On Sunday, a plane carrying European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen was reportedly forced to land in Bulgaria using paper maps after its GPS navigation systems were jammed.
Bulgarian authorities claim the jamming was deliberate Russian interference, though a Kremlin spokesperson told the Financial Times this was “incorrect”.
GPS interference is on the rise, so you might be wondering how it works. And can anything be done about it? And – perhaps most importantly – do you need to worry?
The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other satellite navigation systems use radio signals from satellites to calculate position. To determine position, a GPS needs a direct line of sight to at least four satellites.
There are two ways to disrupt satellite navigation.
The first is jamming. This works by simply broadcasting high-intensity radio noise in the same frequency band used by the navigation satellites.
Jamming drowns out the satellite signal, like a person shouting loudly in your ear stops you hearing what someone is saying on the other side of the room. This appears to be what happened in Bulgaria.
The second way to interfere with satellite navigation is called spoofing, and it’s a little more elegant. Spoofing involves sending radio signals that pretend to be coming from the navigation satellites.
Where jamming stops the satellite navigation system from producing any location, spoofing tricks it into giving a false location – with potentially catastrophic results.
Jamming and spoofing do appear to be growing more common, especially in conflict zones in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
A clandestine Russian base near the Polish border is reportedly responsible for satnav interference in the Baltic region.
Ships in the Red Sea report frequent interference, likely from Houthi rebels in Yemen.
These increasingly common incidents highlight how vulnerable our reliance on satellite navigation makes us.
The best response to interference is to have backup navigation options in place. The US-run GPS is the best known and most commonly used satellite navigation system, but there are others.
