Shaun Waterman
Amid unprecedented amounts of electronic warfare in Russia’s war on Ukraine, there is no doubt that the Russians are jamming GPS and other satellite-based navigation systems around the Baltic Sea. Earlier this year, the interference forced the closure of a major civilian airport after flights had to be diverted enroute.
“We know that Russia has been jamming GPS signals,” Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Margus Tsahkna said, explaining why Tartu, the country’s second largest airport, had to close. The jamming has affected not just Estonia, but parts of neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, sites in Finland and Sweden across the Baltic Sea, and as far afield as Poland and Germany, according to publicly reported data from commercial aircraft.
It is also pretty clear how Russia is doing the jamming, which involves simply broadcasting a more powerful signal on the same frequency used for GPS. Since the real GPS signals come from satellites 12,500 miles above the Earth’s surface, they are easily drowned out by much closer terrestrial broadcasts. According to experts, technical inferences from public data sources bear out Tsahkna’s claim that the jamming is coming from three ground-based locations in Russian territory, including the port enclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched on the Baltic coast between Latvia and Poland.
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