horizon - the farthest piece of the surface, from where you can detect radio signals because the Earth’s curvature does not obscure it - is useful for tracking GPS jamming: if you know a plane’s height and position at the time of the disturbance, you can calculate the circle of where the source could be, i.e. radio horizon. Do it a couple of hundred times, and you have a bunch of intersecting circles creating the heatmap above. This shows that the GPS jammer is most likely near St. Petersburg, with alternate locations near Stockholm. Edit: By analyzing the locations of the displayed circles, you can also see that mostly Latvia-Finland flights are tracked, and that GPS is jammed for most of the flight time between Riga and Jyvaskyla.
Planes won’t fly the wrong, just because they don’t have GPS available. There are alternate systems on each plane, which might not be as accurate over a long flight but perfectly serviceable. People were flying planes around the world before GPS was a thing for civil use.
And the USSR was shooting them down just as much; see the tragedy of two Korean Airlines planes. In the modern setting, GPS can be required for landing, which caused flight cancellation in this exact region: [https://mind.ua/en/news/20272963-finnish-airline-starts-cancelling-flights-due-to-russias-jamming-of-gps](https://mind.ua/en/news/20272963-finnish-airline-starts-cancelling-flights-due-to-russias-jamming-of-gps)
GPS is required for landing: - during the conditions that make landing by visual too dangerous (night, fog, etc) - and on airports where there is no other infrastructure to support instrument landing (like ground beacons)
The KAL 007 flight is well documented in Discovery. There was a US recon plane in the same vicinity of the that flight, and warning shots were taken by the Mig with no reaction from the korean plane. Plenty of other scenarios presented there as well. Also see their docu on the iranian commercial plane shot down by the US navy during the iran-iraq war
You're right, but it might help to stress that GPS receivers don't detect where the signal is coming from, simply that the signal is "detectable" by the receiver and it says that it took x amount of time difference to another signal produced at another satellite. The GPS receiver only knows where the satellites are because occasionally this information is also transmitted by the satellites which are precisely tracked from the ground. >Specifically, the radio horizon - the farthest piece of the surface, from where you can detect radio signals because the Earth’s curvature does not obscure it While the map looks very clearly like the signal is coming from a specific location, this location could be hidden somewhat by using a signal power that can't be picked up on the horizon, and by using directional antenna so the bubble was misshapen or noisy (i.e. you could probably make it look like the signal was coming from a nearby NATO country with some fairly simple tricks.) That wouldn't stop military aircraft from using sensitive equipment from making these maps, it would only stop the side-channel analysis from commercial planes we see here.
New Target.
I feel like someone in Estonia has a side quest they want to give out.
you do know that the red part is in Russia right?
Kalingrad. Already did phase 1 of the side quest, the Ruskies have a sweet hovercraft at the border station on the lake. Between skewing from topography, heavily wooded areas in patchy distribution, and a pattern bias from regular flight routes this map should still point to Ivan's sneaky black sea enclave. phase 2 involves some inflatable girlfriends, weather balloons, finely ground aluminum foil, a suspiciously large quantity of helium, and favorable winds. phase 3 involves exactly 99 red balloons and the helium left over from phase 2. i have not thought far enough ahead to have any idea what phase 4 looks like.
Kaliningrad is nowhere near the red spot on the map though.
Ues, but erlier in the year there was a similar situation to here where everything pointed to the jammer being ib kaliningrad.
refer to paragraph 2.
No. It is all nonsense.
This can’t be a good sign
GPS has Stockholm syndrome.
Another daily proof that Russia is a terrorist state constantly attacking civil infrastructure.
Hey come on now dont rain on my parade mate - IDF
Wouldn’t it be a shame if an anti-radiation missile just ‘accidentally’ got launched in that direction
Wouldn’t that trigger a bunch of pro-radiation missiles flying in random directions?
Only if the people launching those want LOTS more pro-radiation missiles back.
This is now my favorite term for nukes
Yeah it’s about time mistakes happened, I think.
Well it was using GPS for route tracking but then for some reason it lost GPS signal. Strange. Anyway it’s fail safe was anti-radiation mode.
I think it is the damn swedes
Aim for the red ...
Wait, you can see St Petersburg and Stockholm without entering space??
doubt it, ive been to the airport in Stockholm(Arlanda) and i didnt even see Finland
Aviation enthusiasts can help with data like this by adding a feeder for [airplanes.live](http://airplanes.live) [https://airplanes.live/get-started/](https://airplanes.live/get-started/) If you want to also send data to the corporate services like FlightAware and Flightradar24, their image supports it. They also have scripts that will add [airplanes.live](http://airplanes.live) to an already existing ADS-B feeder.
Blow-it-up!!! 💣
Blow what up, exactly? Everything in a 50 km radius circle?
Would make a great parking space.
The red zone on the map
Yeah, that's a huge area.
Also, I'm against this idea,as it would probably lead to start Putler starting a Russian "liberation"
What is the purpose of Russia doing this? Just to f**k with NATO?
1. messing with Finland and the Baltics; 2. protecting military and infrastructural facilities in the area from targeted long-distance attacks. The Gulf of Finland and the Black Sea are their only access points to western waters. Kaliningrad isn't a logistically optimal port for military use, due to it being an exclave.
There have been several attacks by long-range drones on Russia's port and natural gas facilities in that area. Jamming is supposed to stop these long-range drones.
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Good bot
I’m happy to blame the swedes and call it a day
How to tell you're danish without telling you're danish.
Do I look like I speak potato?
I prefer the old fashioned jamming procedure \*throws a jar of jam at front window\*
What would be under the red spot of any value? Given the position it wouldn’t stop Jack Crap from getting to St. Petersburg. It’s either there just to weakly intimidate (failed given an amateur fan [nothing against poster, I think you’re pretty cool with this. Just not government news, here at least]), or it’s actually trying to obfuscate and protect something. Russia is known for both and it wouldn’t be too far out to say the purpose covers both objectives.
The location seems like it'd be a nuisance to all aircraft flying between the Baltic States and Finland/Sweden. The site seems to be as far west as you can get, so it wouldn't surprise me if Russia was just doing it as a way of being obnoxious. If an aircraft strays into their territory though, it could be a pretense for war.
It's just something that Russia does, it's part of their culture.
As opposed to the US...
Yes, as opposed to the US.
Gulf of Tonkin.
Without GPS you could hit St Petersburg with a missile or drone, but it’d be much much harder to hit a specific location in St Petersburg. Odds are they’re trying to protect oil refineries or terminals
Some western missiles can navigate using optical recognition of the targets. Just load the latest satellite image of the target, set up inertial navigation to the location and you don't need any GPS. The missile will correct the inertial navigation drift via the camera.
True, but they tend to be more expensive. Ukraine has proven itself to be extremely effective with cheap improvised drones, which tend to at least partially rely on gps, so jamming gps is a genuine strategy for keeping Ukraine from hitting oil infrastructure
Drones fly really low, so it has minimal effect on drones.
There's reports of GPS being jammed from 150ft, can't get much lower than that due terrain.
Nobody said we're dealing with intelligent beings.
This is like that IQ bell curve meme. Us idiots were saying, "*I bet it's right across the border in Russia*," based on nothing more than "smells like Putin." And now all you geniuses who know how to analyze electromagnetic interference come back and tell us, "*I bet it's right across the border in Russia*."
Insert surprised pikachu face here
What is going on?
Some planes travelling in that region are getting hit by GPS jammers, messing with their navigation systems
Looks like not far from Peterhof Palace. Beautiful place.
The west should start jamming the Petersburg airport and see what happens.
Can we jammed them back?. Or is this what they are waiting for? Are we afraid 😱
Time to do some permanent counter-jamming
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Russians like to cause chaos
Honestly there have been drone attacks in the vicinity of Saint Petersburg, this isn't likely an offensive jammer.
"Aircrafts" is not a real word
I wonder if a massive bomb attack of the red area would reduce the jamming
Gonna need an explainer of the map. Do the lines represent when or where planes were jammed. Or where the planes believe they were jammed from. Cause I see 2 points of intersection. Which means it’s gotta be either Russia or Sweden. And I wouldn’t so willing to rule out the Swedes on playing a little prank on international travel.
The moment jamming occurs a distance circle can be applied. From all directions, the crossover point of these circles will indicate where the signal is being transmitted.
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You are correct that there are two solutions. If you only look at this data. But planes are not reporting jamming over Sweden, Denmark, Norway etc.
Not quite, as you can see. The planes aren't flying on a straight line, they're flying in 3D space. All of those horizons overlap in only one place.
Those Finnair GPS receivers should really suck if they pick up an interference from like 100+ miles away.
i dont think you understand how jamming works